On April 10, 1834, fire broke out in the kitchen of a new three-story house at the corner of Royal and Hospital Streets in New Orleans. The people who came to put it out found the cook, an enslaved woman of about seventy, chained to the stove by her ankle. She told them she had set the fire herself, because she was about to be taken to the room at the top of the house, and nobody who went up there came back. The men who broke into the upper floor found what the New Orleans Bee, the city's French-language paper, reported the next day: seven enslaved people, "more or less horribly mutilated," chained in the attic. The house belonged to Marie Delphine Macarty Lalaurie.
She was one of the best-connected women in the city. Born into the Macarty family, one of the oldest Creole families of Louisiana, she had been widowed twice and in 1825 married a much younger physician, Dr. Leonard Louis Nicolas Lalaurie. In 1831 she bought the Royal Street lot in her own name and built the house, with attached quarters for the people she owned, and entertained there. In 1832 she went to court for a separation from her husband, testifying that he had beaten her in front of witnesses; he answered before a notary that his medical practice kept him in Plaquemines Parish most of the time.
The rescued seven were carried to the Cabildo, the old seat of government on Jackson Square, and the city came to look at them; the Bee put the crowd at four thousand. Over the following days a mob sacked the house and wrecked what the fire had left. Lalaurie was gone by then. She took her carriage out of the city, reached the coast and sailed for France, and she was never charged with anything. She died in Paris in 1849.
What had gone on in the house before the fire is harder to pin down than the legend suggests. The historian Carolyn Morrow Long, working from the archives, found that Lalaurie was investigated for cruelty as early as 1828; the court record of that inquiry has not survived, but there are receipts showing that she paid for legal services and sold several enslaved people afterward. The better-known story comes from the English writer Harriet Martineau, who visited New Orleans in 1836 and published what residents told her two years later. By her account a twelve-year-old girl named Leah, combing Lalaurie's hair, caught a snag; Lalaurie went after her with a whip, and the child fell or jumped from the roof to her death and was buried in the grounds. The inquiry that followed, Martineau wrote, found the Lalauries guilty of illegal cruelty and forced them to forfeit nine people, whom a relative quietly bought back for them. The same residents told her that the cook was kept chained to the stove and that Lalaurie beat her own daughters for trying to feed the others. This is hearsay collected after the fire, and it should be read as that.
The parish funeral registers are firmer ground. Between 1830 and 1834 they record twelve deaths of enslaved people at the Royal Street house, without causes. Among them are a cook and laundress named Bonne, who died on February 7, 1833, and her four children: Florence, who died at ten in February 1831; Leontine, at two, in August 1831; Juliette, at thirteen, two weeks after her mother; and Jules, at six, in May 1833. Nothing in the registers says how they died. A family of five dead within three years in one household is on the record all the same.
Much of what is now told about the house was added later. The torture chamber fitted with instruments, the surgical experiments and the victims in the dozens come largely from George Washington Cable's retelling in the 1880s and from the ghost tours of the twentieth century. The contemporary record supports the chained cook, the fire, the seven people found in the attic and the mutilation the Bee described, and the twelve deaths in the registers. It does not support a count beyond that, and no burial ground of victims has ever been identified. The number of people she killed is not known, and this entry does not give one.