Danielle Grandinetti: Welcome to A Spot of Story. Cozy up with your favorite beverage as we chat about sweet romance, thrilling suspense, and fascinating history. Perhaps you'll find your next read in one of these stories. On this episode, I'm chatting with Karen Ullo about her book, To Crown with Liberty (affiliate). Set in New Orleans, 1795, in the wake of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, Alix de Morainville, a former lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, now married to her gardener, seeks peace and security in the Spanish colony of Louisiana. Karen, welcome to the podcast.
Karen Ullo: Thank you so much for having me, Danielle.
Danielle Grandinetti: Oh, you're very welcome. I'm excited to talk about your book. For our readers, Karen is the author of three award-winning novels: Jennifer the Damned, Cinderelia, and To Crown with Liberty, which we'll talk about today. She's the editorial director of Chrism Press, an imprint of White Fire Publishing, which my readers might recognize as my publishing house as well. She's devoted to fiction from Catholic and Orthodox Christian points of view, and is a former managing editor of the Catholic literary journal, Dappled Things. Karen holds an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Music in vocal performance from LSU. She lives in Louisiana with her husband and two sons, and you can find her online at karenullo.com. I can't wait to talk about your book. But first, since our podcast unites us over our love of reading, I love to start with a question about what your current read is.
Karen Ullo: Well, because I am an editor, I am reading the same thing I am always reading, which is a combination of submissions and books I'm about to edit. So I have spent this morning reading the third book in a series from Chrism Press that was just turned in, on which I'm about to start the edit once I finish the read.
Danielle Grandinetti: Ooh, fun. And of course, you probably can't tell us anything about that?
Karen Ullo: Well, that one I actually can because it's the third in a series, so we have the first two books out already. I'm working on the Incarnate series (affiliate) by Antony Barone Kolenc, which is a thriller sci-fi series based on the premise of what if someone were cloned by diabolical forces from the DNA of Jesus found in a Eucharistic miracle.
Danielle Grandinetti: Oh, that sounds fascinating.
Karen Ullo: It is fascinating, and it is a wonderful read. I haven't gotten to the end yet, but I finally get to learn the end once I finish reading this third book.
Danielle Grandinetti: Excellent. Excellent. Well, I will link to the series on Amazon so if readers find that as fascinating as it sounds, they can find it as well. That's awesome. When does book three come out?
Karen Ullo: It'll be out in early 2027. My editorial calendars get mixed up in my head all the time.
Danielle Grandinetti: I can imagine. Well, speaking of days, why don't you tell us a little bit about what a day in Alix's life would look like?
Karen Ullo: So the book is set both in Louisiana and in France. And a day in Alix's life looks very different depending which side of the ocean she is on, because she was born a noblewoman in pre-Revolutionary France. In France prior to the Revolution, a day in her life depended on what phase she was in. She was a young girl in Normandy, where she studied with her governess at her family estate. Then she moved to Paris and studied in an Ursuline convent at a boarding school, and then she moved to court, was introduced, and eventually became a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. So her life in France, prior to the Revolution, was very proper, very prim, and filled with religious formation when she was in the convent. And believe it or not, the court of Marie Antoinette was actually very Catholic too. It's Louis XIV and XV who were the rowdy ones; XVI was actually a decent human being. Her days were filled with learning and, once she got out of school, filled with serving the queen and playing a lot of music. She's a harpist.
But in the other timeline, in 1795 on the other side of the world in Louisiana, after she has fled the revolution, most of that part of the book takes place on a flatboat traveling from New Orleans to a place called Attakapas, which is modern St. Martinville. So her life is in the middle of a virgin swamp that has not yet been inhabited to a great degree. She spends some of her time sketching out on the deck of the boat, because she's not particularly useful at rowing boats and hunting and the things that you need in the wilderness. But she also starts to learn some of those skills and has to fight off alligators and snapping turtles, and deal with whether the Indians are friendly or not along the way.
Danielle Grandinetti: Wow. I can't quite picture what life would have been like in the 1700s, and then to have to go from French court to a swamp would just be such a radical change.
Karen Ullo: Exactly, and that's really what drew me to this story in the first place. I love contrasts and things that don't seem like they should fit together, like this idea of a French noblewoman on the Louisiana frontier. And believe it or not, there were actually people who fled the French Revolution—primarily from Saint-Domingue, which is now Haiti—who did come to Louisiana to flee the revolution. So it's not entirely fiction.
Danielle Grandinetti: I was going to ask how much was based on true stories.
Karen Ullo: The book that it's based on, Strange True Stories of Louisiana (affiliate) by George Washington Cable, is actually not true. It is a book of short stories that he wrote and went to great lengths to pretend were true. The first section details the purchase of the manuscripts and the translation process, and a lot of people fell for it. It was basically a literary hoax. The Library of Congress says it's fiction, and my own research shows there are way too many anachronisms for it to be true. But there was a real couple that he based it on, who became Alix and her husband Joseph in my book, though their real lives were very different.
Danielle Grandinetti: I love that he got away with it, you know?
Karen Ullo: Yes, but if you actually try to research Elise de Morneville online, you will find her in genealogical records citing George Washington Cable, and it is really hard to find good information about the actual couple. Her real name was Marie Adelaide, and her husband was Joseph Charpentier rather than the name Cable gave him, which I kept. It is hard to find good information because it's all gotten blurred by Cable's book.
Danielle Grandinetti: Wow. We're going to talk more about research in a minute, but first, what was your favorite scene to write in this story and why?
Karen Ullo: My favorite scene to write was the hardest scene to write, and to me, it's the most meaningful scene. It is the scene of the September Massacres in Paris in 1792. If I had to pick one event that the story is about, I would pick that one. It is a very pivotal moment in Elise's life, but it was also a very pivotal moment in the revolution itself. Even though the phrase Reign of Terror came the next year, the September Massacres really marked its beginning, when the revolutionaries completely abandoned their own ideals and massacred all of their political prisoners without a real trial. That was the hardest scene to write, but it was the most rewarding too, because out of the roughly 1,600 people killed, 191 of them have been beatified by the Catholic Church as blesseds. My book is dedicated to those holy September martyrs, and I definitely felt them guiding me through the whole book, but especially through that scene, honoring the martyrdom of our Christian forefathers.
Danielle Grandinetti: Wow. Which leads us into what unique research was required for this story.
Karen Ullo: I spent four and a half years researching and writing this book. There was a time when I felt like I was buying a book per chapter just to do the research for individual scenes, especially for the middle part that is heavy into the revolution. I also went to France. I was supposed to go in 2020, but that obviously did not happen, so I went in 2021. A lot of my tours were offered only in French, and I had not spoken French in 20 years. It was the most mentally exhausting thing I have ever done, but it was also beautiful and rewarding. Any place in the book that is real and still standing, I have been there. The one place I couldn't go to in 2021 was Notre Dame because it was closed from the fire, but thankfully I had been there once when I was 16. For the places that are no longer standing, I found buildings with similar architecture to use as a stand-in. I went to the coast of Normandy, which is where Alix is originally from. Technically, there was a Moronville in Normandy at one point, but it was not on the coast where George Washington Cable put it. Since it's not there anymore, I went to a town called Étretat, which Claude Monet painted many times because it is so beautiful with its white cliffs and pebbled beaches. A lot of the details in the book are from physically being in these places.
Danielle Grandinetti: I love reading stories of places where I've been, just because you can mentally put yourself there even better and the scenery is so much richer. I had the opportunity to visit Versailles, and as you're talking about Marie Antoinette and the gardens, I can just pull up those memories.
Karen Ullo: Yes, and I had to go to Versailles twice to get everything I needed. Because of the way tours are offered, if you have a private English-speaking guide, you can't go into the royal chapel. I had scenes set in the chapel, so I had to go back a second time and take a chapel tour in French. Getting what I needed from Versailles was nuts, but I did it.
Danielle Grandinetti: Yes, I just wandered the grounds when I was there, but realizing the history that happened there is just incredible.
Karen Ullo: It's amazing that Versailles is still standing. A lot of people can't believe the revolution didn't tear it down, considering everything it represented.
Danielle Grandinetti: Do they have a monument to the Bastille?
Karen Ullo: I believe they do, but my itinerary was so packed that I didn't actually look for it. The Bastille is gone, and Elise is smart enough to stay far away from the storming of the Bastille. Even though it is an event within the timeline of the book, she wasn't physically present for it, so I decided I could skip that one.
Danielle Grandinetti: I love digging into the research that authors do. What is a bit of research you wish you could have included in the story, but it just didn't fit?
Karen Ullo: One of the things that my editors probably rightly made me take out was the menagerie at Versailles. It's not there anymore, but Louis XVI and his predecessors kept what we would call a zoo, and they had a lion. They also had a quagga, which is extinct now. The lion actually had a little dog that was its friend; it had just wandered into the cage one day, and the lion adopted it and didn't eat it. They just played together. Eventually, the little dog died, and they gave the lion a new little dog, but that one did not fare so well. I had a scene where Elise visits the menagerie. The tamer animals, like gazelles and elks brought from all over the world, were allowed to roam the gardens free. It's such a wonderful picture of ridiculous extravagance in the midst of people starving. You think about these very manicured gardens, and these people dressed in lavish silks and laces walking the same paths with gazelles and antelope. I really wanted to keep that, but it didn't advance the plot, so they made me take it out.
Danielle Grandinetti: That's why I like asking the question, because it's still fun to know. Let's back up and tell us what the inspiration behind the story is. What made you want to write it?
Karen Ullo: The inspiration is obviously Strange True Stories of Louisiana. The main characters in the novel are lifted straight out of Cable's book, but I made them very much my own. My Alix and Joseph are not his. There is also a character named Abner who is very important; he was just a minor French nobleman in Cable's book, so I had to give him an entire backstory because there was nothing to work with. What drew me to it was the contrast, and this idea of a woman whose entire world has been literally decimated. Everything and everyone she has ever known and loved is gone, and she has to try to make a new life for herself in an inhospitable wilderness. She is a smart, highly educated woman, but her skills—being a talented harpist, beautiful needlepoint, and managing an 18th-century noble household—do not translate at all to building a life on the frontier. Seeing her cope and adapt while processing all of the trauma from the revolution was what really drew me. It's a story of resilience, but without glossing over what brought her to this point.
Danielle Grandinetti: Which brings me to one of our last questions. What encouragement do you hope readers will take away from this story?
Karen Ullo: I hope that readers will, first of all, just enjoy it. That is number one with any book. No matter how many years of research I did, if you don't enjoy it, I didn't do my job. But spiritually, I want you to take away the courage that our Lord gives us. In the martyrdom of the September Massacres, and in Alix's story where courage fails and where courage thrives, we see what God can do even in the midst of the most unthinkable tragedies.
Danielle Grandinetti: That's really beautiful. Karen, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing about your book, To Crown With Liberty. If readers want to find you or your books online, where can they do so?
Karen Ullo: My website is just my name, karenullo.com. Or you can check out the publisher at chrismpress.com. I hope you will do that, and maybe pick it up or ask your library to get a copy.
Danielle Grandinetti: Agreed, we love libraries.
Karen Ullo: Yes, libraries are wonderful.
Danielle Grandinetti: And I will link to all of those on the show notes so they are easy to find. Karen, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate you sharing about To Crown With Liberty, and I hope readers will pick up your book.
Karen Ullo: Thank you so much for having me, Danielle.
Danielle Grandinetti: Thank you for listening to A Spot of Story. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Let us know by leaving a comment below, and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Discover more information about today's book by visiting A Spot of Story online at daniellegrandinetti.com/podcast. Happy reading.
