Books details history of New Orleans's Gentilly neighborhood

“Gentilly: A New Orleans Plantation in the French Atlantic World, 1818-1851” by Nathalie Dessens and Virginia Meacham Gould, Louisiana State University Press, 288 pages.

I had long assumed that New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood earned its name from the area’s quiet, pastoral qualities. It sure is gentle up here, I’d say to myself, while driving past block after block of ample-lawned houses.

Nope. The name is actually a corruption of Chantilly — that original appellation appears on old maps of the city — a northern suburb of Paris.

That story is told in a new book of the same name, the work of a pair of preeminent scholars of colonial Louisiana, Nathalie Dessens and Virginia Meacham Gould, who trace Gentilly’s early history as a suburban plantation through the letters of its longtime ca