Napoleon House
French colonial townhouse with a rooftop cupola, tied to a legendary plot to rescue an exiled emperor.
Location
About this audio guide
Napoleon House on Chartres Street in New Orleans centers on its octagonal rooftop cupola, said for two centuries to have been built by mayor Nicolas Girod to watch for a ship carrying Napoleon Bonaparte, imprisoned by the British on Saint Helena in 1821. The guide follows the plan New Orleans's French sympathizers are said to have hatched, turning to Barataria Bay smugglers and privateers, including Dominique You, a lieutenant of the pirate Jean Lafitte, to sail a schooner called the Seraphine and free him. Girod is said to have already prepared rooms for his guest inside this very house. No signed order or confession survives, only the story and the house's borrowed name.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar
Candlelit eighteenth-century cottage bar where strangers gather round an old piano to sing along.
Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, Barataria Preserve
Boardwalk trails through cypress swamp and bayou once used as a smuggling route to New Orleans.
Bourbon Street
Legendary French Quarter thoroughfare of bars, jazz clubs and balconies lit for after dark.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 2
Above-ground Catholic cemetery of grand tombs where a pardoned pirate rests beneath a Masonic emblem.
Arnaud's New Orleans
Century-old Creole dining room where a Prohibition-era wine seller turned bootlegging into legend.
Old Ursuline Convent Museum
Colonial French convent chapel where nuns kept an all-night prayer vigil and a war-time vow.