Chapter Twenty-Five
CLAUDINE ARNAUD WAITED IN MADAME CIGNY’S PARLOR; she accepted coffee, suffered a biscuit to be laid on her plate. There was conversation in which she joined without attending to what was asked of her or what she said in answer. She nibbled the edges of a piece of fruit…At length the little doctor crept down from the upper story where he had been attending his pregnant mulatto demimondaine. He seemed to be in some confusion, lit uneasily on the edge of the chair where Isabelle Cigny bade him sit, declined all refreshment offered him, and excused himself in rather a shorter time than politeness should have dictated. Madame Arnaud fixed her blank eyes on his nervous display. Something untoward had evidently passed between the doctor and their hostess, but she could not guess the nature of the transaction, nor was she much interested, in fact. When the doctor rose to go, she craved the favor of his escort on her own way.
He attempted no pleasantries, on the stairs or on the street, and Madame Arnaud appreciated that, though his bald head had flushed under its tan, and she saw he was uncomfortable in her company. She knew he was a little afraid of her, though she was beyond taking any satisfaction from that state of things.
“You must take me to Père Bonne-chance,” she said.
“Comment?”
“You must take me to Père Bonne-chance,” said Madame Arnaud, in the same flat and grating tone. The doctor’s hand flapped madly at a black fly that was buzzing near his eyeball.
“The priest who is supposed to have committed those crimes in the camps of Grande Rivière,” she reminded him.
“He never did them,” the doctor said automatically.
“So says my husband also. Not that it matters…not to me.”
“Why yes, monsieur your husband visits there. He might well introduce you.”
“I prefer it should be you.”
Doctor Hébert glanced across at her as they walked. She had not looked at him once so far, but faced resolutely forward, so that he saw her profile. She was much changed since their first meeting. Her color had improved, on the whole—she had more of a look of health than previously. The doctor had had some opportunity of observing her and it was his impression that she no longer drank spirits, or even wine. She had lost her alcoholic palsy, but her eyes were sunken and dark around the sockets as though she were exhausted by some long travail.
“Tell me why it is that you would go?” he said.
“I wish him to hear my confession.”
The doctor stopped in the middle of the street and stared at her. “But surely, madame, there are other priests. At Les Ursulines, for instance…”
“This one. C’est lui qui je veux.” She put her maimed hand on his arm. He glanced down at the gloved finger on his sleeve, the one which was folded under, resisting his first impulse to jerk away.
“Of course,” he said, “I could refuse you nothing.” The fingers on his arm were bird-bone light. “I will oblige you. Tomorrow if you wish.”
SHE MOVED INTO THE PRIEST’S ROOM in a cloud of muslin, footless, drifting like a wisp of fog. It was evening, and the sunset stripe was measuring out its minutes over the stones of the wall beyond the table. She sat down on the stool without awaiting invitation. He saw that she had been pretty once, to say the least, but her face was eroded by some torment. There was the strange, disanimated way she moved, as though she ran on wires or clockwork instead of possessing an inner life. Momentarily, Père Bonne-chance felt puzzled as to what might be her derangement. As for Claudine, she smelled the rum that he had just been drinking with the doctor, and was a little nauseated by the lingering fumes. She covered her mouth with her gloved hand.
The priest looked at her curiously, a ghost of a smile on his broad cheeks. His skin was rather oily. Claudine arranged her hands at the table’s edge. There was an unlit candle, two rum-smelling cups, and an end of bread sticky with honey.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” she said.
But nothing more. The priest was waiting. “Tell me your trouble,” he finally said. At his back, he felt the failing light.
“This awful country,” she said finally. “This dreadful place.”
“Some find it beautiful,” said the priest. “I among them. God intended it to inspire awe, if that is what you mean.”
“God never meant for us to come here.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” The priest leaned back, considering. “They say the Indians who lived here were a gentle race—before the Spanish came.”
“I would that I had never come here,” she said. “It is evil.”
“It’s ourselves,” the priest said.
Claudine was taking off her gloves. “I knew you’d understand me. Only you.”
“Ah well,” the priest said. “So far you’ve told me little.” He waited. Certainly her hands were very pretty, pleasantly shaped, the fingers long, graceful and expressive. The stump on her left hand was a rough shock. Of course, he’d heard the story many times; it was inescapable.
“This is a place which debases men,” she said. “It makes them brutal. My husband has a love of torturing his slaves. He also fornicated with them. They bore his children. All of this happened many times.”
She stopped. The priest shifted his legs under his cassock, watching the red seam of cicatrix that sealed the stump of her left ring finger. “Was it your husband’s sin you came to confess, or your own?”
She didn’t answer him at once. The light had shifted so her face was in shadow, and he could not well make out her expression. While they were silent, the hummingbird appeared outside the window, hovering, then darted in. It hung apparently motionless in the space above the table. From a distance it seemed black, but as it lowered one began to see the iridescent green of the feathers that lay on its neck and breast like scales.
The priest rubbed a finger on the tacky surface of the bread, smeared it in the center of his opposite palm and raised it. Within the curve of his blunt fingers the hummingbird was suspended, long beak needling the skin of his palm.
“It’s a miracle,” Claudine breathed.
The priest laughed. “Oh, I don’t think so.” He dropped his hand and the bird snapped out the window, instantaneously as a shot.
“It’s only a bit of sugar,” the priest said.
“Yes…” She was looking at the wall, where shadows of the vine leaves flickered between shadows of the window bars. “Once I detested my husband’s cruelty,” she said. “The place worked its change on me as well. There was a maid he’d bought me, as a ‘gift,’ he called it. I knew that he had taken her to his bed—I never told myself but oh, I knew…I used her cruelly as I was able—as my imagination would allow. He got her with child, of course, and then one day when she was near her time and he was absent from the place, I had her bound up in a shed…”
She stopped, still staring at the wall. The priest’s back pained him. He leaned forward on the stool and propped his elbows on the table.
“Oh, the power I had over her,” Claudine said. “It was absolute. How could I make you understand it? No one can know.”
The priest lowered his face into his hands. Suddenly he felt very tired, and rather drunk as well. His forehead was humid with a rummy sweat.
“And so you murdered her,” he said.
“And worse.” Making its way around the table, the sunlight smashed her full in the face. It looked as if it might have blinded her. Perhaps it had.
“I cut the child from her womb alive,” she said. “I cut it out and left it there. To die. No one would go near. Not me. Not anyone. But still it lives. It comes to me. I cannot bear it. I cannot nurture it. I am barren, you see. I will never have a child.”
“I believe I understand you,” said the priest.
“And then…” said Claudine. “Of course you know what happened next. It was I who caused the insurrection. I delivered it to this world on my blade’s edge. Do you see? Because I could not bear it!”
“Yes,” the priest said. He rubbed the sore red rims of his eyes. “Yes, my child, I see your difficulty. You must sacrifice your pride.”
“My pride?” Claudine seemed to look upon a lunatic. The priest smiled back at her pleasantly enough.
“Do you know why pride is the deadliest sin? Because it enables us to root out all the others.” He chuckled a little, under his breath. “I myself am not so terribly afflicted with it. Others I have in generous supply. Gluttony, lust and sloth…At least those three, and in sufficient quantity to earn me a warm place in hell. But now, you see, I will be spared this. The Lord has laid my table before me. He will catch me at the brink.
“So I must tell you, offer up your pride, my daughter, stop thinking of the greatness of your crime. One sin is not so much greater than another in God’s eye. Be humble and be kind to others, as you have opportunity, and especially be kind to children, as Christ suffered them. When you do so, your heart will be softened, and you may yet awaken to the language of love.” He laid his hands palm up on the table. “Pray for me also (I will not have much time to pray for you). Have faith that the Lord will provide for you, even as He has provided for me.”
Her face was stricken in the blast of sunset. The priest hardly knew if she heard him or not, but he was exhausted himself by all he’d had to utter. Without knowing he’d do it, he yawned in her face.
“Forgive me, I am very weary,” he said. “Ego te absolvo. Go in peace.”
But Madame Arnaud remained rooted in her chair, gazing through and through him with her unseeing eyes.
“What was her name?” the priest said. “The maid, I mean to say.”
Madame Arnaud seized him by the ribs and clung. She drew herself partway across the table. No sound escaped her, but she was weeping now, as though she’d fill his open palms. With the strange light still full in her face, it looked as if she was weeping tears of blood.
NEXT DAY WHEN HE RETURNED to the Cigny house, the doctor found no one in the parlor—no one about at all in the lower floors save a brown-skinned maid and the footman who’d admitted him. Between these two there seemed to be a strange charged atmosphere. He waited dutifully for his presence to be officially recognized, thinking that Madame Cigny would certainly appear in time. When he first heard the shout from above he went racing up the stairs in triplets and burst into Nanon’s room without a knock.
She lay on her back with her knees drawn up, one hand tearing weakly at the hem of her pillowcase; the pillow seemed to discommode her, and Madame Cigny pulled it away. Nanon’s head dropped back on the flat, sheeted mattress. Her eyes closed, then were shocked open by a long writhing spasm that seemed to the doctor to begin at the base of her spine and shudder all through her till it sent her head lashing back and forth against the linen.
As the contraction passed, he walked to the head of the bed and took her hand. Her face was glossy with a sheen of sweat, and her eyes looked glazedly past him, into the queer angles of the ceiling under the eaves. Then she went rigid from head to toe, and twisted snakily against the mattress, a groan pressing out of her clenched jaws. She crushed down on his hand as if she’d break it, then relaxed with a fainter gasp.
Across the bed from him, Madame Cigny moved with quick concentration, arranging strips of cotton at the bedside. The brown-skinned maid came in carrying a basin of water which Madame Cigny took from her and placed in a corner. She pulled down the sheet and drew up the hem of Nanon’s gown. Automatically Nanon pushed up her hips so that the fabric could roll under. She moaned and jerked and crushed the doctor’s hand. Madame Cigny glared across the heaving swell of her stomach, seeming to see him for the first time.
“You’d better go,” she told him, her tone neutral. “You’ll find there’s nothing you can do.”
“No, no, I must stay by,” the doctor said, unconfidently. He made an effort to look wise and imperturbable. In truth he had attended few scenes of birth and knew next to nothing at all about it. Madame Cigny flicked her fingers at him, but said nothing more.
A new spasm ran through Nanon, sharper and stronger than the others it must have been. She raised up on her elbows and began cursing the doctor in close detail, with a thorough attention to every part of his anatomy, alternating between good French and wild obscure Creole epithets that tried the doctor’s recent knowledge of patois. As she fell back exhausted, Isabelle Cigny smiled and twinkled at him across the bed.
“Well, stay then. Comme vous voulez. Allow her to relieve her feelings.”
Nanon lay with her wide lips slightly parted, so that her teeth and tongue’s tip showed; the whites of her eyes were also showing through a gap in her slack lids. Her breathing was loud and laborious but except for that it looked like death, and the doctor realized how frightened he was.
“How long…” he said, uncertainly.
“She’s tired already,” said Isabelle Cigny, who seemed not to have heard him quite exactly. “A first child…” She shook her head, then dipped a cotton rag in the water basin and began bathing Nanon’s temples, but Nanon had jerked up again with another spasm and was cursing the doctor as before. As she subsided this time she spoke in a loud biting tone.
“Go get Maman-Maigre…Ma’maig’…go get Maman-Maig’!”
Doctor Hébert looked wildly across the bed. Madame Cigny pursed her lips and nodded…Some moments later he was flying out the door, pounding his way toward the Place d’Armes through the midafternoon heat. By the time he found the right courtyard he was all in a lather. The huge old black woman was sitting in the shade of a lean-to by the wall, talking to another slave and playing with an old polished chicken bone, which made a fluting sound when she blew on it. Doctor Hébert exhorted her to come, to hurry, using his most fluent Creole. For a long time Maman-Maigre’s face was blank, and when finally she’d grasped the message, or shown herself willing to receive it, she prepared herself with torturous lethargy. She packed a basket with herb preparations, cold biscuit, a change of clothes. At last he saw her put into the basket a little tortoiseshell kitten before she closed the lid. He was dancing around her like an overwrought lapdog, as she marched grimly back toward the Cigny house. But what in God’s name could she need a kitten for?
In Nanon’s room not much had changed. Maman-Maig’ set down her basket. She spread her fingers on Nanon’s head for a moment as if to weigh her down; in fact the touch did seem to calm her slightly. Then she gripped Nanon’s legs and spread them and peered between; she groped, then grunted something. As she withdrew, Nanon pulled away and screamed. Maman-Maig’ drew a root from her basket and cut a strip of it with a clasp knife and gave it to Nanon to hold between her teeth.
It went on. The doctor stayed stubbornly in the room, though from time to time the women tried to throw him out. He would come forward to hear her curse him, curse all men; when the spasm passed, she would sometimes apologize. Sometimes he sat down to rest, drawing a chair beside the porthole window. New chairs had been brought into the room; there was an extra table now. Across the alley, colors of sundown swirled and faded on the opposite wall. It was dark, then late. The tortoiseshell kitten came out of the basket and chased a ball of lint through shadows of candlelight and under the bed. Doctor Hébert caught it up and brought it to Nanon to look at, touch—for a moment it seemed to distract her from her pain but that was very temporary.
Madame Cigny forced him to go down and sit behind a plate of supper, across the table from her sour, close-lipped husband. Monsieur Cigny was content to eat speechlessly, which was well. The doctor chewed and chewed but could not swallow. Upstairs again, he took a little of the broth that Nanon had been given to keep up her strength—so Maman-Maig’ said. She seemed to choke on it; she pushed the bowl sloppingly away.
There was a lull. Sitting by the dark round of the window, the doctor took out his watch and dangled the chain. The kitten raised up on its hind legs and batted at the links so that they jingled and sparked in the lamplight.
It was past midnight. He went down and out into the street—for air, a few black gulps of the thick humidity. When he returned, the room was once again a box of screams. He was given to understand that the child was trying to be born sideways or backward, that the cord was looped around its neck and that Maman-Maigre’s desperate manipulations were meant to rectify all this. The chicken bone was in her mouth, whistling with her exhalations as she rubbed and worked. Isabelle Cigny drew him aside, and held him by the window. At last Maman-Maig’ looked up with a grin and nodded. She herself had sweated through her head-cloth.
“Now you must go,” Madame Cigny snapped at the doctor.
The doctor stared and mutely shook his head. Madame Cigny had moved back to the bedside.
“Damn you, then,” she said. “Be useful, if you refuse to leave. Well, come here and hold this leg.” She beckoned him and showed him how to do it.
Their positions were symmetrical, either side of the bed. One of the doctor’s hands was locked somewhere on Nanon’s thigh and the other supported her foot like a stirrup. At every new contraction both he and Isabelle pulled back as if on a pair of oars. MamanMaig’ knelt between Nanon’s legs like a worshiper, one hand spread across her belly and the other doing something down below.
“Li prèt,” said Maman-Maig’ in her low flat tone. “He’s ready.” Nanon raised up, face starkly white, lips closed on a tight, silent line as she was pushing, while the doctor and Isabelle Cigny hauled back on her legs.
“Come on,” said Madame Cigny. “Allons—you must concentrate. Plus fort.”
Nanon’s head rolled back, and she subsided, whimpering. There was a pause before the coming stroke.
“Li prèt,” Maman-Maig’ said again. It went on. Isabelle was leaning into Nanon’s face. “Allons,” she called. “Pousses—plus fort que ?a.” Her face was shining, a blaze of power and light pouring down on Nanon; the doctor was in awe of both. And Nanon slipped back, a thin wail sighing from her as her jaws relaxed.
“Li prèt,” said Maman-Maig’.
The contractions came in patterns like sets of waves running in on the beach. Somewhere there was hot water steaming, filling the room with a hot mist. Blood ran out from Nanon’s legs, filling a barber’s basin the brown-skinned maid held underneath her. Everyone was screaming, shouting exhortations. The doctor was probably screaming himself, but mostly he only heard Isabelle, saw her glowing transfigured face as her head leaned near to Nanon’s.
Maintenant pousses plus fort que ?a tu peux tu dois plus fort que ?a si tu m’aimes pousses maintenant!
“Têt li désan,” said Maman-Maig’ with reverence. “The head is coming.”
The doctor turned his own, but could not see. Nanon sobbed out, with relief this time, and Isabelle’s voice was gentler now as she stooped again to stroke back the sweat matted hair from Nanon’s brow.
Allons, pousses, encore une fois…
What shot out into Maman-Maigre’s hands was at first so alien that the doctor could not even read it. It was purple, slimed with blood, connected by a ropy pulsing vein; it looked like some internal organ, a liver or a spleen.
“Regardes-moi cette tête,” said Madame Cigny softly.
Then, upside down, he recognized the face, as Maman-Maig’ scooped off the mucus with her fingers. At once there was a small harsh cry that strengthened as it went. He saw the molded limbs drawn up in that odd rabbity way; the whole body was scarcely the size of the head, it looked, and the head was doubled, enormous. There was a mass of material above the face that made it seem as though the baby were wearing a gigantic conical hat.
Nanon’s hands fluttered weakly over the infant’s back. They had laid it on her breast, and Maman-Maig’ was tying up the cord to cut it. The doctor understood that all was well. Nanon was slipping into sleep. He drew his watch out of his pocket and was amazed to see that more than two hours had passed since Maman-Maig’ first raised her grinning face and announced that it was time.
Now he was hungry, ravenous. He went to the kitchen alone and ate whatever he could find. Madame Cigny had gone to bed, he thought, and Maman-Maig’ was also sleeping somewhere in the house.
He returned upstairs, inattentively brushing crumbs from the corners of his mouth. It could not have been much later, for the brown-skinned maid was still there, tidying the room. Quiet now, with the mother and child asleep, and the signs of the struggle being gradually effaced. Some damp rags hung unnoticed over a chair back. Maman-Maigre’s chicken bone had been set aside on a table where it lay with a mute authority, and there was a basin of blood on the floor.
Blue had begun to show at the porthole window. The maid unlatched the casement and swung it out, to admit a breath of cool predawn air. The doctor felt drifty, cloudlike, though he was not really so very tired. The maid moved through her tasks with the same measured composure that he felt within himself. An hour previous, she must have been screaming with the rest of them. A wave of affection for her passed over him. He asked her name: Jacqueline. The syllables were melodious in his ear, and even the blood in the basin had beauty.
She left a lamp burning for him when at last she went out. By its light the doctor saw that the infant had quietly awakened and was looking toward him with its round dark eyes from the basket they’d arranged near Nanon’s bed. He took it up carefully, afraid of a cry that would wake the mother, but the baby stayed quiet. They’d put a conical cotton cap like a sailor’s on its head, but the doctor slipped it off, noticing at once that the skull itself was relaxing to a more ordinary shape. A quantity of rust-colored hair covered the scalp; the doctor stroked its furry softness with the thumb of the hand supporting the head. A warmth and texture like new-risen bread dough. It was a boy. His hands and feet were covered with an ancient wrinkly skin; one hand wrapped around the doctor’s finger. All the while the baby looked at him from great owl eyes as if he’d truly see and know him.
A thin gray rain came up with the dawn, drops beading on the open porthole casement. Before Isabelle Cigny snuffed out the candle, the doctor had not noticed her come in. She crossed the room, her long nightgown trailing on the floor, and peered over his shoulder into the child’s face. The warmth and softness of her breast pressed unconsciously against his arm, but for once he was unembarrassed, as she was unaware.
“What woke you?” he said. “You must be very tired.”
“Ah, there’s nothing like it, is there?” She did not look at him when she said this, but kept her wistful smile turned on the baby. The doctor understood that she meant not children, but the birth itself, in which they were bound together as witnesses. One of her fingers reached out to touch the newborn cheek.
“He’s very white,” the doctor said.
“On the first day it’s always so,” she said. “After that, one sees the color.” She lifted one of the fingers from its tiny grip. “You can see it now, in the base of the nail.”
There was no rancor in her tone, and the doctor did not resent it. On the contrary, he loved her as well as he loved the maid, Jacqueline. Some little while later she must have left the room, but he was no better aware of her going than of her arrival. The rain was tapping on the window and hissing on the street below. Still the child regarded him intently. Already his small face was changing. When the doctor had first seen it emerge, the face had been without a doubt his own grandfather’s. There were still the odd dog-shaped, crumpled ears, a Hébert family trait, but the other features were settling into something that belonged to this one child alone. Not himself, not Nanon, but a mingling—something new. This, the doctor realized, was what all the trouble was about.
AT THE TRIAL OF PèRE BONNE-CHANCE, these charges were upheld: That he had aided the rebellious slave called Jeannot in the torture and murder of many white prisoners. That he had deliberately pandered and prostituted helpless white women to many of the rebel black slaves. That from the very beginning he had helped to instigate the insurrection and had inspired the slaves to destroy so much property and take so many lives and overthrow the rule of order in the colony.
None of those who had accused the priest appeared against him in person. The charges were general in their form. A letter which had been found and preserved by someone who’d survived the camp of Jeannot was read out in the court.
J’ai disposé la dame une telle à vous recevoir cette nuit…Vous n’avez jamais eu de telle jouissance, mon cher Biassou, que celle qui vous attend ce soir…La petite de fait la reveche mais apportez de la pitre pour la disposer à souscrire à vos désirs…*12
The signature had been been partly torn away, and what remained of it was scarcely legible. Père Bonne-chance denied that he had written the letter, but without much force. He had little else to say. On the whole he did not appear to take much interest in any of the proceedings.
Doctor Hébert testified haltingly on behalf of Père Bonne-chance, describing his assistance at the field hospital in Jean-Fran?ois’s camp. The spiritual comfort he’d brought to white prisoners and black rebels alike. The evident sincerity of his religion…
Michel Arnaud followed the doctor’s testimony, disparaging every accusation made against the priest as if it were unworthy to be heard, especially the charge of prior conspiracy. He’d mustered up all his old swagger for the occasion, and for the time it took him to tell his story he succeeded in making the charges seem absurd. His performance had more authority than the doctor’s, though unfortunately he had also been more remote from the scene.
Still, the judgment was never in doubt. Père Bonne-chance had no defenders who’d actually been present in Jeannot’s camp to say that he had not done those things he was accused of. In any case, it was plain that he was not what he appeared to be. His numerous progeny proved that he did not keep the priestly vow of chastity. Then too, he was a Jesuit disguised in robes of another order. Had not the Jesuits been expelled because of their too great sympathy for the slaves?—which in itself suggested most strongly that Père Bonne-chance must have conspired with the rebels. Besides, even the doctor could not deny that he’d helped with the composition of their latest, most outrageous demands.
Two days after the sentence was passed, they brought the priest to the Place de Clugny. A large crowd was present for the execution. His children had been kept away, but Fontelle was there, and the priest was permitted a last embrace with her. There was a frank lustfulness in his touch of her, and the crowd mocked them both for it, and threw stones and dead things they had saved for the occasion.
Père Bonne-chance was bound spread-eagled to the wheel and broken. The executioner used a great iron hammer to smash his arms and legs, his ribs and clavicle. Domine, non sum dignus, the priest shouted out at the first few strokes. The mob was unnerved by this, and virtually silenced. But after the fifth blow his cries became unintelligible and the mob was released again to jeer and cat-call. When all of his bones had been appropriately shattered, they called for him to be left in that state, for slow death over hours or days as it might be. But the executioner, a kindhearted fellow who was known to carry a pet mouse in his vest pocket even as he did his duty, took out the knife and slit his throat.
Michel Arnaud and Doctor Hébert were both present for the execution. Arnaud was aghast, in a state of shock; it seemed that the repudiation of his testimony had shaken him more deeply than anything else that had yet befallen him. The doctor was obviously, catastrophically drunk, swinging a brandy bottle from his slack fingers and weeping openly without shame. Between them stood Claudine Arnaud, watching closely and missing no detail; her eyes were parched and hot as burning stones.
SEPTEMBER 1802
M. PLACIDE LOUVERTURE, Belle-Isle-en-Mer,
M. Placide, mon ami fils de mon ma?tre I am write to tell you of what am arrive to M. v. père mon ma?tre. I have been four week one month since we are coming at the end of this one journey across the France. This place is a crête in the mountains as it would be in Sainte Domingue but so much far inside the France and so much high. The name it is Fort de Joux. Going we aren’t to see nothings of where we go there, not I and not M. v. père mon ma?tre. We are in a close carriage with no way of regard outside. we are go up and up through some very tight turning like the lace of a boot and the coach do twist and rock on every side. Worse like the ship but for less long.
When they have open the coach to take us out we are come again inside the walls so we don’t see nothings of where we are. Only to see the sky one time and feel the cold which is much colder than our mountains even in the summer here of France.
I am not to see how this fort is there until I am three weeks they take me out bring me away. They take me out though I would not go I would stay near to M. v. père mon ma?tre even if they would make me free but they did not. I am now in this prison of Nantes. I have trapped to myself a sickness of cold from the fort de Joux where it is cold even in summer and wet. No one to me tells what have done what crime
Each day M. v. père mon ma?tre have speak to me of you you mother you brother Isaac St. jean. Between us we remember much of you and we are talk only of you between us when we together come. If my heart will fall too low he does upraise it, and I so to him when it is able to me. This fashion I serve him and can not any other because we have no things in this two cachot where we are place. May Be that you will have words of M. v père also to you because the commandant of Fort dejoux have allow him things of write.
Now I will tell you how it is this place of M. v. père mon ma?tre at this Fort de joux that you when you know of it your hearts will be together. One must pass three keyholes to come to this cachot all like an underground. One place wet like a bad hole of crab. Then after that one comes one corridor with two cachots one for M. v. père and one for MARS PLAISIR. That is all.
I would they lock us in one same cachot but not. We are together each day some hour or two only. Some hour each day they will bring me out to walk inside the walls, under the guard as you will see. For M. v. père mon ma?tre, they make this never to him. Only in cachot all day and enduring the night. There is one small fire but not enough of wood.
Our happiness it is talk of you you mother and you brother and remember between us manything of you. Now we are each alone and in far places. I was nothing when my master raised me up to stand beside him. Now I am in this prison of Nantes, how will I raise him up?
I am pray to n. seigneur jsuschrist, there is no other gods in France. May Be, not even that one.
I have trapped to myself this one bad sickness. In the chest and in the head. Also in this prison of Nantes I have not the money for food or fire. I would even be at fort dejoux if I am able. So I am not alone like here in Nantes prison. They allow me things of write but I do not well say. I know M. v. père mon ma?tre is each day write to government in French. They will not tell me any crime because I did not do any one.
When they are take me down the mountain they do not the coach closing. This way I am to see how how much a cold a highplace is this Fort de Joux. Going down these lacets I would not see the fort above the cliffs and turns. After when we were in a low place and there is the Fortdejoux ten thousand lieux above me of the mountaintop. It was not to be brought there and put down but dug there in the mountaintop like the crab digs his hole in mud. It was like a grave of stone. A man will rise from a grave of dirt, but how will he come out of stone?
A day when I am make my walkings by the walls, the guard am bring me back some different way to the cachot from like before. We are stop inside this different vo?te, for him me show this well. One well set in the stone going down so long away in the dark I am to think myself it must be slaves of France who are make this one. This one well narrow like one man head but a body would not pass it.
The guard have give me a pebble to throw in, this one sharp little stone. I have drop it, how he sign for me to do. I have hear this one stone hitting on the sides of this stone well but never have I hear it strike into the bottom. Still I do listen this long time but I don’t hear it strike.
M. Placide mon ami fils de mon ma?tre, I am pray to n. seigneur jschrist that one day we will all be free. I have trapped a sickness so I don’t know long to live. I do not know how to have a letter or any words of you. I am write you mother you brother also but this another day I am
v. serviteur
MARS PLAISIR
BAILLE, THE COMMANDANT OF THE FORT DE JOUX, was afraid of something, as Toussaint could sense at once. He was an aging man, heavy, white and lumbering, as though he were unused to daylight or disliked it. Toussaint could feel Baille’s lack of ease, and knew that Baille was not afraid of him but of his being there. This cheered him, though he showed nothing of his cheer.
An officer of the guard stood by the wall. Baille asked Toussaint to empty out his pockets. He did so. With a fearful gingery touch, Baille stirred the articles on the tabletop: a broken quill pen, some coins of small denomination, a couple of letters and a watch and chain. Toussaint had kept back two letters and some gold pieces in an inner pocket; he was concerned about a body search, but it did not come.
Baille opened the watch case front and back, looked first at the face and then into the works. He studied the inaudible contractions of the fine silvery spring that moved the second hand. Toussaint leaned a little forward. He knew what troubled Baille so much: the escape of two imprisoned officers of the Vendée from this very place only a few weeks before. The thing Baille feared must certainly be possible. The fear itself might make it possible…But Toussaint did not show his smile.
Baille returned the watch to him. The other items were put into a bag and taken from the room. Toussaint stood up then, as if it were his prerogative to terminate the interview. Baille did not seem startled or surprised.
They passed along the vaulted corridors in this order: first a guard with keys, then Toussaint, then the officer of the guard, and Baille bringing up the rear. It heartened Toussaint that the commandant was so reluctant to be near him. He kept his face a neutral blank. The cold of the tunnels troubled him but he suppressed any visible shiver. The vaulted ceilings were so low that the taller men must stoop to pass, but Toussaint, with his jockey’s build, could still walk erect.
Baille carried his own ring of keys, and paused to lock each door once they’d passed through it. The door before them was never opened until Baille had locked the door behind. Each door had a small cross-barred hatch set in it, no larger than palm-size, each a head higher than Toussaint’s eye level. The double thickness of the wood of every door was bound with bolts and bands of iron.
The third corridor they traversed was damper than the others; a sheen of water seeped on the raw rock wall to their left side, and water had collected on the floor so that the splashing echoed as they went through. In the next vault, the floor was dry again, or only damp. At its end, the guard unlocked the final door, and stood aside that Toussaint might enter.
When he had gone into the cell and walked as far as the middle of it, he turned to look back. The other three had all remained without, watching him through the doorway. Baille bowed to him, without apparent irony. Toussaint returned the bow. When he raised his head again, the door was already quietly closing. He heard the crunching of the iron teeth of the lock.
He walked first to the end of the cachot, where the window was. It had been bricked up over the lower two-thirds of its height, and above this barrier he could just see a section of a slate-blue sky, beyond the outer end of the deep-set embrasure. He turned and walked back, passing the bedstead, a square table with two chairs pushed up under it. To his left was a small fireplace, but no wood.
He had reached the door. His eyes were just flush with the lower edge of the barred peephole. From beyond, he heard the doors locking down along the line of vaults. On the way in, the guard had opened each almost with stealth. Going out, he seemed to prefer to slam them.
Toussaint turned again. The wall opposite the fireplace was quarried out of living stone. There was a glisten of damp on it as well, though it did not run with water so freely as had the wall in the third corridor.
On the table stood a pitcher; when Toussaint lifted it he found it mostly full. He poured some water into his palm and washed his face and hands. There was a cup on the table too, and he poured an inch of the water into the cup and drank it. The water had a faintly brassy taste.
He took out his watch and looked at it, let it depend and swing gently at the length of its chain, then snapped it up into his hand and put it in his pocket. It was just past four, in the afternoon. Certainly it was an illusion that he could feel the tick of the watch against his fifth rib.
He walked to the window and again to the door. It was almost automatic to count the steps required for the circuit, but he repressed the number. Standing before the cold fireplace, he became aware that he had wet his boot leather, crossing the third vault.
He picked up one of the chairs and positioned it before the window. Standing on it, he could look over the top of the brickwork. The view was somewhat altered by this change of angle. Now he saw the top of a wall, the corner of a guardpost, and a sentry walking along the rampart.
The iron bars at the end of the embrasure were old and rusting, but the mesh screen beyond the brickwork was much newer. Those officers of the Vendée had filed the bars of their cell, and bribed a guard. Toussaint reached to his arm’s length to touch the screen. The mesh was too fine to admit his fingertips, too fine for even a rolled paper to be pushed through.
He drew his hand partway back, turning it this way and that at the top of the brickwork. An ambiguous current of air stroked across his fingers. A scrap of gray cloud was hastening across the strip of sky he saw above the wall but disoriented as he was, he could not guess which way the wind was blowing.
Part IV
ILLUMINATION
August 1792—June 1793
Don’t try to hold me up
On this bridge now
I got to reach Mount Zion…
—BOB MARLEY