The fact is that the number of people killed by the Lalauries, if any, is unknown. The stories of the rescued slaves in the attic dropping dead from shock or leaping from the windows are just that—undocumented stories. This is not to say that the Lalauries did not commit murder at any point. But there is no solid documentation to prove that. Surely, if Madame had a history of strange deaths in her home, accidental or otherwise, court documents would have reflected this, and the newspapers would have jumped all over it following the 1834 incident.
The most fascinating aspect of this case is that the story of “Mad Madame Lalaurie” has excited the imagination of the public for so long. This long-standing legend was undoubtedly jump-started by the enormous amount of press coverage it received at the time. Madame’s physical beauty and perfect manners may have been the spark that started the flame. It is difficult for modern society to admit that beautiful people, particularly women, can commit the ugliest of acts. In 1830s New Orleans, it was even more shocking to the public. Well-bred Creole women were meant to be the heart of the family and the keeper of the home, never even raising their voices in anger much less committing terrible acts of violence. While other women perpetrated the same kind of abuse, particularly out on the plantations, Madame Lalaurie was the one who got caught.
In the Meigs Frost article from the February 4, 1934 New Orleans Times-Picayune, an argument is made for the slandering of Madame Lalaurie by her relative and neighbor, Montreuil.
Montreuil was related to Delphine Lalaurie by the marriage of her aunt, Manette (Marie Marthe), to his uncle. A substantial piece of property reverted to the management of Madame Lalaurie, which resulted in a large loss of income for M. Montreuil. Frost maintains that the reason Montreuil was “all over the place” during the fire is that he was trying to get Madame into as much trouble as possible. He knew of the slaves in the attic and tried to incite as much interest in them as possible.
So Madame was victimized but was probably at least an accessory in the mistreatment of the slaves. What was Dr. Lalaurie’s role? If one were to take the legend at face value, including the alleged medical experimentation, he would seem to be the likely perpetrator. The crude sex change operations, the “crab woman” and the victim with the peeled skin go far beyond punishment. These are Nazi-like medical atrocities. Certainly, there are cases and citations of medical experiments being performed on slaves and prisoners, particularly prisoners of color, throughout western history. It was not uncommon for doctors (some with very dubious credentials) to try out new remedies and potions on hapless slaves. But we believe that what was going on in the Lalaurie house was nothing quite so exotic.
Dr. Lalaurie’s nonchalant answer to a would-be rescuer of “mind the business at hand” seemed to indicate that he knew what was happening in the locked rooms and was trying to divert attention away from them. But those things were probably not Grand Guignol–style medical atrocities. Those lurid details did not appear in the Lalaurie legend until the 1940s. In fact, they seem to have been inserted by one particular author, Jeanne DeLavigne. It is far more likely that what Louis Lalaurie was trying to hide was a flagrant abuse of power over people whom society had made helpless. Dr. Louis Lalaurie abused his wife—that much was documented in court. A man who would raise his fists to his wife would not cringe at the thought of brutally harming people who were considered to be his property.
In Peter Vronsky’s book Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters (2007), he stated that the wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists often came from a stable background, had few problems in childhood and were generally well educated. Vronsky cited a 2002 study by Janet Warren and Ron Hazelwood: “The majority of the 42 women studied…lived rather conventional, stable, and non-criminals lives; before the initiation of the relationship that culminated in rather radical changes in their behavior.”
As far as we know, Delphine Lalaurie fits that model. There was never a hint of scandal associated with her until she married Louis Lalaurie. Whether he was a sexual sadist is unknown. But someone in that household, maybe both parties, had a wide streak of sadism.
If they were working in tandem, this raises the interesting idea that the Lalauries were enmeshed in the rare psychological syndrome known as “folie a deux,” or “a madness shared by two.” In more recent psychiatric publications, it’s referred to as shared psychotic disorder. Ironically, the syndrome was first postulated in nineteenth-century France, by Drs. Ernest Charles Lasegue and Jules Philip Joseph Falrer.
Simply put, this is a psychotic syndrome in which two people share the same delusion. Sometimes there is a dominant partner who presses a delusional belief on the second. More rarely, two people who have a similar delusion or mental illness meet, and their illnesses feed each other, according to Dr. W.W. Ireland.
One could build a case for this theory. Madame was certainly a strong enough personality to bend other people to her will, whether or not it was rational. And it seems fairly strange that Delphine married Louis after knowing him for only a few months. It’s possible, if not likely, that what drew them together was a common bond of madness.
Vronsky describes a study by anthropologist Ilsa Glazer that researched aggression in females (defined as “Masked Criminology”) and that showed that “as an offender the woman is perceived as instigating and inspiring violence rather than partaking in it directly.” After extensive consideration of the possibilities, we are leaning toward this psychological concept as an answer to what occurred in the Lalaurie Mansion. To put it plainly, we find the most likely scenario to be that the physical acts of torture were committed by Louis Lalaurie, who was encouraged, or perhaps even pushed to action, by Madame Lalaurie.
Another dark twist on this theory is that Madame may have been happy to have Louis’ rage turned on someone other than herself. If she encouraged him to torment the slaves, it may have been at least partly an attempt to deflect his abuse away from herself and onto someone else. Not the noblest of motives, but sadly, not uncommon either.
Was Madame Lalaurie mad? Her letters written toward the end of her life indicate a basic lack of understanding of the seriousness of her crimes in New Orleans. In a letter in the collection of the Missouri Historical Society, her son stated the following about Madame Lalaurie’s proposal to return to New Orleans in 1842:
[It is] a project of which the idea alone is a lack of consideration toward her family. She has been speaking about it in a vague manner but we comfort ourselves with the hope that moments of humor alone could make her nourish a thought that the sad memories of the catastrophe of 1834 must have made her envision as impossible.
A lack of empathy for victims and a lack of understanding of the gravity of actions is not necessarily indicative of insanity, at least not in the eyes of modern law. A modern western court of law generally judges whether a defendant is insane based on the M’Naghten Rules, created in England by the House of Lords in 1843 following the attempted assassination of the British prime minister, Robert Peel, by an insane individual named Daniel M’Naghten. The M’Naghten Rules read:
The jurors ought to be told in all cases that every man is presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that to establish a defence [sic] on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring [sic] under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
Or, to make a long set of rules short, a person is considered legally insane if he cannot understand that what he did was wrong.
The M’Naghten Rules clearly do not apply to Madame Lalaurie. If she had truly not known that what was being done to her slaves was wrong, she would not have tried to hide that fact by discouraging would-be rescuers from going into the attic. She knew
that what she was doing was wrong (or at least illegal). She just did not care.
And then there is the slight possibility that Madame Lalaurie was completely oblivious to the whole situation. Her disobedient slave problems were “taken care of” by her husband. She was absent when the abused slaves were brought forth to the public. She knew that they were being punished. Everyone punished their slaves; why the big fuss? This would account for Madame wanting to return to New Orleans, not realizing the gravity of her husband’s sins.
Or perhaps she was a heartless sociopath, which is what we believe to be true.
We believe that Delphine probably suffered from antisocial personality disorder, also known as sociopathy. This is a fairly common personality disorder marked by a lack of empathy and a focus on one’s self to the exclusion of the well-being of others. Lacking a conscience, sociopaths do what they want, take what they want and usually get what they want at any cost. They are quite willing to go against social norms to get what they desire or even just to entertain themselves. Most psychiatrists, such as Robert D. Hare, consider this to be a neurological disorder that is often aggravated by trauma early in life.
Sociopaths are superficially charming in the extreme, dazzling others while skillfully manipulating them. They can fit perfectly into any social situation. They are glib, skillful liars, and their true motives often go undetected for years, if not for their entire lives. It’s estimated that 1 to 4 percent of the general population are sociopaths, according to Martha Stout.
Sound like anybody we know?
We do not believe that Madame Lalaurie was mad, in the common sense of the word. She was not a drooling lunatic or a paranoid schizophrenic. But her psyche was far from normal. She was the center of her world, and everyone else—slaves, husbands, children, friends and relatives—were just props created for her amusement.
So how much of the legend is true? When you compare the tales found in books, on websites and in the hundreds of tours led through the French Quarter every year to the provable, documented portions of the story, it seems amazing that any of the facts have survived the 180 years of telling and retelling. The core of the story, that Delphine and Louis Lalaurie heinously abused and neglected their slaves, stands true, even if their motives will never be known for certain. Some of the mysteries raised in the tour at the beginning of this book have been explained. Many more are waiting to be solved. The wonderful thing about history is that new facts could turn up at any time—in someone’s attic, in a forgotten library storage room, in the basement of a courthouse or in the hope chest of a lady long since passed. Maybe someday we will find something, and we will know more.
Chapter 10
Myths v. Facts
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
–D.H. Lawrence
History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
–E.L. Doctorow
Many of the stories swirling around the Lalaurie legend are provably myths and patently untrue (however entertaining they may be). Here is a rundown of the stories we know to be myths, as well as the truths behind them.
Myth: Madame Lalaurie had two previous husbands who died under mysterious circumstances. Even Louis Lalaurie vanished from public view, and his death date or cause was never established. She may have murdered them, starting and then continuing her career of death and mayhem.
Fact: It’s true that there is no documentation for the deaths of any of Delphine’s three husbands. But that is hardly unusual, considering that not one of Madame’s husbands died quietly at home. Record-keeping and sharing between countries was iffy at best.
She may have been present for one of their deaths. The movements of her first husband, López, are well documented in Cuba with the Spanish governmental papers. If indeed she reached Cuba before he died, he was already very sick while she was pregnant and traveling on a ship to meet him. She did not have the opportunity, or even the motive, to kill him. Few women in the nineteenth century wanted to be left widowed and pregnant.
Jean Blanque’s death was not documented (nor was his burial), but his very lifestyle made him almost impossible to track through standard bureaucratic record-keeping of the time. The man was a smuggler, a slave dealer and, quite probably, a pirate. Such men die violently, or they move to faraway countries to spend their ill-gotten gains. The man vanished, one way or another. It is ridiculous to consider that Madame might have murdered him and disposed of his body on her own. No such remains were found at the Blanque home.
Louis Lalaurie and Delphine Lalaurie had been separated from each other for years at the estimated time of his death. Agatha Christie fans might guess that she sent him a poisoned bottle of brandy as a parting gift, but that seems every bit as likely as Madame dragging Jean Blanque’s body to the swamp and dumping him herself. In all likelihood, he died in the arms of his “riffraff” family or practicing shoddy medicine in Cuba or Haiti.
Madame Lalaurie’s husbands did not die under mysterious circumstances. Not one of them met an end that indicated poison or murder-for-hire, the two most common ways for a woman to dispose of an unwanted husband in the nineteenth century. They did, however, leave her very wealthy. But her own family was very wealthy. Money was simply not a motive for Delphine to murder her husbands, nor was the “shame” of divorce. Divorce was quite common in Creole upper-crust culture, and women were well protected by alimony laws.
Myth: Madame was seen chasing a young slave child through her house, brandishing a bullwhip. She chased the young girl up to the roof, where the child slipped and fell to her death in the courtyard. She was buried next to the well by her grieving relatives.
Fact: No documentation of the death of the slave child exists. If it occurred, this probably would not have been a criminal matter, as most people researching the incident have assumed. If complaints were, in fact, filed by witnesses of the act, the case would have been heard in the civil or parish courts. There are no documents whatsoever indicating that a civil trial took place, much less a guilty verdict handed down.
Most versions of this story claim that Madame was fined and that all of the slaves were removed from her household. No court records can be found indicating that any disciplinary action was taken against the Lalauries or that the case appeared in court at all. No police reports exist to document the event.
During the 1834 coverage of the Lalaurie fire and its horrible revelations in the Bee and Courier, the editors who dragged Madame Lalaurie through the mud would have been only too happy to bring up any previous problems with her slaves and play them for all they were worth. Yet there was not a single mention of the incident with the unfortunate child. When firemen and police dug up the courtyard, no human bones or bodies were found.
The tale of the murdered child appears in all versions of the Lalaurie legend, but so far, nothing factual has been uncovered that might prove the story to be true.
Myth: Firemen at the scene of the Lalaurie blaze reported horrific and outrageously grotesque scenes of torture.
Fact: This oft-quoted scene is from Jeanne DeLavigne’s 1946 book, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans. However, no records were found that involved the firemen documenting or commenting on these atrocities. In fact, the more gruesome and outlandish descriptions—like the extracted and knotted intestines, the people smeared with honey and attacked by ants and the brain stir-sticks—did not appear in the Lalaurie legends until DeLavigne’s book was published. This would indicate that these details were either embellishments on the part of that author or perhaps stories that she heard from New Orleans locals who enjoyed spinning a colorful yarn.
The official statement by Judge Canongo indicates that only seven slaves were pulled from the upper galleries and floors of the mansion during the fire. The slaves were not in good condition, and it
was determined by rescuers and doctors who examined them at the Cabildo that they had been chained, beaten and starved over a period of some time. As horrible as this is, it is a far cry from intestines pulled out and defleshed joints.
Police records in New Orleans do not go back as far as 1834, and the archives at the state library do not hold any record of the Lalaurie incident. Although photographic equipment existed in the 1830s, it was extremely rare and expensive. It is almost certain that no photographs were taken of the victims of the Lalauries. But newspaper illustrations were quite common, and these drawings were notoriously lurid. Yet not a single drawing of a slave being devoured by ants or with his intestines wrapped around his abdomen exists. It seems most likely that the “firemen’s description” and the stories that sprouted from it, like the “crab woman” and the buckets of blood and guts in the attic, were storytellers’ elaborations to make the already shocking tale even more horrifying.
Illustration from Jeanne DeLavigne’s book of torture victims in the attic.
Myth: The story of the hauntings began shortly after the incident, as the ashes cooled and police stayed on the scene to ensure that the structure was not damaged any further. Sounds of whimpers and scratching could be heard, but the firemen and police could not find any more hidden rooms and feared that ghosts were afoot. In the 1970s, when the floorboards of the Lalaurie Mansion were pulled up during restoration, the bodies of up to twenty people who had been buried alive were found.
Fact: Extensive search of newspapers at the time of the ’70s restoration did not turn up any stories about bodies being found under the floorboards. No bodies were found during any decades following, either. Had this been an actual event, it would have been huge news, national news. But not the smallest paragraph could be found.
Every five to ten years, new articles would show up in the papers about the Lalaurie Mansion, especially around Halloween, but no actual facts about the discovery of bodies emerged from these entertaining articles—just more ghost stories.
Mad Madame LaLaurie Page 9
