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.
That history began in the first year or two of the century, when the Baron de Pontalba, a stanch old Bonapartist who did as he pleased, did it with exceptionally good taste and built this mansion. Soft ground or no soft ground, the Pontalbas were a vigorous family, who, when they wanted houses, built them. Gossip said the Baron and his daughter-in-law never got on well together. There may have been some truth in it, for years later they found the Baron dead in his room at Mont l’Eveque, and daughter-in-law in her own room badly wounded by pistol shots. True, however, to the tradition of hardihood which ran in the family, she recovered, and lived through the Franco-Prussian War, carrying the bullets in her body to her grave.
The Baron had earnestly advised Napoleon to sell Louisiana to Jefferson. Oddly enough, the Purchase which he advocated brought about a change in New Orleans which attacked the very identity of such families as the Pontalbas. An invasion of uncultured Americans from the north swept down the valley, settled in the city, and beat against the social barriers of the French and Spanish circles in the vieux carré. Hitherto they had dictated the life of the city, and it was disturbing to those who dated from the “filles de la cassette” and the grandees of the Spanish Main to contemplate this immigration of a new race, unancestored and, from a Latin standpoint, uncivilized. It was more than disturbing, it was electro-chemical, and although there was at first little fraternity between the races, it produced shortly a lively society.
The Duke of Saxe-Weimar is responsible for an interesting picture of its customs and habits in 1825. During a visit to New Orleans he was entertained at the home of a famous gambler, the Baron de Marigny (he who had entertained the princes of Orleans in ’98), where he admired, not without cause, a set of chinaware decorated with portraits of the French royal family and its palaces. The winter was gay, and he made the rounds of dances, masques and theatres. He frequented coffee-houses, he danced with the ladies, whom he found “very pretty, with a genteel French air,” and when “the gentlemen, who were far behind the ladies in elegance, did not long remain, but hastened away to other balls,” he was among those also-hastening, for the naughty young gentlemen were on their way to a quadroon ball. On another occasion he called upon the august lawyer Grymes, who figured prominently in the notorious case of Salome Mueller, a white slave-girl. Grymes was a “foremost citizen” in that society, so was Miller, Salome’s claimant, who probably knew she was white and therefore entitled to freedom. A foremost citizen, even in our own enlightened and prohibited day, can do no wrong—if he has the right lawyer. The Duke found the city magnificent in her unbridled emotion, charming in her graces, attractive if perverse in her ethics, and altogether capable of making a stranger’s head spin.
Thus, when there came to New Orleans in 1825 a benevolent middle-aged gentleman of France, the Marquis de Lafayette, the city gave him a superlative welcome. In the light of recent Franco-American exchanges it is pleasant to think of him as the recipient of every token of hospitality the city could offer, from triumphal arches to dinners of state. It suits our specific purpose to watch him chatting in the drawing-room of the Pontalba house, to peep through the shutters of the great windows and see the street below filled with bobbing lanterns of the crowd that has collected to see the great man step into his carriage, to turn back again into the drawing-room and see that he has no intention of leaving, for he is the center of a sparkle of wit that matches the crystal chandelier for brilliance. Here he discoursed, up yonder he passed the night. With his departure in the morning, the chronicled glory of the house ends, and its tragedy begins.
Among the old court records there is an entry which establishes the fact that at the height of the interesting social period marked by Lafayette’s visit the Pontalba house changed hands. On August 30, 1831, it was bought by Madame McCarty-Lopez-Blanque-Lalaurie, a woman of more than ordinary magnetism and the wife of Dr. Louis Lalaurie. Her establishment was quite up to the standards of Créole society. The touch of her expert hand was evident in the decoration of the house, and the choice and disposition of the furniture and paintings were a compliment to her taste. Her ten slaves were more than enough to care for its needs. She drove out along the Bayou road of an afternoon behind fine horses, her coachman was coveted as a correct and desirable servant. What the world calls fine people came to her house with as keen an appetite for the intellectual cocktails of the hostess as for the creature hospitality they anticipated at her table.
Like most ladies of social pursuits she had pronounced likes and dislikes, and she got herself talked about. Being a pure-blood Créole she resented the nouveau-riche American invasion of the city. “Let them come,” she said. “There are some things they cannot buy”—and her good opinion was one, her invitations another. Some of “them” resented the fact that they would never be bidden to enter the deep-arched vestibule, nor see the ponderous door swing wide to them as guests, nor ascend the graceful winding stair. So they railed, and Madame Lalaurie tossed her head. They muttered unpleasant things, and she sniffed. Then they cried scandal, to which she was deaf.
A susceptible young Créole attached to the office of the district attorney was sent one day to call upon Madame Lalaurie and to bring to her attention the annoying rumor that she had been unkind to her slaves. He went away with his copy of Article XX of the Old Black Code unrecited, and his addled young head full of impatience that such slander could have been perpetrated against a person so obviously kindly as Madame Lalaurie had just shown herself to be. He had been, in fact, charmed, and he admitted it.
There is no telling how long the matter might have carried on if it had not been for a chance glimpse through a window. The unsubstantiated scandal persisted. But there happened to be a small staircase window in a neighbor’s house which gave on Madame Lalaurie’s courtyard, and which commanded not only the screened courtyard-galleries of the house itself but those of the slave quarters, which stood at right angles to the house.
The neighbor was going upstairs when she heard a piercing shriek. From the window she saw a little negro girl fly screaming across the courtyard, with Madame Lalaurie in close pursuit, the lady armed with a whip. Into the shelter of the house fled the child, then out again upon the lower latticed balcony. Although the neighbor could not penetrate the lattice, she followed the progress of the chase by a crescendo of terrified cries, as the child raced up the outside stairs to the next gallery, then to the next. In a moment she emerged upon the roof, her last frantic bid for sanctuary. There were seven different angles of pitch to that roof, and it was covered with shiny tiles. The child slipped, clutched, fell to the courtyard and was killed.
Madame Lalaurie buried her that night in a shallow grave in the courtyard. The neighbor saw that, too. Then, and not until then, she reported the whole episode. The authorities came and found the grave, corroborated the story, and punished Madame Lalaurie by selling all her slaves. The purchasers were her relatives, and she promptly bought all her slaves right back.
“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.
The shell of the house stood abject and battered for a number of years, its broken windows telling its ugly story to all who came that way. On a moonlight night an impressionable girl passing the house could readily have seen the ghost of a woman’s form leaning imploringly from the belvedere—one girl did see it, and not even her later confession that the ghost was a fabric of moonbeams has been sufficient to rid the building of its name—The Haunted House. 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 easily banished. We shall hear one more story—a brief one—and then we may judge.
The war came and passed and left New Orleans dominated politically by those who had been their slaves. The pendulum swung so far to the extreme that a public school for both white and black children was ordained and, by coincidence or cunning design, was established in the Haunted House. It was of course an unfortunate move, and served no purpose except to whet racial antagonism. There came, finally, the breaking point. A white political organization which had been recuperating in strength sent a delegation one afternoon to call at the school. They were met by the teachers, to whom they issued a command to muster the school for roll-call. One of the pupils, a girl of exceptional beauty, heard the commotion from the upper hall, and peering over the banisters realized the significance of the roll-call—that the white pupils were to be segregated from the black. She leaned far over, to catch every word, when a shell comb fell from her hair and shattered on the marble floor below. She burst into tears and fled to an upper room.
The roll-call ended. All pupils who had negro blood were ordered from the house. When the slight flurry had subsided, and the delegation had left, the principal and one of the teachers found Marguerite upstairs in a paroxysm of grief. “The comb was my mother’s,” she sobbed, and when the teacher tried to comfort her, became hysterical. The principal drew the teacher outside. “It is not on account of the comb,” she said. “Marguerite’s mother was an octoroon; she married a white sea-captain. He loved her so much that in order to marry her he opened his wrist and let a few drops of her blood into his own, so that he might swear that he had African blood in his veins and get a marriage license. Only Marguerite and I and one or two others knew her story—and no one would have suspected, for she is so beautiful. She is engaged to be married, and her fiancé didn’t know. But the roll-call—now she will leave school, and he must learn of it.”
Which was the greater tragedy—the brutality of slave torture, or the death of the exquisite school-girl’s romance? It may be you will find the answer from the ghost, if ten years of children’s lessons, and the arpeggios and trills of a conservatory of music, and subsequent vapors of lodging-house cooking have not frightened the ghost herself away. Go and see. Far and down in the old quarter of New Orleans, where Hospital Street meets Royal, you will scarcely hear the drone of the modern city at work. In the vieux carré one may converse easily with ghosts. You will find no answer here.