Abel. Both Jeanne Louise and Peter were fair of complexion, with light brown hair and pale eyes.
Charlotte gave birth to two more boys before the death of her crippled husband. The gossip in the colonies named two different individuals as the fathers. Both these boys grew to manhood and emigrated to France. They used the name Fontenay.
Jeanne Louise went only by the name of Mayfair on all official documents, and though she married young to a dissolute and drunken husband, her lifelong companion was her brother, Peter, who never married. He died only hours before Jeanne Louise, in 1771. No one questioned the legality of her using the name Mayfair, but accepted her word that it was a family custom. Later, her only daughter, Angelique, was to do the same thing.
Charlotte wore the emerald necklace given her by her mother until she died. Thereafter Jeanne Louise wore it, and passed it on to her fifth child, Angelique, who was born in 1725. By the time this daughter was born, Jeanne Louise’s husband was mad and confined to “a small house” on the property, which from all descriptions seems to be the house in which Petyr was imprisoned years before.
It is doubtful that this man was the father of Angelique. And it seems reasonable, though by no means certain, that Angelique was the child of Jeanne Louise and her brother Peter.
Angelique called Peter her “Papa” in front of everyone, and it was said among the servants that she believed Peter was her father as she had never known the madman in the outbuilding, who was chained in his last years rather like a wild beast. It should be noted that the treatment of this madman was not considered cruel or unusual by those who knew the family.
It was also rumored that Jeanne Louise and Peter shared a suite of connecting bedrooms and parlors added to the old plantation house shortly after Jeanne Louise’s marriage.
Whatever gossip circulated about the secret habits of the family, Jeanne Louise wielded the same power over everyone that Charlotte had wielded, maintaining a hold upon her slaves through immense generosity and personal attention in an era that was famed for quite the opposite.
Jeanne Louise is described as an exceptionally beautiful woman, much admired and much sought after. She was never described as evil, sinister, or a witch. Those whom the Talamasca contacted during Jeanne Louise’s lifetime knew nothing of the family’s European origins.
Runaway slaves frequently came to Jeanne Louise to implore her intervention with a cruel master or mistress. She often bought such unfortunates, binding them to her with a fierce loyalty. She was a law unto herself at Maye Faire, and did execute more than one slave for treachery. However, the goodwill of her slaves towards her was well known.
Angelique was Jeanne Louise’s favorite child, and Angelique was devoted to her grandmother, Charlotte, and was with the old woman when she died.
A fierce storm surrounded Maye Faire on the night of Charlotte’s death, which did not abate till early morning, at which time one of Angelique’s brothers was found dead.
Angelique married a very handsome and rich planter by the name of Vincent St. Christophe in the year 1755, giving birth five years later to Marie Claudette Mayfair, who later married Henri Marie Landry and was the first of the Mayfair witches to come to Louisiana. Angelique also had two sons, one of whom died in childhood, and the second of whom, Lestan, lived into old age.
Every evidence indicates that Angelique loved Vincent St. Christophe and was faithful to him all their lives. Marie Claudette was also devoted to him and there seems no question that he was her father.
The pictures which we possess of Angelique show her to be not as beautiful as either her mother or her daughter, her features being smaller and her eyes being smaller. But she was nevertheless extremely attractive, with very curly dark brown hair, and was thought of as a beauty in her prime.
Marie Claudette was exceptionally beautiful, strongly resembling her handsome father Vincent St. Christophe as much as her mother. She had very dark hair and blue eyes, and was extremely small and delicate. Her husband, Henri Marie Landry, was also a good-looking man. In fact, it was said of the family by that time that they always married for beauty, and never for money or for love.
Vincent St. Christophe was a sweet, gentle soul who liked to paint pictures and play the guitar. He spent much time on a small lake built for him on the plantation, making up songs which he would later sing to Angelique. After his death Angelique had several lovers, but refused to remarry. This too was a pattern with the Mayfair women; they usually married once only, or only once with any success.
What characterizes the family through the lifetimes of Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angelique, and Marie Claudette is respectability, wealth, and power. Mayfair wealth was legendary within the Caribbean world, and those who entered into disputes with the Mayfairs met with violence often enough for there to be talk of it. It was said to be “unlucky” to fight with the Mayfair family.
The slaves regarded Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angelique, and Marie Claudette as powerful sorceresses. They came to them for the curing of illnesses; and they believed that their mistresses “knew” everything.
But there is scant evidence that anyone other than the slaves took these stories seriously. Or that the Mayfair Witches aroused either suspicion or “irrational” fear among their peers. The preeminence of the family remained completely unchallenged. People vied for invitations to Maye Faire. The family entertained often and lavishly. Both the men and the women were much sought after in the marriage market.
How much other members of the family understood about the power of the witches is uncertain. Angelique had both a brother and a sister who emigrated to France, and another brother, Maurice, who remained at home, having two sons-Louis-Pierre and Martin-who also married and remained part of the Saint-Domingue family. They later went to Louisiana with Marie Claudette. Maurice and his sons went by the name of Mayfair, as do their descendants in Louisiana to the present day.
Of Angelique’s six children, two girls died early, and two boys emigrated to France, the other, Lestan, going to Louisiana with his sister Marie Claudette.
The men of the family never attempted to claim the plantation or to control the money, though under French law they were entitled to do both. On the contrary, they tended to accept the dominance of the chosen women; and financial records as well as gossip indicate that they were enormously wealthy men.
Perhaps some compensation was paid to them for their submissiveness. Or perhaps they were accepting by nature. No tales of rebellion or quarrels have been passed on. The brother of Angelique who died during the storm on the night of Charlotte’s death was a young boy said to be kindly and acquiescent by nature. Her brother Maurice was known to be an agreeable, likable man, who participated in the management of the plantation.
Several descendants of those who emigrated to France during the 1700s were executed in the French Revolution. None of those emigrating before 1770 used the name Mayfair. And the Talamasca has lost track of these various lines.
During this entire period the family was Catholic. It supported the Catholic church in Saint-Domingue, and one son of Pierre Fontenay, Charlotte’s brother-in-law, became a priest. Two women in the family became Carmelite nuns. One was executed in the French Revolution, along with all the members of her community.
The money of the colonial family, during all these years as their coffee and sugar and tobacco poured into Europe and into North America, was frequently deposited in foreign banks. The degree of wealth was enormous even for the multimillionaires of Hispaniola, and the family seems always to have possessed quite fantastic amounts of gold and jewels. This is not at all typical of a planter family, whose fortunes are generally connected with the land and easily subject to ruin.
As a consequence the Mayfair family survived the Haitian revolution with enormous wealth, though all of its land holdings on the island were irretrievably lost.
It was Marie Claudette, who established the Mayfair legacy in 1789, right before the revolution that forced the family to leave Saint-Domingue. Her parents were by that time dead. The legacy was later enhanced and refined by Marie Claudette after she was settled in Louisiana, at which time she shifted a great portion of her money from banks in Holland and Rome to banks in London and in New York.
The legacy is an immensely complicated and quasi-legal series of arrangements, made largely through the banks holding the money, which establishes a fortune that cannot be manipulated by any one country’s inheritance laws. Essentially it conserves the bulk of the Mayfair money and property in the hands of one person in each generation, this heir to the fortune being designated by the living beneficiary, except that should the beneficiary die
