Madame Castel's Lodger by Frances Parkinson Keyes

Madame Castel’s Lodger by Frances Parkinson Keyes published by Farrar, Strauss & Company, New York, 1962.

From the jacket;
Madame Castel’s lodger is P. G. T. Beauregard, full general, hero of Fort Sumter, victor at Manassas, first idol of the Confederacy - and incomparable lover! Historians often refer to him as “Napoleon in Gray”; his devoted soldiers called him “Old Bory”; his Anglo-Saxon fellow officers “the Great Creole”; his family and friends, Pierre; and his countless female admirers by endearing terms too numerous to mention. His story, now told for the first time in the form of superb biographical fiction, is one of tremendous drama from start to finish.
A scion of Louisiana’s landed gentry of French, Spanish and Italian background, his early years were passed on a fabulous plantation which, after the Mexican War, was given the name of the first battle in which he won his spurs - Contreras. His father, determined that he should ”be an American,” sent him to a boarding school in New York whose directors were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars; this experience confirmed Pierre’s childhood desire to be a soldier and, despite family opposition, he entered 
West Point and eventually graduated second in his class, having meanwhile conceived a deep dislike for General Winfield Scott and an abiding affection for Robert Anderson - later the defender of Fort Sumter - and several other fellow students who were to become officers in the Union Army. he had also had his first love affair. But it was not until after his return to Louisiana that he met the beautiful Laure Villere and, after a whirlwind courtship, persuaded her to marry him.
At this stage, Pierre was a dashing and romantic figure and Mrs. Keyes does full justice to him as such. to the idyllic quality of his romance with Laure and to its radiant background. She is no less successful in tracing the variuos tragedies which darkened several years after Laure’s death; Pierre’s recapture of happiness, in a different form, wshen Caroline Deslone - whose sisterf Mathilde was the wife of John Slidell - entered his life; his spectacular success at Fort Sumter and Manasses; and the friction which arouse between Beauregard - a latin, a Catholic and a patrician - and Jefferson Davis, who could not appreciate the influence of these factors on ideals, outlook and modus operandi. When Beauregard finally returned to New Orleans after the surrender of the last mournful remnants of the Confederate Army, he was practically a pauper, reduced to taking humble lodgings in the once beautiful mansion where he had been a joyful bridegroom and which, like himself, had fallen from high to lowly estate. Here, when he least expects or hopes for it, he finds new fulfillment and the courage with which to rebuild his life through his association with his landlady, Simone Castel.
Mrs. Keyes has been variously called a historian at heart, an incurable romanticist and a born story teller. In Madame Castel’s Lodger, she proves that she can reveal herself as all three in one and the same book. During the twenty years since she wrote her first novel with a Louisiana setting, her knowledge of this chosen field and her feeling for it have grown deeper, more comprehensive and more abiding. Her talent for vivid characterization and arresting plot has constantly ripened. The present novel forms a fitting crown and climax to all that have gone before it.