by Eva Pohler
“Let’s use the crowbar like a chisel,” Sue said. “We can hit it with another crowbar.”
“Take the camera.” Ellen handed the camera to Sue before rushing down the stairs to fetch another crowbar.
She ran through the rooms to the dining room, scared to be alone. Then she rushed up the stairs, breathing heavily, realizing she could move quickly when she needed to.
Tanya held one crowbar steady against the plywood while Ellen hammered against it with another, until they’d chipped a hole. Then they turned the crowbar around and pulled until they ripped a chunk of the subfloor up. It was somewhat damaged from water, so it came up easily, now that they had some leverage. They pulled up two more pieces when they came across a leather-bound book.
“Oh, my God!” Sue cried. “There it is!”
Tanya dropped her crowbar and took up the book. She opened it.
“Well?” Isabel asked.
Tears poured down Tanya’s cheeks as she smiled up at them. “This is it. The diary of Delphine Lalaurie.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Isabel asked.
“Read it,” Ellen said. “Try to find out where the devil child was buried.”
“We think he was called Charles,” Tanya said.
“And after that?” Isabel asked.
Tanya shrugged. “I guess we should give it to the local historical society.”
“That’s the right thing to do,” Isabel said. “But I’d like to read it, too, when you’re done.”
“Of course,” Sue said. “We’ll give it to you, since you helped us, and then you can turn it in.”
“Let’s take Isabel home,” Ellen said as she turned off the camera. “We can stop by an ATM machine on the way, to get her cash. Then we can come back and read the diary together.”
“Let’s go by Starbucks on the way back,” Sue said. “I need a latte with extra chocolate syrup to calm my nerves.”
When they returned, lattes in hand, they gathered in the living area of the guesthouse on Chartres, where Tanya translated, aloud, the pages of Delphine’s diary.
Chapter Sixteen: Delphine Lalaurie
August 30, 1834
Nothing went as planned.
Whether it was extreme agitation or a miscalculation, Rachel set the fire on Thursday morning, the tenth of April, while Louis and I were still finishing our breakfast in the dining room.
Perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps she was experimenting and did not intend for it to spread. Or, perhaps she meant to trap us all.
Regardless, her screams haunt me still.
Why did she not keep to our plan?
And then there was the insufferable Montreuil, whose part in the catastrophe only worsened the results. I should have counted on his interference.
How shocked I was when passengers aboard the Polish refused to return my smiles and salutations. They did not look me in the eyes, but I felt their stares on my back.
I have never in my life been treated so poorly. I count among those instances those days when I was but twelve, and Don Ramon seduced me. When my parents forced him to marry me, to protect my virtue; his parents accepted me with opened arms—even after Don Ramon was stripped of his office by the Spanish king. They loved me as a daughter, better than my own father.
Louis’s family are disrespectful to their son, to me, and to the children. They are cruel and ill-mannered, the sort of people who want to appear better than they are and yet insult those both above and below them in station.
To mourn is difficult enough. To be ostracized while in mourning is heartbreaking. I have been in tears since we landed, and my in-laws are no help to me with their rude comments.
Louis has gone to a hotel to escape his father. He left me and the children behind. If I never see him again, I shall be happier. But Jean Louis wants his father.
September 17, 1834
The rumors have spread to Paris. I have had to introduce myself with another name, to protect the children. The first name I thought of was D’Arcy.
I was devastated to learn that, while Louis managed to save his medical books and journals, the children’s and mine are gone. The diaries I have kept since I was a girl are no more.
I should not cry for my books when so many lives were destroyed that night—mine among them. I am so very low that I doubt I shall ever reach the light of day again.
Why did Rachel not keep to our plan?
September 30, 1834
My money has, at long last, arrived from De Lassus. How weary I had grown of meeting the steamships. The children and I have moved into better rooms on Rue Le Sage, outside of Paris. I am careful to introduce us as D’Arcy. Although the people are friendlier here, they are old and boring. The children and I have little to keep us occupied.
Since my diaries have turned to ash, I shall entertain myself by recounting much of what I had previously written. It helps to dwell on better days, when I was loved and respected in my own city.
My father and mother doted on me and gave me everything I wanted. My aunts, my uncles, and my cousins adored me. All but my father continued to love me through my ordeal with Don Ramon. My father never looked at me the same again.
Don Ramon was the new Spanish intende, who had just arrived from Spain after losing his wife to an outbreak of yellow fever. Although he was twice my age, he was youthful and full of charm and vitality. I found him to be extremely handsome. I was used to men giving me attention. I had learned to be polite but distant. Yet in the case of Don Ramon, I could not keep my distance. His dark eyes and curly black hair and beard, his strong, wiry form, and his husky laugh attracted me.
He had been drinking with the other officials at our home on the plantation, celebrating the start of a new year and a new century, the first time he kissed me. We met in secret many times at the parties of my family. I had never been happier until my mother caught us in the south garden on midsummer’s eve.
Don Ramon was apologetic to my parents and tender to me. When they insisted that we marry, he agreed, even though he knew he would not be granted permission from the king in time to satisfy my parents. Since two other officers had married without permission before us, he took a chance and was sorely disappointed when the king dismissed him from his office.
For years, he worked tirelessly to petition the king. During that time, I rarely saw him. Never again was our relationship like it had been in those first six months. Don Ramon worried constantly about money and position and had little time for his young bride. I continued to be the center of much attention among the friends of my parents, and many gentlemen continued to admire me even after I was wed. Sometimes, out of boredom, I let down my guard and admired them back, but I never went too far. I had learned the art of beguiling others while remaining respectable. It is a fine line to walk, indeed.
In the spring of ’04, when I learned I was pregnant, I made a journey to Spain to speak to the king on my husband’s behalf, believing the sight of Don Ramon’s pregnant wife might move the king to pardon my husband and reinstate his office. The night before I was to be presented to King Charles, I was kneeling in a courtyard of the Spanish palace praying for strength and favor from the Almighty, when the queen happened upon me. She told me that I made a lovely picture beneath the moonlight. She caressed my long, hair, which fell, unbound, to my waist, and kissed my cheeks, saying she would grant me whatever I came to ask. I told her my story. She said she would speak to the king on my behalf.
The next day, the king pardoned Don Ramon.
I immediately wrote to my husband, who was on his way to meet me in Havana. But fate prevented our happy reunion when his ship was caught in a storm, killing him and several other passengers and crew.
When I arrived in Havana to bury Don Ramon, I gave birth to our sweet and beautiful Borquita, named for his beloved grandmother, who was always kind to me. It was both a joyful and somber time for me, to give birth to a daughter and to bury a husband within a few days.
October
4, 1834
I met Jean Blanque at one of the parties my parents hosted for the dignitaries of Louisiana, before Don Ramon’s death. He was among the young officers and politicians who admired me and whom I deigned to admire back. In the year after my husband’s passing, Jean continued to admire me with some reserve and constraint, but his charms and good looks grew on me, and by the end of ’05, I was in love with him.
Whereas Don Ramon was tender and sensitive, lean and wiry, gentle with words, and constantly worried about money, Jean Blanque was the opposite. Jean was never tender, and his body was thick and massive. He had a boisterous, loud laugh that could bring a room into hysterics. Don Ramon found humor in the silly and ridiculous, but Jean Blanque found it in human foibles and at the expense of the weak. His dominance and authority were never questioned. His wit was sharp and cut deep, and I loved it. He proved a worthy opponent to my own sharp tongue. More than once we drew the attention of an audience with our banter.
Jean’s tall and broad frame added to the authority he wielded in any crowd. Whereas Don Ramon cupped my cheeks and gently caressed my lips with his, Jean Blanque grabbed me roughly, pressed his mouth hard to mine, and crushed me in his arms.
It was exhilarating.
Jean’s shrewd business dealings and his association with the pirates Pierre and Jean Laffite, who could obtain anything one might need from anywhere in the world, gave Jean a remarkable economic confidence. I did not worry that he might pursue me for the money I would inherit from my father, because he had more than enough of his own.
For three years, Jean and I kept our love affair a secret. When I turned twenty-two in 1808, he surprised me with a proposal, and we were married that same year. My sweet Borquita was nearly four years old.
My darling mother died within a year of my second marriage. Her loss was felt by the entire city. I was soon to learn that my mother’s responsibilities of hosting dignitaries fell to me.
Jean and I spent our time between two households—our charming Ville Blanque on the Mississippi River, and our stylish Royal Street brick house in the Vieux Carre. We had the most exotic soirees, in the vein of my parents, but even more spectacular because of Jean’s more colorful associates. Because we relied so heavily on their abilities to get us what we could not otherwise obtain, we happily ingratiated ourselves with them as readily as we would the highest dignitaries in the land.
Jean had a rule that all guests must put aside their stations and political differences to revel in the moment. Along with the lively sailors, we entertained the likes of Governor Claiborne, Commander Wilkinson, the Surveyor General Trudeau, Bosque, Marigny, Destrehan, Suave, Derbigny, Macarty, de la Ronde, Villere, and all the well-known leaders of the greatest city in America.
Except for the loss of my mother, those days were some of the best in my life. They were made ever more joyful by the birth of our children, who merged seamlessly into our grand lifestyle, with the help of our many slaves. Jeanne came first in 1810, before the slave revolt in Haiti. Laure was born a year later, just after that dreadful night when our great city saw its own slave revolt, and in which my beloved cousin, Francois, was killed. That marked the day Jean and I began to lock all but our most trusted slaves into their rooms at night, for fear they might kill us in our sleep.
For the next two or three years, Jean traveled more than I wished, and each time he returned home, we were embroiled in our passionate lovemaking, wishing less and less to share our time with the rest of society. Paulin was born in ’15, and a year later, Pauline. As an infant, she was perfect, and there was no sign of the deformity that would plague her in later years.
Within a year of Pauline’s birth, another epidemic of yellow fever struck Louisiana—the worst yet—and my strong, virile, irascible Jean was struck by it, too, turning him into a helpless infant until his death, six months later. It was a terrible time for me, but not the worst.
The worst was still to come.
October 15, 1834
We have taken rooms on the Rue St. Agnes, with the hope of better entertainment from gayer neighbors. The children had become restless and insufferable with their complaints of boredom. They and I dearly miss their older sisters.
Paulin and Pauline have already found friends nearby to keep them company, and even Jean Louis, when he is not at his lessons, has a playmate who comes to visit often. Only I am without companions. I have never felt so alone.
My loneliness reminds me of those days in the wake of my dearest Jean’s death. The world will never know a livelier, more boisterous character—of that, I am certain.
My father died nearly a year after Jean. I had just been to the governor’s house to emancipate my oldest slave, Jean Louis, who was well over fifty years of age and had been loyal and kind during his service to our household. I returned home to the awful news that Baba had died of heart failure.
I mourned the days when I was a child and my father had doted on me—before my marriage to Don Ramon. My father had never treated me kindly again, and it had left a hole in my heart.
His death brought me great fortune, however. This made me a desirable match in the eyes of the older unmarried men in my family’s circle. At thirty-one, I was still something of a beauty.
For four years, I kept them at bay, occupied by the marriage of my oldest daughter and by the birth of my first grandchild.
In 1825, when Pauline was ten years old, her deformity had long since made its appearance. She walked bent over, doomed, I feared, to become a lonely old hunchback. When I read Dr. Lalaurie’s notice in the Courier advertising a cure for hunches, a new hope blossomed in my chest for my sweet and gentle Pauline.
The first time I met Louis, I felt an instant attraction to him, perhaps because I saw him as my hope and savior. He was kind and gentle and very optimistic about Pauline’s treatment. She would need to undergo at least three operations over the course of a year, with long hospitalizations.
Louis and I began our affair not long after Pauline’s first operation. By the time Pauline had endured her final surgery, I was pregnant. I didn’t love Louis. Our relationship was formed by my gratitude and by his lust. But a pregnancy introduced a complication. My family would not tolerate the birth of a child outside of marriage.
The doctor had traveled to France when I realized my condition, so I went to his uncle and asked that he send a discreet message to his nephew as soon as possible. My scandalous condition disappointed my favorite aunt and uncle, and enough pressure was put on Louis by both my family and his to force him to return to New Orleans and marry me in June of ’28. A few months later, our son was born.
We were miserable from the beginning. By then, I was forty, and he but twenty-five and in the prime of his life. He had hoped to travel to different places to study and learn from other doctors and to try his treatments in many parts of the world. He was ambitious, and our marriage destroyed his dreams.
Although I maintained rights to my property and real estate, in case our marriage should not last, he took charge of my household as if he owned it and everything in it. He could be kind, gentle, and charming when he wanted to be, but when he was irritated, he took it out on everyone around him.
In the first year of our marriage, he was rarely at home, and when he was, we walked on pins and needles.
November 8, 1834
Reading back over what I have written, I recall the fun the children and I had in the weeks that Louis was away. Because we knew his arrival would mean we would once again be forced to walk the straight and narrow, we took advantage of his absence. We danced and ate and drank with the slaves, holding private parties for the household. Rachel taught us an African dance, and she and Devince entertained us with it for hours.
But by 1830, our little house parties ended when Louis opened his practice in our home—my home. I legally owned it. He promised it was temporary. He planned to have a new house built that would afford him a proper office. I told him I would agree to move and to invest in the e
state with him if he would agree to host the wonderful parties for which I was once quite famous in my days with Jean. Perhaps because he could not afford such a grand house on his own, he agreed.
Around this time, I was visited by Marie Laveau, a Voodoo practitioner who was acquainted with Louis, having supplied him with various tonics and powders to try on his patients. She came to me in desperation with a newborn baby who was grotesquely deformed. His skin resembled the scales of a tortoise, and his little eyes bulged. His nose was malformed. He looked like a monster. Marie Laveau called him a “devil child” and said the mother had died and the father had abandoned it to her care. But the baby continuously screamed in pain and would not eat from her breast (she had her own baby to nurse). She begged me to beseech the doctor to help the unfortunate child, for even if he was born of a demon, he himself was innocent.
Not wanting to turn my back on an innocent, and imagining it would not live long, I took the baby to Louis, where he was bent over his journal in his office. He seemed pleased for the opportunity to observe and practice on the rare condition. He gave the baby an injection to put him to sleep, and he studied the infant’s unusual deformities. I argued that the baby had a soul and must be baptized before he died, lest his soul remain in purgatory. I did not want my own soul besmudged by guilt and sin.
We called Father Antoine to our home for a private baptism, and the devil child was baptized “Charles” after Marie Laveau’s father. Louis and I stood in as the baby’s godparents.
Louis applied an ointment to the devil baby’s skin, which eased his pain for many hours. During that time, the child’s nose grew more normally, and he began to look less devil and more angelic—not quite normal, but the human features were visible. When he wasn’t in pain, the child cooed and gurgled and smiled, like any other baby. But the reprieve from his pain never lasted more than a few hours. The misery would overtake him, and he would scream until we reapplied the ointment and fed him a calming tonic. In addition to the ointment and tonic, the doctor performed many operations. The child surprised us every day that he thrived.