Katherine never voluntarily returned to the First Street house. It reminded her too much of Darcy. When in old age she was forced to return, it unsettled her mind; and at the turn of the century she became a tragic figure, eternally dressed in black, and roaming the gardens in search of Darcy.
Of all the Mayfair Witches studied to date, Katherine was perhaps the weakest and the least significant. Her children Clay and Vincent were both entirely respectable and unremarkable. Clay and Vincent married early and had large families, and their descendants now live in New Orleans.
What we know seems to indicate that Katherine was “broken” by Darcy’s death. And is thereafter never described as anything but “sweet” and “gentle” and “patient.” She never took part in the management of Riverbend, but left it all to Julien, who eventually put it in the hands of Clay and Vincent Mayfair and of paid overseers.
Katherine spent more and more of her time with her mother, Marguerite, who had become with each decade ever more peculiar. A visitor in the 1880s describes Marguerite as “quite impossible,” a crone who went about night and day in stained white lace, and spent hours reading aloud in a horrid unmodulated voice in her library. She is said to have insulted people carelessly and at random. She was fond of her niece Angeline (Remy’s daughter) and of Katherine. She constantly mistook Katherine’s children Clay and Vincent for their uncles, Julien or Remy. Katherine was described as gray-haired and worn, and always at work on her embroidery.
Katherine seems to have been a strict Catholic in later life. She went to daily Mass at the parish church and lavish christening parties were held for all of Clay’s children and Vincent’s children.
Marguerite did not die until she was ninety-two, at which time Katherine was sixty-one years old.
But other than the tales of incest, which characterize the Mayfair history since the time of Jeanne Louise and Pierre, there are no occult stories about Katherine.
The black servants, slave or free, were never afraid of Katherine. There are no sightings of any mysterious dark-haired lover. And there is no evidence to indicate that Darcy Monahan died of anything but plain old yellow fever.
It has even been speculated by the members of the Talamasca that Julien was actually “the witch” of this entire period-that perhaps no other natural medium was presented in this generation of the family, and as Marguerite grew old, Julien began to exhibit the power. It has also been speculated that Katherine was a natural medium but that she rejected her role when she fell in love with Darcy, and that is why Julien was so against her marriage, for Julien knew the secrets of the family.
Indeed, we have an abundance of information to suggest that Julien was a witch, if not the witch of the Mayfair family.
It is therefore imperative that we study Julien in some detail. As late as the 1950s, fascinating information about Julien was recounted to us. At some point, the history of Julien must be enlarged through further investigation and further collation and examination of the existing documents. Our reports on the Mayfairs throughout these decades are voluminous and repetitive. And there are numerous public and recorded mentions of Julien, and there are three oil portraits of him in American museums, and one in London.
Julien’s black hair turned completely white while he was still quite young, and his numerous photographs as well as these oil paintings show him to be a man of considerable presence and charm, as well as physical beauty. Some have said that he resembled his opera singer father, Tyrone Clifford McNamara.
But it has struck some members of the Talamasca that Julien strongly resembled his ancestors Deborah Mayfair and Petyr van Abel, who of course in no way resembled each other. Julien seems a remarkable combination of these two forebears. He has Petyr’s height, profile, and blue eyes, and Deborah’s delicate cheekbones and mouth. His expression in several of his portraits is amazingly like that of Deborah.
It is as if the nineteenth-century portraitist had seen the Rembrandt of Deborah-which was of course impossible as it has always been in our vault-and consciously sought to imitate the “personality” captured by Rembrandt. We can only assume that Julien evinced that personality. It is also worth noting that in most of his photographs, in spite of the somber pose and other formal aspects of the work, Julien is smiling.
It is a “Mona Lisa” smile, but it is nevertheless a smile, and strikes a bizarre note since it is wholly out of keeping with nineteenth-century photographic conventions. Five tintypes of Julien in our possession show the same subtle little smile. And smiles in tintypes of this era are completely unknown. It is as if Julien found “picture taking” amusing. Photographs taken near the end of Julien’s life, in the twentieth century, also show a smile, but it is broader and more generous. It is worth noting that in these later pictures he appears extremely good-natured, and quite simply happy.
Julien was certainly the magnate of the family all of his life, more or less governing nieces and nephews as well as his sister, Katherine, and his brother, Remy.
That he incited fear and confusion in his enemies was well-known. It was reported by one furious cotton factor that Julien had, in a dispute, caused another man’s clothing to burst into flame. The fire was hastily put out, and the man recovered from his rather serious burns, and no action was ever taken against Julien. Indeed, many who heard the story-including the local police-did not believe it. Julien laughed whenever he was asked about it. But there is also a story, told by only one witness, that Julien could set anything on fire by his will, and that his mother teased him about it.
In another famous incident, Julien caused all the objects of a room to fly about when he went into a rage, and 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
