Marie-Joseph Angélique was the black slave of a rich widow in Montreal. According to a published account of her life, by Afua Cooper in 1734, after learning that she was going to be sold and separated from her lover, she set fire to her owner's house and escaped. The fire raged out of control, destroying forty-six buildings. Captured two months later, Marie-Joseph was paraded through the city, then tortured until she confessed her crime. In the afternoon of the day of execution, Angélique was taken through the streets of Montreal and, after the stop at the church for her amende honorable, made to climb a scaffold facing the ruins of the buildings destroyed by the fire. There she was hanged until dead, with her body flung into the fire and the ashes scattered in the wind.