Madame LaLaurie Exposed (1834)
In 1834, a fire broke out at the LaLaurie mansion kitchen. Common lore has it that a seventy-year-old slave set the fire to draw attention to her plight, so desperate to escape that she was willing to risk death. Crowds gathered outside the mansion to watch the flames. When officials searched the house, they found, as reported in the French newspaper at the time, “seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated.” Word of Madame LaLaurie’s sadism trickled through the neighborhood. A mob surrounded the LaLaurie mansion, destroying what was left after the fire, but the sadistic Madame escaped. She was an outcast in New Orleans society. In a society that supported the ownership of human beings, she went too far even for them. Nobody knows what happened to Madame LaLaurie after her escape is undocumented; rumor has it she fled to Paris and died in 1842.