Delphine Lalaurie

Novel 1920's New Orleans X Tzimisce

Sorbriquet

Delphy

Appearance

Delphine is bronzed in skin color, dark of hair. Her nails are long, and often have bits of other people under them. Delphine dresses in a modern style, and changes her appearance periodically as she desires, being sometimes busty, sometimes slim.

History

Delphine Macarty was born about 1780, one of five children. Her father was Louis Barthelemy Macarty (originally Chevalier de Maccarthy) whose father Barthelemy (de) Maccarthy brought the family to New Orleans from Ireland around 1730, during the French colonial period. (The Scots-Irish surname Maccarthy was shortened to Macarty or de Macarty.) Her mother was Marie Jeanne Lovable, also known as "the widow Lecomte", whose marriage to Louis B. Macarty was her second. Both were prominent in the town's white Creole community. Delphine's cousin, Augustin de Macarty, was mayor of New Orleans from 1815 to 1820.

On June 11, 1800, Mlle. Marie Delphine Macarty married Don Ramón de Lopez y Angulo, a Caballero de la Royal de Carlos (a high-ranking Spanish royal officer), at the Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. (Luisiana, as it was spelled in Spanish, had become a Spanish colony in the 1760s.) By 1804, after the American acquisition, Don Ramón had been appointed to the position of consul general for Spain in the Territory of Orleans. Also in 1804, Delphine and Ramón Lopez traveled to Spain. Accounts of the trip vary. Grace King wrote in 1921 that the trip was Lopez's "military punishment" and that Señora Delphine Lopez met the Queen, who was impressed with Mrs. Lopez's beauty. Stanley Arthur's 1936 report differed; he stated that on March 26, 1804, Don Ramón Lopez was recalled to Spain "to take his place at court as befitting his new position," but that Lopez never arrived in Madrid because he died in en route, in Havana.

During the voyage, Delphine gave birth to a daughter, named Marie-Borja/Borgia Delphine Lopez y Angulo de la Candelaria, nicknamed Borquita. Delphine and her daughter returned to New Orleans afterwards.

In June 1808, Delphine married Jean Blanque, a prominent banker, merchant, lawyer, and legislator. At the time of the marriage, Blanque purchased a house at 409 Royal Street in New Orleans for the family, which became known later as the Villa Blanque. Delphine had four more children by Blanque, named Marie Louise Pauline, Louise Marie Laure, Marie Louise Jeanne, and Jeanne Pierre Paulin Blanque.

In December of 1814, Delphine met Ezra Howland at a Christmas party. He watched the beautiful woman from a distance, and eavesdropped on all her conversations. When she told her closest confidants about the cruelty she lavished on her slaves, he became intrigued with this woman. After following her and watching her for more than a month, Ezra took her mortal cares away. He stayed and taught her what it meant to be Tzimisce, whispered in her ear about the Sword of Caine, and then road away going west on a train going to California by way of Kansas City.

Delphine drank Blanque dry in 1816. Delphine married her third husband, physician Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie, who was much younger than she, on June 25, 1825. In 1831, she bought property at 1140 Royal Street, which she managed in her own name with little involvement of her husband, and by 1832 had built a three-story mansion there, complete with attached slave quarters. She lived there with her husband and two of her daughters, and maintained a central position in New Orleans society.

1834 fire

The Lalauries maintained several black slaves in slave quarters attached to the Royal Street mansion. Accounts of Delphine Lalaurie's treatments of her slaves between 1831 and 1834 are mixed. Harriet Martineau, writing in 1838 and recounting tales told to her by New Orleans residents during her 1836 visit, claimed Lalaurie's slaves were observed to be "singularly haggard and wretched;" however, in public appearances Lalaurie was seen to be generally polite to black people and solicitous of her slaves' health, and court records of the time showed that Lalaurie manumitted two of her own slaves (Jean Louis in 1819 and Devince in 1832). Nevertheless, Martineau reported that public rumors about Lalaurie's mistreatment of her slaves were sufficiently widespread that a local lawyer was dispatched to Royal Street to remind LaLaurie of the laws relevant to the upkeep of slaves. During this visit the lawyer found no evidence of wrongdoing or mistreatment of slaves by Lalaurie.

Martineau also recounted other tales of Lalaurie's cruelty that were current among New Orleans residents in about 1836. She claimed that, subsequent to the visit of the local lawyer, one of Lalaurie's neighbors saw one of the LaLaurie's slaves, a twelve-year-old girl named Lia (or Leah), fall to her death from the roof of the Royal Street mansion while trying to avoid punishment from a whip-wielding Delphine LaLaurie. Lia had been brushing Delphine's hair when she hit a snag, causing Delphine to grab a whip and chase her. The body was subsequently buried on the mansion grounds. According to Martineau, this incident led to an investigation of the Lalauries, in which they were found guilty of illegal cruelty and forced to forfeit nine slaves. These nine slaves were then bought back by the Lalauries through the intermediary of one of their relatives, and returned to the Royal Street residences. Similarly, Martineau reported stories that LaLaurie kept her cook chained to the kitchen stove, and beat her daughters when they attempted to feed the slaves.

On April 10, 1834, a fire broke out in the LaLaurie residence on Royal Street, starting in the kitchen. When the police and fire marshals got there, they found a seventy-year-old woman, the cook, chained to the stove by her ankle. She later confessed to them that she had set the fire as a suicide attempt for fear of her punishment, being taken to the uppermost room, because she said that anyone who had been taken there never came back. As reported in the New Orleans Bee of April 11, 1834, bystanders responding to the fire attempted to enter the slave quarters to ensure that everyone had been evacuated. Upon being refused the keys by the Lalauries, the bystanders broke down the doors to the slave quarters and found "seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated ... suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other", who claimed to have been imprisoned there for some months.

One of those who entered the premises was Judge Jean-Francois Canonge, who subsequently deposed to having found in the LaLaurie mansion, among others, a "negress ... wearing an iron collar" and "an old negro woman who had received a very deep wound on her head [who was] too weak to be able to walk." Canonge claimed that when he questioned Madame Lalaurie's husband about the slaves, he was told in an insolent manner that "some people had better stay at home rather than come to others' houses to dictate laws and meddle with other people's business."

A version of this story circulating in 1836, recounted by Martineau, added that the slaves were emaciated, showed signs of being flayed with a whip, were bound in restrictive postures, and wore spiked iron collars which kept their heads in static positions.

When the discovery of the tortured slaves became widely known, a mob of local citizens attacked the Lalaurie residence and "demolished and destroyed everything upon which they could lay their hands". A sheriff and his officers were called upon to disperse the crowd, but by the time the mob left, the Royal Street property had sustained major damage, with "scarcely any thing [remaining] but the walls." The tortured slaves were taken to a local jail, where they were available for public viewing. The New Orleans Bee reported that by April 12 up to 4,000 people had attended to view the tortured slaves "to convince themselves of their sufferings."

The Pittsfield Sun, citing the New Orleans Advertiser and writing several weeks after the evacuation of Lalaurie's slave quarters, claimed that two of the slaves found in the Lalaurie mansion had died since their rescue, and added: "We understand ... that in digging the yard, bodies have been disinterred, and the condemned well [in the grounds of the mansion] having been uncovered, others, particularly that of a child, were found." These claims were repeated by Martineau in her 1838 book Retrospect of Western Travel, where she placed the number of unearthed bodies at two, including the child.

Later life and death

Copper plate found in Saint Louis Cemetery #1, which claims that Lalaurie died in Paris in 1842 Lalaurie's life after the 1834 fire is not well documented. Martineau wrote in 1838 that Lalaurie fled New Orleans during the mob violence that followed the fire, taking a coach to the waterfront and travelling by schooner from there to Mobile, Alabama and then on to Paris.[19] Certainly by the time Martineau personally visited the Royal Street mansion in 1836 it was still unoccupied and badly damaged, with "gaping windows and empty walls".

The circumstances of Delphine Lalaurie's death are also unclear. George Washington Cable recounted in 1888 a then-popular but unsubstantiated story that Lalaurie had died in France in a boar-hunting accident. Whatever the truth, in the late 1930s, Eugene Backes, who served as sexton to St. Louis Cemetery #1 until 1924, discovered an old cracked, copper plate in Alley 4 of the cemetery. The inscription on the plate read: Madame Lalaurie, née Marie Delphine Maccarthy, décédée à Paris, le 7 Décembre, 1842, à l'âge de 6--.

According to the French archives of Paris, Marie Delphine Maccarthy died on 7 December of 1849

Recent History

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