Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

However, notarial records exist stating that she was back living quietly in New Orleans by the late 1840s; for in 1849 she petitioned to manumit a middle-aged slave named Orestes. Every one of her detractors has made it clear that Delphine Lalaurie did have favorites among her slaves, notably the faithful coachman Bastien; and she is recorded to have manumitted another slave while living at the Royal Street house in 1832. Bastien the coachman was said to have been killed when, after driving Madame and her husband to safety at Lake Pontchartrain, he tried to return to the house and was torn apart by the mob. What Bastien thought of his mistress's activities in the attic, and why he attempted to return to the house can, of course, only be conjectured.

Too many modern cases exist of men who imprisoned one or several youths or girls in their homes or in improvised dugout cellars, over periods of months, as sex slaves or for purposes of torture, before killing them, for me to believe that Madame Lalaurie "couldn't" have done what it is alleged that she did.

Records from the 1840s also indicate that next door to the widow of N. L. Lalaurie in the Faubourg Marigny lived her two unmarried daughters. Most stories add that Madame Lalaurie was buried secretly in St. Louis #1 Cemetery, but no one knows the location of her grave.

Please remember, however, that this is a work of fiction, not a scholarly biography. I used the sources that were available to me and made the best decisions I could from what I read about what the situation and circumstances might have been like, if what the newspapers said was in fact true. If there is further information conclusively vindicating Delphine Lalaurie, I would be delighted to see it. I have tried above all to keep the flavor of place and time and not do violence to my source material.

The house that now stands at 1140 Royal Street in New Orleans has been so extensively rebuilt that very little remains of the original structure. When one of the McCarty plantations was subdivided into house lots, one of the streets was named Delphine Street and remains so to this day.

Barbara Hambly

July 1997

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles with two Pekingese, a cat, and another writer. She is at work on the fourth Benjamin January novel, Sent Down the River.