Delphine La Laurie - Later Life and Death

Later Life and Death

LaLaurie's life after the 1834 fire is not well documented. Martineau wrote in 1838 that LaLaurie fled New Orleans during the mob violence that followed the fire, taking a coach to the waterfront and travelling by schooner from there to Mobile, Alabama and then on to Paris. Certainly by the time Martineau personally visited the Royal Street mansion in 1836 it was still unoccupied and badly damaged, with "gaping windows and empty walls".

The circumstances of Delphine LaLaurie's death are also unclear. George Washington Cable recounted in 1888 a then-popular but unsubstantiated story that LaLaurie had died in France in a boar-hunting accident. Whatever the truth, in the late 1930s, Eugene Backes, who served as sexton to St. Louis Cemetery #1 until 1924, discovered an old cracked, copper plate in Alley 4 of the cemetery. The inscription on the plate read: "Madame LaLaurie, née Marie Delphine Macarty, décédée à Paris, le 7 Décembre, 1842, à l'âge de 6--."