The Louisiana Exchange

This isn’t so much a story about life imitating art as it is a story about art intimidating life.

Yes, the setting of Act Four in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” is in a Louisiana desert. Specifically “A desert plain on the borders of New Orleans.”

The map featured in the drawing (“U.S. Territorial Acquisitions”) is a public domain map from the “National Atlas of the United States,” an atlas published by the United States Department of the Interior from 1874-2007.