His works featured a broad range of topics including clerical celibacy, abortion, and slavery and its aftermath.

[6] He left New Orleans and studied in Paris at Lycée Louis-le-Grand an institution his cousin Louis Placide Canonge also attended around the same period.

[6] His half-first cousin was playwright Louis Placide Canonge and his sister Henrietta Armantine Mercier was the wife of Senator Pierre Soulé.

When Alfred was fourteen he traveled to France where he was educated around 1830 at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand the same institution his cousin Louis attended.

By the end of the American Civil War, he returned to New Orleans in the late 1860s joining the literary group of Southern Writers.