1 & 2) Calais-sous-Soleil. It means Calais-under-the-sun, and is named for the French port of Calais on the English Channel. The "sous-Soleil" was added because Orange is a tropical location, and less cloudy than Calais, France. Lafayette has another city, Château-Rouge, but I do not know who founded it, other than that it was a Lusofone who declared Lafayette residency when filling out the Orange citizenship application.

3) When I was in Orange, Lafayette had a home page, but no longer does. It was removed by Orange's webmaster (Thiago Mello?) over a year ago.

4) Orange Peel. It had been part of the Orange Web Site, but has not been since I emigrated. I have the back issues on disk, and will try to get them (and some other historical material to you by e-mail -- I am at work right now...) If I can get the files to you, you will also find Le Bien Public, the newspaper of Nouvelle-Rouen in Porto Claro while I was there.

5) The colors orange and light blue are the traditional colors of the Netherlands, whose royal house is the House of Orange, after which Cape Orange and our country were named. (The Netherlands now uses red, white, and blue on its flag, but uses orange for patriotic effect). The gold stripe in the middle represents a claim that gold is (or was once) present in the territory of Orange.

6) Lafayette had a constitution, loosely based on the French Revolutionary Constitution of the Year III. If I can send the other material, the Constitution will be in with it.

7) The reasons are well stated in Orange's Declaration of Independence, which, the last I noticed, was still in Orange's official website. The *real* reason was that Pedro Aguiar felt that my efforts to make Nouvelle Rouen more culturally French and Francesc Savalls' to create a local order of nobility in Pirraines were threatening to his control over Porto Claro, at least culturally. Rather than wage a long-term cultural war, we decided to cross the bay and start our own country.

The Tisserand Museum
October, 2000