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The servants’ quarters–but where are the servants?

Madame’s answers are witty but evasive. “Never mind them now–save the valuables!”

Somebody touches Judge Canonge–“Those servants are chained and locked up and liable to perish.”

“Where?”

“In the garret rooms.”

He hurries towards them, but fails to reach them, and returns, driven back and nearly suffocated by the smoke. He looks around him–this is no sketch of the fancy; we have his deposition sworn before a magistrate next day–and sees some friends of the family. He speaks to them:

“I am told”–so and so–“can it be? Will you speak to Monsieur or to Madame?” But the friends repulse him coldly.

He turns and makes fresh inquiries of others. He notices two gentlemen near him whom he knows. One is Montreuil. “Here, Montreuil, and you, Fernandez, will you go to the garret and search? I am blind and half smothered.” Another–he thinks it was Felix Lefebre–goes in another direction, most likely towards the double door between the attics of the house and wing. Montreuil and Fernandez come back saying they have searched thoroughly and found nothing. Madame Lalaurie begs them, with all her sweetness, to come other ways and consider other things. But here is Lefebre. He cries, “I have found some of them! I have broken some bars, but the doors are locked!”

Judge Canonge hastens through the smoke. They reach the spot.

“Break the doors down!” Down come the doors. The room they push into is a “den.” They bring out two negresses. One has a large heavy iron collar at the neck and heavy irons on her feet. The fire is subdued now, they say, but the search goes on. Here is M. Guillotte; he has found another victim in another room. They push aside a mosquito-net and see a negro woman, aged, helpless, and with a deep wound in the head.

Some of the young men lift her and carry her out.

Judge Canonge confronts Doctor Lalaurie again:

“Are there slaves still in your garret, Monsieur?” And the doctor “replies with insulting tone that ‘There are persons who would do much better by remaining at home than visiting others to dictate to them laws in the quality of officious friends.'”

The search went on. The victims were led or carried out. The sight that met the public eye made the crowd literally groan with horror and shout with indignation. “We saw,” wrote the editor of the “Advertiser” next day, “one of these miserable beings. The sight was so horrible that we could scarce look upon it. The most savage heart could not have witnessed the spectacle unmoved. He had a large hole in his head; his body from head to foot was covered with scars and filled with worms! The sight inspired us with so much horror that even at the moment of writing this article we shudder from its effects. Those who have seen the others represent them to be in a similar condition.” One after another, seven dark human forms were brought forth, gaunt and wild-eyed with famine and loaded with irons, having been found chained and tied in attitudes in which they had been kept so long that they were crippled for life.

It must have been in the first rush of the inside throng to follow these sufferers into the open air and sunlight that the quick-witted Madame Lalaurie clapped to the doors of her house with only herself and her daughters–possibly the coachman also–inside, and nothing but locks and bars to defend her from the rage of the populace. The streets under her windows–Royal street here, Hospital yonder–and the yard were thronged. Something by and by put some one in mind to look for buried bodies. There had been nine slaves besides the coachman; where were the other two? A little digging brought their skeletons to light–an adult’s out of the soil, and the little child’s out of the “condemned well”; there they lay. But the living seven–the indiscreet crowd brought them food and drink in fatal abundance, and before the day was done two more were dead. The others were tenderly carried–shall we say it?–to prison;–to the calaboose. Thither “at least two thousand people” flocked that day to see, if they might, these wretched sufferers.