Mad Madame LaLaurie

by Victoria Cosner Love

  Interestingly, author Barbara Hambly described Madame’s daughters as abused in her excellent novel Fever Season, although the abuse seems to be more mental than physical.

  We doubt the factuality of the physical abuse, at least. Delphine Lalaurie’s daughters remained faithful to her throughout their lives, often traveling and living with her. Letters between Madame and her girls indicate a warm relationship. (As an aside, it is not uncommon for psychopathic or sociopathic individuals to love their own family members, as much as they are capable. Many spouses and relatives of psychopaths are utterly surprised that their loved one could have ever done such bad things—they never saw that aspect of the perpetrator’s personality.) Martineau’s description of the fire differed from most retellings. She stated that it was extinguished fairly quickly and that the neighbors took advantage of this to break into the “outhouse” (outbuilding) to satisfy their curiosity about the rumors of cruelty.

  She painted the Lalauries’ escape as being Bastien’s idea, as his mistress was so self-absorbed that she had no idea that a bloodthirsty mob was ready to tear her apart. The description of her escape is exciting and dramatic. Martineau’s description of the mob reaching the lake too late to catch Madame and instead taking their vengeance out on the horses and, most probably, Bastien is frequently quoted (though unverified).

  Martineau related that Madame Lalaurie escaped the howling mob and fled to France but did not stay in one place for long before she was recognized and had to run again. Madame, she believed, “is supposed to be now skulking about in some French province, under a false name.”

  This rumor of disgrace and exile is found throughout the later legends but is probably not true. Madame would not have had much reason to hide her identity in France, where she could not even be charged with a crime.

  Martineau ended her account with a paragraph about the mob setting off to find other cruel masters and distributing circulars. Martineau could “never get out of the way of the horrors of slavery in this region.” That may or may not have been true. There are no newspaper accounts of mobs randomly searching Creole homes for cruel masters. It seems doubtful that such a thing would have been permitted by the New Orleans police, who were almost entirely French Creole at the time.

  Martineau’s tale set the standard for the vilification of Madame Lalaurie. She set Dr. Lalaurie aside as ineffectual, setting the blame squarely on the shoulders of Delphine. Her dramatic descriptions, which she says she collected from eyewitnesses, defamed Madame Lalaurie forever. Martineau gave us a spectacular narrative from just five years after the events, but most of what she reported is hearsay. As for the veracity of eyewitnesses, just speak with any law enforcement officer. Eyewitnesses are considered by many in police work to be the least reliable source of evidence. The brain plays tricks on us. We see what we expect to see, and what we hear about an event can color our memories of it later. Fortunately or unfortunately, Martineau helped set the stage for the story to grow from a shameful case of cruel abuse to an epic Grand Guignol horror show.

  HENRY C. CASTELLANOS

  Historian Castellanos wrote a history called New Orleans As It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life, which dedicates a chapter to the Lalaurie story. He took some time to research and analyze the story, probably for the first time since the events occurred. He was a contemporary of George Washington Cable’s, publishing in the late 1890s. Castellanos added some historical documentation to the tale:

  The proprietor of the New Orleans “Bee” wrote: “We saw where the collar and manacles had cut their way into their quivering flesh. For several months they had been confined in those dismal dungeons, with no other nutriment than a handful of gruel and an insufficient quantity of water, suffering the tortures of the damned and longingly awaiting death, as a relief to their sufferings. We saw Judge Canonge, Mr. Montreuil and others, making for some time fruitless efforts to rescue those poor unfortunates, whom the infamous woman, Lalaurie, had doomed to certain death and hoping that the devouring element might thus obliterate the last traces of her nefarious deeds.”

  He also corrected what he believed to be erroneous information in previous accounts and backed up his research when he could. For example, a rumor had been going around that many of the rescued slaves died after being fed because they were just too weak to handle nutrition after months of starvation. Castellanos refuted this:

  Two thousand persons, at least, convinced themselves during that eventful day by ocular inspection of the martyrdom to which those poor, degraded people had been subjected, while the ravenous appetite with which they devoured the food placed before them fully attest their sufferings from hunger. None of them, however, died from surfeit, as it has been erroneously alleged. Numberless instruments of torture, not the least noticeable of which were iron collars, “carcaus” with sharp cutting edges were spread out upon a long deal table, as evidences of guilt.

  He agreed with Martineau on several points, though, including the idea that the fire was purposely set by a slave: “Among them, a woman confessed to the Mayor that she had purposely set fire to the house as the only means of putting an end to her sufferings.”

  Many tellers of this tale do not look at the activities of the police during the three days after the fire. Some say that all the manpower in New Orleans was needed to protect the Lalaurie house from being reignited and burned to the ground. No account has been found that tells if there was an active effort by law enforcement to capture Madame and Dr. Lalaurie as they fled. Castellanos shined a small light onto what the city authorities were considering:

  It was said that Etinue Mazureau, the Attorney General, had expressed his determination to wreak upon the guilty parties the extreme vengeance of the law. But when the shadows of night fell upon the city, and it was ascertained beyond a doubt that no steps in that direction had been taken and that powerful influences were at work to shield the culprits, their fury then knew no bounds and assumed at once an active form.

  One item that Castellanos cleared up is whether the bones of the murdered slave girl (and perhaps other victims) were found in the courtyard:

  The story that human bones and among others those of a child who had committed self-destruction to escape the merciless lash, had been found in a well, is not correct, for the papers of the day report that acting under that belief, the mob had made diligent search even to the extent of excavating the whole yard, and had found nothing.

  Henry Castellanos is a must-read for the Lalaurie enthusiast. He closed his chapter with his belief about the state of the house, as it stood at the time of his writing:

  As a school house; as a private residence, as a factor; as a commercial house and place of traffic, all of these have been tried, but every venture has proved a ruinous failure. A year or two ago, it was the receptacle of the scum of Sicilian immigrants, and the fumes of the malodorous filth which emanated from its interior proclaimed it what it really is, “A HOUSE ACCURSED.”

  This highly entertaining (if extremely racist) ending to the account makes a dramatic denouement to Castellanos’s story. However, it is a little surprising that a writer who was so careful with his research into the facts would end on a superstitious note. This just proves that the Lalaurie story affects all who hear it—not just intellectually but at the gut level, the fearful, irrational level where monsters are real and ghosts haunt the house of pain.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE

  The American novelist George Washington Cable was probably the most famous writer to spread the Lalaurie legend. Born in Louisiana in 1844, Cable fought for the Confederate army and later became a journalist. His stories of Creole life, before and after the Civil War, painted an incredible picture of pride, opulence, racism and money. His eye for detailing the “battle” between the Americans and French Creole was remarkable, especially in his novel The Grandissimes. He conveyed a sense of disapproval toward the racism still present in Louisiana after the War Between the States. Cable eventually moved to Massachusetts a
nd became friends with Mark Twain. They toured together doing book lectures.

  George Washington Cable shared tales of Creole culture and its secrets and mysteries with a large American audience. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

  In his book Strange True Stories of Louisiana, Cable was one of the first to relate the story of the haunting of the Lalaurie house. He described the basics of the story, mostly sticking to the facts. (It is notable that he did not include any “medical experiment” injuries in the list of tortures suffered by the slaves.) He claimed that Judge Canongo took leadership to look for the household slaves in the garret rooms. He cited neighbors Montreuil, Fernandez and Lefebrve as assisting in the rescue. These accounts are backed up with original documents and depositions given after the incident in 1834.

  Initially, rival Louisiana historian Charles Gayerré referred to Cable as “no more than a malevolent, ignorant dwarf,” but Cable’s popularity and fame as a Creole historian climbed. Gayerré, who was a notorious Creole loyalist in his views of Louisiana history, joined with other New Orleans elite families and led a campaign to defame Cable. Included in his attacks were “sizzling editorials” in the New Orleans Bee and a spurious story that Madame Lalaurie had refused to receive Cable in her house because he had “colored blood.” Gayerré claimed that Cable wrote his story of the “Haunted House in Royal Street” to get even for this slight. The story is laughable, considering that Cable was born in 1844—a full ten years after Madame and Dr. Lalaurie fled New Orleans, making him about thirteen years old when Madame Lalaurie died, according to historian Christopher Benfey.

  As Cable’s popularity grew with American audiences, his fate was sealed among the Creole families in New Orleans. Benfey quotes Louisiana historian Grace King, who wrote that “Cable proclaimed his preference for colored people over white and assumed the inevitable superiority—according to his theories—of the quadroons over the Creoles.”

  Obviously, this caused him to be persona non grata among the Creole elite. To his credit, Cable didn’t seem to care.

  Cable published and traveled, and he never backed down from his revelations about the inner workings of Creole society. This earned him the title of “the most cordially hated little man in New Orleans,” at least according to New Orleans author Joseph Pennell, quoted by Benfey.

  GHOST STORIES ABOUND

  The ghost stories surrounding the Lalaurie incident are perhaps the pieces of the story that are the most repeated, most widely spread and most creatively embellished. You won’t find a haunted New Orleans tour that doesn’t include ghosts along with the grisly details of torture and mayhem. If you ask any longtime citizen where to find the most haunted house in New Orleans, they’ll direct you to the house on Royal Street.

  JEANNE DELAVIGNE

  Enter Jeanne DeLavigne, who wrote Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans in 1946. It not only set the standard for tales of hauntings in the Lalaurie house, but it was also quite possibly responsible for some of the gorier embellishments on what the rescuers found during the Lalaurie house fire of 1834, including the medical experiments and buckets of body parts. There is no documentation to back up these aspects of the story. DeLavigne wrote a horror story, not a history:

  The man who smashed the garret door saw powerful male slaves, stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out, their fingernails pulled off by the roots; others had their joints skinned and festering, great holes in their buttocks where the flesh had been sliced away, their ears hanging by shreds, their lips sewed together, their tongues drawn out and sewed to their chins, severed hands stitched to bellies, legs pulled joint from joint. Female slaves there were, their mouths and ears crammed with ashes and chicken offal and bound tightly; others had been smeared with honey and were a mass of black ants. Intestines were pulled out and knotted around naked waists. There were holes in skulls, where a rough stick had been inserted to stir the brains. Some of the poor creatures were dead, some were unconscious; and a few were still breathing, suffering agonies beyond any power to describe. [DeLavigne quoted the firemen entering the house.]

  Image from the DeLavigne book of a torture victim hanging upside down.

  This book, sadly out of print, is a classic of New Orleans ghost story literature. If you find a copy, consider yourself very lucky.

  Interestingly enough, firsthand stories of hauntings in the Lalaurie house have appeared in newspapers and periodicals over the years, particularly at Halloween. This States Item report from June 16, 1969, notes an appearance:

  Zella Funck lives in the famous “Haunted House” at 1140 Royal St. “My poltergeists are just playful,” she declares blithely. “They’re not around every day, but they do surprise visitors.”…The ghost, whom she says she has seen twice, is a romantic figure of a man. “I’ve watched him for several minutes in a full-length mirror before he faded away. He’s about 5’9”, about 170 lbs, has a reddish clipped beard, and wears a creamy beige felt hat turned up slightly, with a cord around it.”

  This Times-Picayune item from August 11, 1974, reports another:

  As recently as 14 years ago, a long-time resident of one of the small apartments within the building declared emphatically that he had heard strange sounds near his room for as long as he had lived there—footsteps running along dim passages, mournful sighs and, at least once, a smothered scream. He didn’t bother to investigate, he said, and so the spirits—or whatever they were—hadn’t bothered him.

  Of course, if you search for “Lalaurie ghost stories” on the Internet, you will find a veritable treasure-trove of material. Like most Internet content, it is to be taken with a huge grain of salt. But searching for Madame on the web from time to time is an entertaining way of finding out how the legends have most recently been adapted.

  CREATING THE FACE OF A MONSTER

  There are two images of Madame Lalaurie that float through the Internet. One is a realistic-looking painting depicting Delphine in an 1880s-style dress. The other painting is more eerie, painted in unsettling reds and blacks. Both paintings were created by the same New Orleans artist, Ricardo Pustanio.

  Pustanio’s first portrait of Madame Lalaurie is the most commonly found image of Madame on the Internet. Very similar to a 1934 portrait published in the Times-Picayune, the red and black painting of the infamous Madame Delphine Lalaurie was painted in 1997 and has grown its own legend. As spooky as it is, there is nothing strange about its creation or the reasons Pustanio decided to paint it. “At the time I used whatever image of her I could find to do the work from,” said Pustanio, both on a website and in his interview with one of the authors. “I even went to the Musée Conti Historical Wax Museum and questioned them about her appearance they did in wax.”

  With no detailed description of Madame Lalaurie in the chronicles of history (other than the often-repeated comment that she was beautiful), Pustanio and the Musée Conti were on their own in creating her image.

  Pustanio told the authors in an interview that he was asked to create this image by a resident of the Lalaurie house. This gentleman wanted to have her portrait in their apartment as a touchstone with the building’s past. Besides, they said, it would make a great conversation piece. Pustanio obliged, creating a haunting, unforgettable image. The painting was perhaps more haunting than Pustanio intended, for it gathered its own reputation for being haunted.

  After they hung it on the wall, the piece took on a life of its own, according to the portrait’s owners. “The resident began to hold séances for his friends and even tourists and paranormal investigators, who always are trying to get a glimpse inside the haunted mansion,” said Pustanio. “To their astonishment the painting would actually rock on the wall and even fall loose from the wall, hitting the floor with a great thud.”

  The owner eventually became frightened by the painting. He reported smelling smoke, having objects in his apartment moved around by unseen forces and other strange phenomena. He gave the portrait to one of the other tenants o
f the mansion. She hung it proudly, but she also started having problems with the painting. She heard pacing footsteps and strange sounds. The portrait’s eyes followed her across the room. Cold hands touched her. When she started hearing the painting whisper to her, she brought in a paranormal investigator to document the incidents. (The complete story of the haunted portrait can be read at the Haunted America Tours website.)

  Pustanio often heard the story of a haunted painting bandied about, but he did not at first realize that the painting in question was one that he had created. “[N]ever did I think the Haunted Painting was something that I had done,” the artist was quoted as saying. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life that people say are haunted. I personally don’t think I am haunted. Nor does what I do attract ghosts, or is intended to be haunted.”

  “I just think outright some people connect with artists, because we put strong emotions into our works,” he continued. “And isn’t a haunting basically supposed to be just that, strong emotions of the dead manifesting themselves?”

  During his interview with the authors, the artist commented that he was very happy about the portrait being his, even though it did nothing of a supernatural nature when it was returned to him by its second owner. “It is great publicity to paint a haunted portrait,” he said.