The Lady's Flight.
The old Bayou Road saw a strange sight that afternoon. Down at its farther
end lay a little settlement of fishermen and Spanish moss gatherers,
pot-hunters, and shrimpers, around a custom-house station, a lighthouse,
and a little fort. There the people who drove out in carriages were in the
habit of alighting and taking the cool air of the lake, and sipping
lemonades, wines, and ices before they turned homeward again along the
crowded way that they had come. In after years the place fell into utter
neglect. The customs station was removed, the fort was dismantled, the gay
carriage people drove on the "New Shell Road" and its tributaries,
Bienville and Canal streets, Washington and Carrollton avenues, and sipped
and smoked in the twilights and starlights of Carrollton Gardens and the
"New Lake End." The older haunt, once so bright with fashionable
pleasure-making, was left to the sole illumination of "St. John Light" and
the mongrel life of a bunch of cabins branded Crabtown, and became, in
popular superstition at least, the yearly rendezvous of the voodoos. Then
all at once in latter days it bloomed out in electrical, horticultural,
festal, pyrotechnical splendor as "Spanish Fort," and the carriages all
came rolling back.
So, whenever you and----visit Spanish Fort and stroll along the bayou's
edge on the fort side, and watch the broad schooners glide out through the
bayou's mouth and into the open water, you may say: "Somewhere just along
this bank, within the few paces between here and yonder, must be where
that schooner lay, moored and ready to sail for Mandeville the afternoon
that Madame Lalaurie, fleeing from the mob," etc.
For on that afternoon, when the people surrounded the house, crying for
vengeance, she never lost, it seems, her cunning. She and her sleek black
coachman took counsel together, and his plan of escape was adopted. The
early afternoon dinner-hour of those times came and passed and the crowd
still filled the street, but as yet had done nothing. Presently, right in
the midst of the throng, her carriage came to the door according to its
well-known daily habit at that hour, and at the same moment the charming
Madame Lalaurie, in all her pretty manners and sweetness of mien, stepped
quickly across the sidewalk and entered the vehicle.
The crowd was taken all aback. When it gathered its wits the coach-door
had shut and the horses were starting. Then her audacity was understood.
"She is getting away!" was the cry, and the multitude rushed upon her.
"Seize the horses!" they shouted, and dashed at the bits and reins. The
black driver gave the word to his beasts, and with his coach whip lashed
the faces of those who sprung forward. The horses reared and plunged, the
harness held, and the equipage was off. The crowd went with it.
"Turn the coach over!" they cry, and attempt it, but fail. "Drag her out!"
They try to do it, again and again, but in vain; away it rattles! Away it
flashes! down Hospital street, past Bourbon, Dauphine, Burgundy, and the
Rampart, with the crowd following, yelling, but fast growing thin and
thinner.
"Stop her! Stop her! Stop that carriage! Stop that _carriage_!"
In vain! On it spins! Out upon the Bayou Road come the pattering hoofs and
humming wheels--not wildly driven, but just at their most telling
speed--into the whole whirling retinue of fashionable New Orleans out for
its afternoon airing. Past this equipage; past that one; past half a
dozen; a dozen; a score! Their inmates sit chatting in every sort of mood
over the day's sensation, when--what is this? A rush from behind, a whirl
of white dust, and--"As I live, there she goes now, on her regular drive!
What scandalous speed! and--see here! they are after her!" Past fifty gigs
and coaches; past a hundred; around this long bend in the road; around
that one. Good-bye, pursuers! Never a chance to cut her off, the swamp
forever on the right, the bayou on the left; she is getting away, getting
away! the crowd is miles behind!
The lake is reached. The road ends. What next? The coach dashes up to the
bayou's edge and stops. Why just here? Ah! because just here so near the
bayou's mouth a schooner lies against the bank. Is Dr. Lalaurie's hand in
this? The coachman parleys a moment with the schooner-master and hands him
down a purse of gold. The coach-door is opened, the lady alights, and is
presently on the vessel's deck. The lines are cast off, the great sails go
up, the few lookers-on are there without reference to her and offer no
interruption; a little pushing with poles lets the wind fill the canvas,
and first slowly and silently, and then swiftly and with a grateful
creaking of cordage and spars, the vessel glides out past the lighthouse,
through the narrow opening, and stands away towards the northern horizon,
below which, some thirty miles away, lies the little watering-place of
Mandeville with roads leading as far away northward as one may choose to
fly. Madame Lalaurie is gone!
The brave coachman--one cannot help admiring the villain's
intrepidity--turned and drove back towards the city. What his plan was is
not further known. No wonder if he thought he could lash and dash through
the same mob again. But he mistook. He had not reached town again when the
crowd met him. This time they were more successful. They stopped the
horses--killed them. What they did with the driver is not told; but one
can guess. They broke the carriage into bits. Then they returned to the
house.
They reached it about 8 o'clock in the evening. The two daughters had
just escaped by a window. The whole house was locked and barred;
"hermetically sealed," says "L'Abeille" of the next morning. The human
tempest fell upon it, and "in a few minutes," says "The Courier," "the
doors and windows were broken open, the crowd rushed in, and the work of
destruction began." "Those who rush in are of all classes and colors"
continues "The Courier" of next day; but "No, no!" says a survivor of
to-day who was there and took part; "we wouldn't have allowed that!" In a
single hour everything movable disappeared or perished. The place was
rifled of jewelry and plate; china was smashed; the very stair-balusters
were pulled piece from piece; hangings, bedding and table linen were
tossed into the streets; and the elegant furniture, bedsteads, wardrobes,
buffets, tables, chairs, pictures, "pianos," says the newspaper, were
taken with pains to the third-story windows, hurled out and
broken--"smashed into a thousand pieces"--upon the ground below. The very
basements were emptied, and the floors, wainscots, and iron balconies
damaged as far as at the moment they could be. The sudden southern
nightfall descended, and torches danced in the streets and through the
ruined house. The débris was gathered into hot bonfires, feather-beds were
cut open, and the pavements covered with a thick snow of feathers. The
night wore on, but the mob persisted. They mounted and battered the roof;
they defaced the inner walls. Morning found them still at their senseless
mischief, and they were "in the act of pulling down the walls when the
sheriff and several citizens interfered and put an end to their work."
It was proposed to go at once to the houses of others long suspected of
like cruelties to their slaves. But against this the highest gentility of
the city alertly and diligently opposed themselves. Not at all because of
sympathy with such cruelties. The single reason has its parallel in our
own day. It was the fear that the negroes would be thereby encouraged to
seek by violence those rights which their masters thought it not expedient
to give them. The movement was suppressed, and the odious parties were
merely warned that they were watched.
Madame Lalaurie, we know by notarial records, was in Mandeville ten days
after, when she executed a power of attorney in favor of her New Orleans
business agent, in which act she was "authorized and assisted by her
husband, Louis Lalaurie." So he disappears.
His wife made her way to Mobile--some say to the North--and thence to
Paris. Being recognized and confronted there, she again fled. The rest of
her story is tradition, but comes very directly. A domestic in a Creole
family that knew Madame Lalaurie--and slave women used to enjoy great
confidence and familiarity in the Creole households at times--tells that
one day a letter from Prance to one of the family informed them that
Madame Lalaurie, while spending a season at Pau, had engaged with a party
of fashionable people in a boar-hunt, and somehow meeting the boar while
apart from her companions had been set upon by the infuriated beast, and
too quickly for any one to come to her rescue had been torn and killed. If
this occurred after 1836 or 1837 it has no disagreement with Harriet
Martineau's account, that at the latter date Madame Lalaurie was supposed
to be still "skulking about some French province under a false name."
The house remained untouched for at least three years, "ornamented with
various writings expressive of indignation and just punishment." The
volume of "L'Abeille" containing this account seems to have been
abstracted from the city archives. It was in the last week of April or the
first week of May, 1836, that Miss Martineau saw the house. It "stands,"
she wrote about a year later, "and is meant to stand, in its ruined state.
It was the strange sight of its gaping windows and empty walls, in the
midst of a busy street, which excited my wonder, and was the cause of my
being told the story the first time. I gathered other particulars
afterwards from eye-witnesses."
So the place came to be looked upon as haunted. In March, 1837, Madame
Lalaurie's agent sold the house to a man who held it but a little over
three months and then sold it at the same price that he had paid--only
fourteen thousand dollars. The notary who made the earlier act of sale
must have found it interesting. He was one of those who had helped find
and carry out Madame Lalaurie's victims. It did not change hands again for
twenty-five years. And then--in what state of repair I know not--it was
sold at an advance equal to a yearly increase of but six-sevenths of one
per cent, on the purchase price of the gaping ruin sold in 1837. There is
a certain poetry in notarial records. But we will not delve for it now.
Idle talk of strange sights and sounds crowded out of notice any true
history the house may have had in those twenty-five years, or until war
had destroyed that slavery to whose horridest possibilities the gloomy
pile, even when restored and renovated, stood a ghost-ridden monument. Yet
its days of dark romance were by no means ended.