A French Colonial House That Outlasted Two Fires

Behind a plain board facade at 632 Dumaine Street stands one of the oldest houses in the French Quarter. It was completed in 1788 for Manuel de Lanzos, a Spanish officer, after the Good Friday fire of that year burned what stood here, and it came through the city's second great fire, in 1794, unscathed. Its builder, the American contractor Robert Jones, was told to reuse the brick and iron hardware that survived. The style was already old-fashioned when it went up: a French colonial raised cottage, with a full-height brick ground floor, a timber-framed living floor above, a deep gallery and a broad hipped roof, and a courtyard with a kitchen and slave quarters behind. The name comes from fiction. George Washington Cable's story "Tite Poulette" gave a house like this to a character called Madame John, and the label stuck to the real building. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970 and belongs to the Louisiana State Museum.