Augustus Pendergast

“I fear there are skeletons in the Pendergast family closet, figurative and literal, that I must keep even from you.”

Augustus Robespierre St. Cyr Pendergast was a distant ancestor of Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.

The only child of Orazio Paladin Prendergast and Eloise de Branquilanges, Augustus was a doctor and philosopher, well-respected among New Orleans high society. It was he who dropped the first 'r' from the Prendergast name in an effort to make it sound "more American." His fascination with the people and practices of the bayou region of New Orleans led him to his wife, a beautiful bayou woman who was rumored to have been a voodoo queen. Legends of their nocturnal deeds passed down through the Pendergast family, with Agent Pendergast himself flat-out refusing to tell Constance Greene what he had heard.

In 1750, he purchased a former Carmelite monastery on Dauphine Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, and turned it into a town home called Maison de la Rochenoire. The Pendergast family continued to inhabit Rochenoire until it burned down in 1971.