“She starves them,” said Rumor, sitting on the eaves of a house across the way. “She whips them, she beats them,” the story ran, gaining momentum.
“But see how fat and cheerful is her coachman,” replied Reason. “Does he look like the victim of cruelty?” “He is a spy upon the others,” hissed Rumor. “Eh, bien,” said New Orleans, and yawned lightly, “She serves such dinners!”
The slave who cooked those dinners was a radical. She tired of practising her arts with a twenty-four-foot chain clamped to her ankle. On the afternoon of April 10, 1834, after extraordinary provocation, she became desperate and set fire to the house.
The townsfolk swarmed to the fire, and were greeted at the door by the gracious Madame Lalaurie. She directed her friends in their efforts to remove her costly furniture from the house. When someone suggested seeing that there was no human life still endangered in the building she said that it was quite empty, and that there was no necessity of visiting the slave quarters. Judge Canonge took it upon himself to investigate, but the smoke drove him back. There were some in the crowd, however, who were neither her friends nor her well-wishers, and who insisted that the slaves had not been removed. In the face of swelling clouds of blinding smoke and the lady’s angry remonstrances, a man finally groped his way into the slave wing which stood at right angles to the house.
Within a few moments he was outside, shouting. Volunteers ran back with him into the slave quarters. In the tiny cubicles which served as living-space for those humble lives were seven negroes, some locked in while the fire crept toward them, others chained to the walls. Their emaciated bodies bore witness to famishing hunger, and cruel sores told the story of their confinement. They were carried to the street, and the crowd, having helped to put out the fire in the house, took fire itself and charged the door. Madame Lalaurie deftly slammed it in their faces.
Her resourcefulness rose to the situation. By subtle management her carriage picked its way through the crowd a few hours later and drew up at the entrance. Before the growing throng of people detected the maneuver, she and her husband were inside the equipage and rattling round the corner, “driven up Chartres Street in a close carriage which I saw speeding at a furious rate” (so Henry C. Castellanos wrote in 1895). The afternoon parade of society was idling along the Bayou Road; her skilful driver wove his way through the stream of carriages and gained fast on the pursuit which had risen, howling at her flight. The Lalauries gained the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, put off in a skiff, boarded a schooner for Mandeville—up sail, and safe away!
The coachman began his return journey to town, and ended it when he met the pack of pursuers, for they destroyed him. The chase was deferred just long enough for the lady to effect her escape to Mobile, and thence to Paris. There rumor followed, and she was avoided by society. Three years later word came back in the ships that Madame Lalaurie was dead of wounds received in a boar-hunt. She had probably hunted as hard as she had lived.
We cannot surrender her to the savage credulity of the ages, however, without suggesting that the story of her life, although generally regarded as authentic, may have been gilded here and there by intervening generations of highly-colored imagination. A New Orleans man writes:
“I happen to know one of the descendants of Madame Lalaurie very well, and I have seen a marble bust of this self-same lady whose alleged record as a slave murderer is indignantly repudiated by the self-same descendants. As a matter of fact, those stories are pretty much of a piece with those which were in vogue in regard to throwing negro slaves into the furnaces of the Mississippi River steamboats and feeding piccaninnies to alligators. This would be pretty much as if you or I stood at the foot of the Battery and chucked all of our money, diamonds, and worldly possessions into New York Bay.”
That April-day crowd in New Orleans had no such sober judgment. After the coachman had been murdered they returned to Hospital and Royal Streets and sacked the house from hall to belvedere, ripped the silk curtains, slashed the paintings, tore out the chandeliers, dug up two slave skeletons from the courtyard, pitched Madame Lalaurie’s precious possessions out of the windows and made bonfire of the wreckage in the street. They drank and looted and terrorized the neighborhood until a detachment of regulars appeared under the sheriff’s command and put an end to the orgy.