I managed to find a video on YouTube that gives a tour of the Amelia Street house at 3711 St Charles Avenue. You can see more detail of the house and from different perspectives, which is really fascinating. So, I've added the video to the Parlor playlists on YouTube.
I have embedded it on the Amelia Street page if you'd like to take a look.
Another thing I've done is to discuss one real life plantation that inspired Fontevrault on its own page. This, of course, is Belle Grove Plantation. Belle Grove was located in Iberville Parish, Louisiana along the Mississippi River. The mansion burned after decades of ruin in 1952 and is long gone.
You will find a link to the page that has begun to discuss Belle Grove at the bottom of the Amelia Street page. Or, you can click here: The Queen of the South - Belle Grove Plantation
I think an understanding of the plantations along the Mississippi River, upon which Anne Rice based Fontevrault, and probably Riverbend as well, might give insight into the Mayfair Witches who operated the fictional plantations. One thing I could not help but notice in the AMC series is something that I wonder if there will be more details on in Season 2.
The location of the Mayfair crypt.
In the books, the Mayfair crypt was located in the cemetery in New Orleans. It was constructed with "oven" vaults, the type you see on mausoleums with "end open" crypts. If you are familiar with mausoleums at places like Forest Lawn in Glendale, California or Hollywood Forever Cemetery's Cathedral Mausoleum, "end open" crypts are those where the casket is slid in end first. For example, the crypt of Rudolph Valentino is an end open crypt.
Then again, one has only to look at the crypts in St. Louis Cemetery or Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans and see how many of the family mausoleums are built. The Mayfair tomb is not one you would enter to access the individual crypts of those entombed there.
But in the series, it was. AND. It was a mausoleum that obviously was not in New Orleans, but in a rural area.
A lot of plantations had their own private burial grounds. Not all of them, but still, a number of them did. So I had to ponder what the reason for the change of scenery for departed Mayfairs was.
There are possible spoiler alerts--unless, of course, you have both read the books AND watched the show.
We've already met one character who actually was not introduced until later in the book series, one who was connected with Fontevrault. Those familiar with the books will recall that while Riverbend, the plantation operated by the Mayfairs until the end of the 19th century, was washed away by the river despite numerous attempts to prevent the destruction. And also that although Fontevrault had not been washed away and was still standing, it was standing in...water.
Before Katherine Mayfair commissioned the construction of the First Street house in the historically accurate 1857, the Mayfair Witches' home was Riverbend. The family, if you recall if you have read the books, fled Haiti during the Haitian Revolution in the last decade of the 18th century. They'd been at Riverbend a long time before First Street, so...
Where were those Mayfairs laid to rest?
Since I haven't visited this part of the story in a long time, I might have forgotten if some Mayfairs might have been moved to other burial grounds, but not all of them.
When you take into consideration that the rural location might have helped to conceal something that occurred among the Mayfairs over the generations, you start to see something I understand could be called "foreshadowing".
If you have not read the books, this could definitely be a spoiler alert, but if you have, you might understand when I say this: "walking babies".
