Description

University Press of Florida [Published Date: 2012]. Hardcover, 258 pp. First printing (with full number line). Good+ in good+ dust jacket. Red cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Light damp-staining to end-papers and half-title page (looks like a water spill). Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and light creasing and wrinkling to edges. Red damp-staining from water on back side of jacket as well. NOT price clipped Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] The legend of Madame Delphine Lalaurie, a wealthy society matron and accused slave torturer, has haunted New Orleans for nearly two hundred years. Her macabre tale is frequently retold, and her French Quarter mansion has been referred to as the most haunted house in the city. Rumors that Lalaurie abused her slaves were already in circulation when fire broke out in the kitchen and slave quarters of her home in 1834. Bystanders intent on rescuing anyone still inside forced their way past Lalaurie and her husband into the burning service wing. Once inside, they discovered seven wretched negroes starved, chained, and mutilated. The crowd's temper quickly shifted from concern to outrage, assuming that the Lalauries had been willing to allow their slaves to perish in the flames rather than risk discovery of the horrific conditions in which they were kept. Forced to flee the city, Delphine Lalaurie's guilt went unquestioned during her lifetime, and tales of her actions have become increasingly fanciful and grotesque over the decades. Stories of perverted tortures, of burying slaves alive, of cutting off their limbs have continued to plague her legacy. A meticulous researcher of New Orleans history, Carolyn Long disentangles the threads of fact and legend that have intertwined over the decades. Was Madame Lalaurie a sadistic abuser? Mentally ill? Or merely the victim of an unfair and sensationalist press? Using carefully documented eyewitness testimony, archival documents, and family letters, Long recounts Lalaurie's life from legal troubles before the fire through the scandal of her exile to France to her death in Paris in 1849...