EXCERPT Zelda Maria de Monterre (better known as Madame Centauri) was born on December 23rd 1904 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti). Her father, Pierre de Monterre, was a French diplomat (also suspected of being a professional spy and assassin). Her mother, Estelle Lavoissier, was a respected botanist (also reliably known to have been a Voodoo priestess). The combination of her father’s career and her mother’s exotic researches meant that Zelda experienced an itinerant childhood, traveling widely and almost continuously throughout the Francophone regions of the Caribbean, Africa, and East Asia.…