ir masters thought it not expedient
to give them. The movement was suppressed, and the odious parties were
merely warned that they were watched.

Madame Lalaurie, we know by notarial records, was in Mandeville ten days
after, when she executed a power of attorney in favor of her New Orleans
business agent, in which act she was "authorized and assisted by her
husband, Louis Lalaurie." So he disappears.

His wife made her way to Mobile--some say to the North--and thence to
Paris. Being recognized and confronted there, she again fled. The rest of
her story is tradition, but comes very directly. A domestic in a Creole
family that knew Madame Lalaurie--and slave women used to enjoy great
confidence and familiarity in the Creole households at times--tells that
one day a letter from Prance to one of the family informed them that
Madame Lalaurie, while spending a season at Pau, had engaged with a party
of fashionable people in a boar-hunt, and somehow meeting the boar while
apart from her companions had been set upon by the infuriated beast, and
too quickly for any one to come to her rescue had been torn and killed. If
this occurred after 1836 or 1837 it has no disagreement with Harriet
Martineau's account, that at the latter date Madame Lalaurie was supposed
to be still "skulking about some French province under a false name."

The house remained untouched for at least three years, "ornamented with
various writings expressive of indignation and just punishment." The
volume of "L'Abeille" containing this account seems to have been
abstracted from the city archives. It was in the last week of April or the
first week of May, 1836, that Miss Martineau saw the house. It "stands,"
she wrote about a year later, "and is meant to stand, in its ruined state.
It was the strange sight of its gaping windows and empty walls, in the
midst of a busy street, which excited my wonder, and was the cause of my
being told the story the first time. I gathered other particulars
afterwards from eye-witnesses."

So the place came to be looked upon as haunted. In March, 1837, Madame
Lalaurie's agent sold the house to a man who held it but a little over
three months and then sold it at the same price that he had paid--only
fourteen thousand dollars. The notary who made the earlier act of sale
must have found it interesting. He was one of those who had helped find
and carry out Madame Lalaurie's victims. It did not change hands again for
twenty-five ye