Madame Lalaurie, Mistress of the Haunted House by Carolyn Morrow Long

Author:Carolyn Morrow Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida

Oil portrait of Jeanne Marie Céleste Forstall (born 1823), daughter of Placide Forstall and Borja López y Ángulo. A handwritten inscription on the mat identifies her as “Mrs. Henry A. Rathbone, neé Céleste Forstall, mother of Mrs. James DeBuys, neé Stella E. Rathbone, ‘Nanine.’” This image, along with the portrait of Madame Lalaurie and other portraits of Forstall, DeBuys, and Rathbone family members, was published in Herman de Bachellé Seebold's Old Louisiana Plantation Homes and Family Trees (1941). The portraits were photographed by H. J. Harvey's Studio, probably in the 1930s. The location of the original painting is unknown. (Courtesy of John Ellis.)

In 1858 Amanda filed for a separation from bed and board on the grounds that Paulin had struck her, and that she had “frequently been menaced, humiliated, and her feelings [had been] lacerated by the offensive language of her husband.” One of their quarrels was over Amanda's punishment of a young female slave; did Blanque see in his wife the same destructive tendencies that had caused his mother's downfall? Paulin was alleged to have stated in front of a witness that Amanda was “a bad woman,” and that “it was she who should be flogged rather than the slave.” The same witness testified that Paulin accused Amanda of “bringing men into his house…and making of it a bordello.” When reminded that he was addressing “the mother of his children,” he replied that she “had filled his house with bastards,” and denied being the father of the child that Amanda was carrying at the time. A servant who had been employed in the household testified that Blanque would “throw his wife against the bed…and call her bitch and whore.” Paulin Blanque did not contest these charges. The judge therefore ruled in favor of Amanda, and decreed that she would retain her dotal property and the house on Hospital Street.28 The 1860 census shows Paulin Blanque renting a room on Ursulines near Rampart, around the corner from the Forstalls. In 1868, at age fifty-three, he died of lung cancer at the Forstall home and was interred in the Forstall family tomb.29

After separating from her husband, Amanda Andry Blanque gradually slipped into poverty. She had initially derived a good income from renting out the Hospital Street house. But when she used this property as security for two loans and failed to make the required payments, her creditors took their claims to court and the house was seized and sold at a sheriff's auction. Amanda lost a property valued at $6,000, plus the $1,000 yearly rent, for a debt of $4,800.30

In later years Amanda lived in a series of rented dwellings in the downtown Creole faubourgs of Tremé, Marigny, and what is now the Bywater, moving every few years. By 1882 she was listed in the city directory as a seamstress. Her grandson Charles Gabriel Blanque, who sometimes shared her home, died at Charity Hospital of “accidental morphine poisoning.” The census for 1910 lists seventy-year-old “Armanda” Blanque, described as “feebleminded,” as an inmate at the Asylum of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

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