The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,244

then could not bring a halt to the confusion. He went out, shut the door on the little storm, and sank into helpless laughter. There is also an isolated story, dependent upon one witness, that Julien murdered one of his boyhood tutors.

None of the Mayfairs up to this period attended any regular school. But all were well educated privately. Julien was no exception, having several tutors during his youth. One of these, a handsome Yankee from Boston, was found drowned in a bayou near Riverbend, and it was said that Julien strangled him and threw him in the water. Again, this was never investigated, and the entire Mayfair family was indignant at this gossip. Servants who spread the story at once retracted it.

This Boston schoolteacher had been a great source of information about the family. He gossiped continuously about Marguerite’s strange habits, and about how the slaves feared her. It is from him that we gained our descriptions of her bottles and jars full of strange body parts and objects. He claimed to have fought off advances from Marguerite. Indeed, so vicious and unwise was his gossip that more than one person warned the family about it.

Whether Julien did kill the man cannot be known, but if he did, he had—given the attitudes of the day—at least some reason.

Julien was said to give out foreign gold coins as if they were copper pennies. Waiters at the fashionable restaurants vied with one another to serve his table. He was a fabled horseman and maintained several horses of his own, as well as two carriages and teams in his stables near to First Street.

Even into old age, he often rode his chestnut mare all the way up St. Charles Avenue to Carrolton and back in the morning. He would toss coins to the black children whom he passed.

After his death, four different witnesses claimed to have seen his ghost riding through the mist on St. Charles Avenue, and these stories were printed in the newspapers of the period.

Julien was also a great supporter of the Mardi Gras, which began as we know it today around 1872. He entertained lavishly at the First Street house during the Mardi Gras season.

It was also said countless times that Julien had the gift of “bilocation,” that is, he could be in two places at the same time. This story was widely circulated among the servants. Julien would appear to be in the library, for instance, but then would be sighted almost immediately in the back garden. Or a maidservant servant would see Julien go out the front door, and then turn around to see him coming down the stairway.

More than one servant quit working in the First Street house rather than cope with the “strange Monsieur Julien.”

It has been speculated that appearances of Lasher might have been responsible for this confusion. Whatever the case, later descriptions of Lasher’s clothes bear a remarkable resemblance to those worn by Julien in two different portraits. Lasher as cited throughout the twentieth century is invariably dressed as Julien might have been dressed in the 1870s and 1880s.

Julien stuffed handfuls of bills into the pockets of the priests who came to call or the visiting Little Sisters of the Poor or other such persons. He gave lavishly to the parish church, and to every charitable fund whose officials approached him. He often said that money didn’t matter to him. Yet he was a tireless accumulator of wealth.

We know that he loved his mother, Marguerite, and though he did not spend much time in her company, he purchased books for her all the time in New Orleans, and ordered them for her from New York and Europe. Only once did a quarrel between them attract attention and that was over Katherine’s marriage to Darcy Monahan, at which time Marguerite struck Julien several times in front of the servants. By all accounts he was deeply emotionally hurt and simply withdrew, in tears, from his mother’s company.

After the death of Julien’s wife, Suzette, Julien spent less time than ever at Riverbend. His children were brought up entirely at First Street. Julien, who had always been a debonair figure, took a more active role in society. Long before that, however, he appeared at the opera and the theater with his little niece (or daughter) Mary Beth. He gave many charity balls and actively supported young amateur musicians, presenting them in small private concerts in the double parlor at First Street.

Julien not only made huge profits