What Became of Madame LaLaurie

On the morning of April 10, 1834, a fire broke out in Delphine LaLaurie's mansion on Royal Street. People who came to help found enslaved people inside who had been starved, tortured and chained. When the sheriff made no arrest, a crowd gathered. LaLaurie's carriage burst out of the gate and raced to Lake Pontchartrain, where she boarded a schooner, and the mob sacked the house. She was never brought to justice. The building at 1140 Royal today is not the one she lived in: it was rebuilt after 1838, and has since been a school, a conservatory, apartments and a private home. What happened to her afterward is less certain. Paris records say she died there on December 7, 1849. Yet in the late 1930s a cracked copper plate turned up in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 with her name and a death date of 1842. Whether her body ever came home remains an open question.