That April-day crowd returned to Hospital and Royal Streets and sacked the house from hall to belvedere, ripped down silk curtains, slashed paintings, wrenched out chandeliers, dug up two skeletons from the courtyard, pitched Madame Lalaurie’s precious possessions out of windows and made bonfire of the wreckage in the street. Nor when inside the stout old walls a new and finer residence was built in cheerful defiance of the ghost, could the spirit of tragedy be banished.
The Haunted House, New Orleans
Far down in the vieux carré, the old French quarter of New Orleans, where Hospital Street meets Royal, the drone of the modern city at work comes faintly through the morning air. Back yonder, above Canal Street, there are motor trucks, profanity and clangor; here there is hardly a street-car, and if you hear loud voices they are filtered through the shutters of a shabby dwelling where a hopeful candidate for the Opera is practising her topmost. The old French Opera House, the scene of Patti’s debut, departed this life only last year—a gay life, marked by amours and appointments, triumphs and disappointments, dances and duels. Presently there will be gaps in the circle of musicians who always settle about the focal point of an opera house, and you will hear no more the manifold outpourings of their several souls, throats and fiddles.
Their passing will deepen the twilight of an antiquity which New Orleans has cherished with more sympathy than all the rest of our American cities. Rigid modern buildings with Louis XVI fronts and O’Shaughnessy backs will rear their ventilators, tanks and pent-houses where, once upon a time, warm walls and climbing cupolas, odd contours and vine-like wrought-iron railings melted into a strangely complex and beautiful composition. Even now, as the fitful trolley-car clanks past the corner of Hospital and Royal, a tremor shakes a few more crumbling grains from the arches of the old Spanish Barracks. Soon they will be returned to earth. You will forget that France gave New Orleans to Spain to pay for her help in the English wars; that Napoleon, sitting in his bath-tub and quarreling with his brothers, maintained stoutly that since he had just forced Spain to give Louisiana back to him, he had a perfect right to re-sell; that he splashed them into agreement; and that he did re-sell the territory to the new United States. But Napoleon’s legions have followed Andrew Jackson’s Kentucky riflemen into the twilight.
The passing of the old order has a hundred conspicuous manifestations in New Orleans, perhaps because there is a legend for every old house, a tragedy for every shadow, a romantic blood-stain on every pavement. The Absinthe House takes in lodgers. The Cabildo, the ancient Spanish city hall, is a museum. An order of Catholic sisters now occupies the building which once witnessed the quadroon balls. There is African ragtime in New Orleans, as there is in every city and town where squeals the talking-machine, but in Beauregard Square you will not hear today the thumping of the voodoo chant, nor see the bamboula danced, as you might have in the days when it was Congo Square. Ashes unto ashes, dust to—reinforced concrete.
Nowhere, perhaps, is there more graphic evidence of the change than right here at Hospital and Royal Streets. Inspect the house before you. The days of its grandeur are past. The concièrge says a hundred and eighty people live there now—surely it was not intended for so many. But it is a lodging-house, and the task of cleaning up after the lodgers must make them seem to the concièrge like a hundred and eighty or more.
From the street corner diagonally opposite your eyes take in a spacious square building, three stories high, of cement-colored stucco. It has a flat roof, and its architecture suggests that the daughter of a Florentine palace became the bride of a small but snappily dressed United States Post Office. It stands flush with the banquette, and wears a frill of balcony clear round its two street sides, under whose tempering shade you may distinguish the faded red of the lower story, and the entrance to a mysterious tunnel which is in reality a deeply arched doorway.
Under its modern exterior you will detect hints of its great age. There is, for example, a note of caprice in the red wrought-iron railings of the balcony. They may have been made, as were many in the vieux carré, at the very forge of Jean Lafitte, the pirate-blacksmith who commanded the marauders of Barataria, and whose pirate four-pounders helped out the rifles at the battle of New Orleans. Generations of idlers have worn smooth and rusty brown the peacock tints on the iron columns that support the balcony. There are touches of vermilion and lavender in the sharp green of the shutters at the second-floor windows.
The architecture is Italo-American, and so are the urchins popping from the doors to stare at you as you wait for admittance. Their faces are soiled, and so is the black-and-white marble floor behind the heavy spiked gates. Note, above you, the coffered and embossed ceiling, appraise the graceful fan-light over the door, examine the elaborate carving of the door itself, for these are relics which indicate the grand manner in which this house once welcomed its guests. Forget that the ceiling is blistered, that two panes are gone from the side windows, and that night-blooming lodgers have kicked the haunches off the carved steeds of Phoebus Apollo on the door. A century ago a slave would have swung wide the portal with great ceremony, and you would have mounted the winding stair to an upper hall which was notable for its elegance; today you find it dingy, uninspiring and forlorn. Not a ghost in sight anywhere.
Comes the concièrge and swears and deposes that in the year of Our Lord 1919 she did see with her own eyes a headless man march up these stairs, and that she has accordingly caused the house to be sprinkled with holy water. Did he look like Louis Philippe? Well, he looked something like him, and yet differed from him—the light wasn’t good, and besides (and this was a happy thought) the figure had no head, and resemblances are hard to establish under those conditions. Louis Philippe is believed to have slept here, though Mr. George W. Cable doubts this, on the ground that in 1798, the year of the royal visit, no such high buildings were erected for fear they would sink into the soft ground. No, the headless man was not Louis Philippe, but some other character in the lurid history of the building.