Chapter Twenty-Eight
DOCTOR HéBERT WAS IN SOME ANCIENT MOUNTAIN FORT, alone and unattended except for his wife and child. The place was under attack, it seemed, with men wearing chain mail and curious antique helmets charging the gate with a battering ram, the shock sounding a throaty bass note, repeated at a slow interval. The baby was crying, somewhere out of view, and the doctor looked about himself for help or some means of defense. There was only a rusty medieval pike, leaning against the huge rough-cut stones of the wall. As he reached for it, he overbalanced and was falling—then came to himself sprawled over the floor beside the bed, tangled in a snarl of mosquito netting. Insects thirsty for his blood had clustered on the netting and he had evidently crushed a good number of them in falling out of bed; there were a good many small bloody smudges on the pale planks of the floor. The knock at the door repeated itself, but with no more than ordinary force.
It was still daylight, though dim from rain, and he had dropped asleep without intending to. He sat up on the floor and pried the piece of mirror from his pocket. In the cupped palm of his hand his one eye hung suspended as within a pool. He closed his fingers over it, put it into his pocket again. Sweat was running in the hollow of his throat. The knocking, which had ceased, commenced again.
He cleared the net from his legs, bunched it and tossed it on the bed, then walked to the door and opened it a crack. Since the deportation of Desparbés and Cambefort there had been fewer open disturbances in the town, and the petit blancs were again kept mostly in check by the troops the commissioners had brought, along with two thousand other soldiers under the command of Rochambeau, who’d lately been denied a landing at royalist Martinique. These things being so, the doctor no longer felt compelled to answer the door with a weapon actually in hand.
A blurry identification of the uniform of the Regiment Le Cap moved him to pull the door open wide. But it was not Maillart who entered. The face above the uniform collar was pale, but swirled with chocolate freckles. The doctor stepped aside to let him pass, remaining near enough to the door that he might easily have reached the rifled long gun down from its pegs above the lintel. He had come to know Choufleur by sight and by his sobriquet, though he had never spoken with him. Choufleur was not a usual caller here, and the doctor thought that Nanon seemed ill at ease when speaking of him, that she avoided the topic when she could and even tried to keep the two of them apart.
But Choufleur was not attending to him now. No more than if the doctor had been Nanon’s footman at the door. He walked over the rugs in the center of the room, silver spurs jingling at the heels of his military boots, looking superciliously at the pieces scattered over the chessboard, then at some bibelots arranged upon a cabinet shelf. With a suppressed chuckle he picked up a small silver snuffbox and turned toward the doctor.
“Do you take snuff?”
The doctor shook his head blearily. “Nor would I recommend its use to anyone,” he said. “It fouls the nasal passages and conduces to catarrh.”
Choufleur snorted and set the snuffbox down, unopened, on the high shelf beside the pistol case. He resumed his idle circuit of the room, twirling a slender gold-pommeled cane, its tip describing loops an inch or two above the carpets. The doctor hid a yawn behind his hand. In the heat of the day he had broken off his medical rounds and returned here to rest for an hour, but he had not intended to sleep so heavily as he seemed to have done. It was later than he’d thought. He was enough confused to imagine that he might still be dreaming.
“Was it me you wished to see?” he asked.
Choufleur turned and glanced at him dismissively. “I came for the lady,” he said in an easy tone.
“I believe she has stepped out,” the doctor said. He stooped slightly to peer out the window.
Outside, a mass of purple cloud was beginning to be pierced by a few shafts of evening sun. The rain had momentarily stopped, but it was very close and humid in the room, and he was still sweating from his nightmare. Barefoot, he padded to a stand and poured some water from a pitcher into his hand, then dabbed it at his temples. He had mostly undressed before lying down, and now wore only a pair of loose trousers and a blousy white shirt, untucked.
“You are much at home here,” Choufleur observed.
“You caught me asleep,” the doctor said simply.
Choufleur kept looking at him, but he did not elaborate. The mulatto turned and moved past the pallet where the girl Paulette lay sleeping, toward the cradle. Doctor Hébert took note again of the uniform he wore and wondered what it might portend. Of recent weeks, Sonthonax had been raising more and more mulattoes to posts of importance in the military and the civil government. The commissioner’s speeches inveighed more and more heatedly against race prejudice; in turning against the local Jacobins, he had denounced them all as “aristocrates de la peau.” The doctor knew from Captain Maillart that these developments, especially the military promotions, were causing a rise of tension in the Regiment Le Cap.
Choufleur shifted the mosquito net from the crib on the point of his cane. The doctor moved up on him quickly and quietly, standing just behind his shoulder. The child was sleeping quietly enough.
“What pains she takes,” Choufleur murmured, his tone half mocking, half wistful.
The baby clicked his tongue in sleep, and made a nursing movement with his loose lips. His hair was dark and straight and fine; his skin indistinguishable from white. Of course there were the fingernails, as Madame Cigny had explained. A mosquito lowered whining from the ceiling, toward where the netting gapped above the child’s head. The doctor crushed it with a one-handed clench; his fingers made a smacking sound against his damp palm. He stooped to detach the net from Choufleur’s cane tip and replaced it over the crib. When he straightened, Choufleur was looking at him with a sardonic twist to his lips.
“Yes, I think he does resemble you,” he said, as though he had been considering the point for some time and only now had come to his conclusion. “What do you say?”
The doctor stroked his spade-shaped beard. “On the day he was born he most resembled his great-grandfather,” he said. “Since then I believe he has come to take after the mother’s side a little more.” He waited for Choufleur to sort through the implications of this remark.
“You are a strange man,” Choufleur said.
“People are always telling me so,” said the doctor. “I confess that I do not find myself so remarkable.”
“One insults you, but you are not insulted,” said Choufleur. “A grand blanc would have called me out, perhaps.”
“A grand blanc would not have lowered himself to duel with a mulatto,” the doctor said, raising his chin slightly so that his beard’s point seemed to jut, “but would more likely have arranged for you to be hung from some lamppost, I imagine.”
Choufleur’s lips tightened for a moment under the cloud of his freckles. The doctor saw that the colors had not mixed in him, but remained particulate, at odds with each other all across his face. The mouth opened and Choufleur laughed.
“I will not be insulted either,” he said. “I will be equal with you. But it is strange—that you should keep the company of a man like Michel Arnaud, or officers of the ancien régime like your Captain Maillart, and all the while live openly with a femme de couleur.”
“Consider that I am a friend of the world,” the doctor said. “I see by your uniform that you and Captain Maillart are become comrades in arms.”
“Oh, but you are mistaken there,” Choufleur said. “The Regiment Le Cap refuses to receive me or acknowledge my commission. Their suggestion is that I be posted to the Sixth—with the other mulattoes, you understand.” With quick clicking steps, he walked to the door. “But I will have my place there in the end…if the Regiment Le Cap continues to exist.”
The doctor looked at him where he stood framed in the open door, rain-gray daylight behind him. “Shall I tell Nanon that you called for her?”
“You needn’t trouble,” Choufleur said. “No doubt I’ll find her at home some other day.”
He went out, slapping the door behind him. The doctor opened his hand, brushed away a mosquito leg. The blood was browning in the creases of his palm—he wondered what mixture it might be, and smiled to think it hardly mattered.
He turned back toward the crib. No doubt the baby had not cried at all; that part had been only dream. He yawned. The visit had unsettled him, and yet he would have liked to detain Choufleur, and ask him a few more questions. Nanon was always uncomfortable in speaking of their acquaintance, would only say that they had been born on the same plantation, near Acul, and had known each other as children, before she came to Le Cap and he was sent to Europe to commence another sort of education. The doctor knew that women in Nanon’s position would often keep a lover of their own color—quite unbeknownst to their grand blanc whoremasters, as a rule. But if there were rivalry, he still might be counted the winner, thus far—after all, the child was his.
CAPTAIN MAILLART WAS HAVING SOME DIFFICULTY concentrating his mind, for the meeting room of the Regiment Le Cap officers’ quarters was a welter of confusion, with all the young men talking at once. There was chaos too in the court of Les Casernes. Through the windows he could see enlisted men milling about in a state of excitement. Some members of the suppressed Jacobin club had arrived with a handcart and were distributing copies of what purported to a proclamation of the French National Assembly, making it illegal for colored officers to command white troops in the colonies. Within the room, the arguments carried on unmoderated.
“Look at that rabble—and the troops are listening to them! When they ought to be clubbing them down with their musket butts—”
“But what if the proclamation is true?”
“Of course it is an arrant fabrication!”
“Don’t be so sure, and if it is not true, it ought to be.”
“Gentlemen,” said Captain Maillart, “let us have at least some semblance of order.” But the hubbub did not abate. So many senior officers had been deported with Cambefort and Desparbés that there was no one clearly in authority in this group.
“Let them listen to it,” someone was saying. “Let them believe it. It would be the very thing we need to rid us of the Jacobin dictatorship of this Sonthonax…”
“And throw in our lot with that petit blanc canaille? It’s scarce two months since they were all arming themselves to murder us…”
“But if they are the enemies of our enemy, after all—”
“This Sonthonax is a slippery fish,” said Captain Maillart. “Who knows whose enemy he really is? He raised those petit blancs up to be his Jacobin brothers, and now he reviles them as aristocrates de la peau…”
“Well and it may be that white skin will be our last aristocracy in this place,” someone said sarcastically.
“Can’t you see through him then?” said another officer. “I’ll tell you what he is at bottom—a bloody abolitionist.”
There was a brief, surprising silence at that. In the courtyard, disbanded members of the Jacobin Club were still crying the “news” of the National Assembly.
“If Desparbés had not lost his nerve,” someone said in a lower tone, “we might have done it in September. And if we do not lose our nerve, we may yet do it now.”
It continued quiet in the small square room, with the men all looking at each other tensely. There were fifteen or sixteen of them there, and scarce a one over twenty-five years of age.
“We have again the National Guards to reckon with,” said Captain Maillart. “The mulattoes of the Sixth…”
Someone leaned over and spat conspicuously on the floor. Captain Maillart raised his voice just slightly.
“These petit blancs are not to be relied on, even if our interests have momentarily coincided. Then there are the two thousand troops who arrived with Rochambeau, which I predict will remain loyal to the Commission…”
“What are you saying, Maillart?” someone said. “Whose side are you on?”
Captain Maillart turned his hands palm out, an unconscious mimicry of Cambefort’s signal for calm.
“Well, and if we’d only denied the commissioners a landing as they denied Rochambeau at Martinique, we’d be in a better situation now…” someone said.
“Here’s to that,” said Captain Maillart. “I am for the king, as I always was.”
Quiet again. “Vive le roi,” someone said, but the phrase fell flat in the still room, less like a cheer than a prayer of unbelief.
Some change transpired in the quality of the disturbances in the court, and Maillart looked out the window to see that Laveaux had dismounted from a horse, tossing his reins to a trooper to hold, and was striding across toward the building where they were gathered. Soon he’d passed within the portal, in a moment he’d be in the room.
“Oho,” someone said. “So they did call him back.”
Laveaux had entered, or almost; he stood handsomely within the door frame. His air was almost diffident, for although he had been promoted to full colonel following the September riot, he did not like to presume on his rank in any less than formal situations. Once again the room had fallen silent.
“May I come in?” Laveaux said.
There was a murmur, and someone pulled out a chair for him. Laveaux sat down. He looked from face to face, but most eyes turned away from him, though he was well liked by almost all of them, partly because he shared their youth.
“Let us come quickly to the point then,” Laveaux said. “There are rumors of insubordination, mutiny even. I hope to discover them all false.”
No answer.
“Monsieur Sonthonax has been greatly concerned—” Laveaux began.
“Monsieur Sonthonax has set himself up as a despot here, since Ailhaud ran away to France and Polverel went to Port-au-Prince. There is no Commission here, it is government by caprice. The faintest whisper of dissent and you are deported to France on the instant. Or even if you do not whisper, it is enough that your name appear on the black list of that infamous Jacobin Club to find yourself sailing for the guillotine—”
“But Sonthonax has suppressed the Jacobin Club—” Laveaux said.
“Oh, be sure that your Sonthonax is a straw to twist in whatever wind blows strongest—”
“Enough,” Laveaux said. “It is not his conduct we are to discuss, but your own. You will not acknowledge the commission of le citoyen Maltrot—”
“—who not ten weeks gone was calling himself le Sieur Maltrot—”
“—jumped-up nigger, that Choufleur—”
“Je vous en prie!” Laveaux said. “Whatever he may have been, he is now a citizen of the French Republic for better or worse—as are we all. And he is only one man. All the other regiments have accepted a single colored officer—”
“Will you say it is only a token? That’s what they claimed about the law of May 15—a mere four hundred votes for the mulattoes. Now they are all enfranchised and set over us to boot, Sonthonax takes them into the government, they supersede the Colonial Assembly—”
“Peace,” Laveaux said. “Let us keep to the point. Would you throw everything over for this one man? Can you doubt the capabilities of les gens de couleur? They have proved themselves in the field time and again.”
“They have proved a facility for drawing out eyeballs with corkscrews, you mean—”
“The mulattoes are very well in the Sixth. And the Regiment Le Cap is very well without them.”
Laveaux sighed and looked at the tabletop. Maillart studied him—his face was drawn with weariness, and his laced fingers strained against each other slightly.
“Consider this,” Laveaux said in a low voice. “Our first mission is to suppress the slave insurrection, as I think you’ll all agree—and even with Commissioner Sonthonax, on this one point. Our campaign against the rebels was going famously well—until I was recalled to deal with disturbances here. The threat of these disturbances means we cannot field the troops we need to put down the insurrection once for all, and this has been true for a long time, as I think you understand. And soon enough we will be at war with Spain, most likely England as well. If these troubles find us quarreling among ourselves, we may very probably be destroyed altogether.”
“Colonel,” Maillart said, “so far as you are concerned, yourself, we all of us would follow wherever you might lead.”
Around the room there ran a murmur of assent, but someone spoke more bitterly.
“After all, are you not le comte de Laveaux?”
“It’s true that I originate from the noblesse de l’epée,” Laveaux said. “Exactly as you have it. But my first loyalty is to the nation.” He looked at Maillart. “If you truly mean what you just said, then I believe that all of you will find your duty clear.”
With that, Laveaux stood up and left the room. When he had gone, one of the junior officers cleared his throat as if to speak but found no words. Maillart remained in his seat, staring out the window, while the others scraped back their chairs and gradually dissipated from the room. His head hummed with unconcluded arguments, and he had small doubt that the others were in much the same condition.
NEXT MORNING, the morning of December 2, the command came down the line for the Regiment Le Cap to assemble on the Champ de Mars. At first no one misdoubted the order. The men fell out, carrying their weapons but all unloaded—it was only a dress parade. Captain Maillart was startled at first by the numbers of civilians who lined their way as they marched out the barrack gate and onto the big parade ground. He’d seen many of the same faces screaming abuse at him and his fellows when the riots broke out in September, but now the men who wore the pompon rouge were presenting themselves as allies of a kind…not that he much trusted them.
The morning was gray, misty and cool, though the rain had stopped. A mist gathered on the captain’s forehead, and he felt the cold sweat start from under his arms as he moved through the cool humid air. Tramping into the Champ de Mars, they found the mulattoes of the Sixth already waiting for them, standing at attention, muskets dressed crossways across the breast. Maillart was relieved to see that these men too had fallen out without their ammunition boxes. And yet a little thrill coursed up his spine.
“Curse his arrogance,” someone said behind him, in a voice loud enough to carry across the field. “He has no right to wear that uniform.”
Captain Maillart looked over and saw Choufleur, a little apart from the lines of the Sixth, still arrayed in the uniform of the Regiment Le Cap. Sonthonax, his commissioner’s medallion shining over his navel, stood near to him, along with Laveaux. From the crowd of civilians that lined all four sides of the field, a high thin voice called out, “Massacre!”
The captain could not make out who had raised the call. The Regiment Le Cap halted, faced right, and dressed its ranks, facing the Sixth at some fifty yards distance. The men stood down, musket butts resting lightly on the packed earth of the field, a hand curled around each barrel. Laveaux was crying out in a loud voice that the Sixth Regiment was without ammunition also, and that a peaceful assembly was all that anyone intended. Then Sonthonax took a step forward and began to speak. His hands described strange arabesques in the air, and he was all atremble like an excited hunting dog. Captain Maillart could not at first understand what he was saying, distracted and disturbed as he was by his groundless premonition that something much more serious than talk was likely to occur.
A deeper voice called from the mass of Pompons Rouges. “The truth, Sonthonax. You mean to abolish slavery! Set the niggers to rule over us all—and all of us know what’s in your black heart!”
Sonthonax, his face reddening in his agitation, screamed that the maintainance of the institution of slavery in this colony was his most sacred principle—one he’d die, if need be, to defend. The question of the day was not slavery at all but the rights of les citoyens du quatre Avril…Captain Maillart’s attention drifted once again. His eye rose from Sonthonax’s gesticulating figure to the mass of blue-veined cloud that swirled above Morne du Cap. The cloud parted, and a shaft or two of sunlight chiseled through.
“Massacre!” the same high voice cried. “Fly—fight! Sauve qui peut—Look there, they are bringing cartridges to the Sixth!”
“It’s bread, you idiots,” Laveaux shouted. “It’s only bread.”
Maillart turned to the center of the confusion. An aged mulatto was making a way through the civilian crowd toward the lines of the Sixth, bent double under the weight of a man-sized duffel sack. If this was bread, Maillart was thinking, it must be the heaviest bread ever baked.
But some of the Pompons Rouges had overpowered the old man and jerked the pack away from him, ignoring Sonthonax’s hoarse admonitions. Men of the mulatto Sixth stepped up to protect him. The men around Maillart broke ranks and rushed up into the center of the confusion. The captain could not think how to restrain them or if they ought to be restrained. He let himself be carried forward by the movement, and when the rotten canvas of the duffel ripped from the many hands tugging at it, he saw that there were loaves, indeed, on top, but underneath were many ammunition boxes.
Men of all parties were fumbling over the torn sack and scrabbling for the spilled and scattered ammunition on the ground. By instinct the captain dove for a cartridge box himself and caught it by its strap. The troops of the Regiment Le Cap had spontaneously charged the Sixth and were fighting them with gun butts and fists before they could load, if they had meant to load. Captain Maillart could not tell who had got control of the contraband ammunition. When the first shots began snapping he did not know who had fired. Unconsciously he was passing out cartridges from the small supply he’d recovered to the men nearest him. Then he saw Choufleur, who’d somehow got astride a horse. The freckled mulatto rode low on his horse like a Cossack and he had got the half-full ammunition sack slung across its withers and he was distributing cartridges to the rear ranks of the Sixth, who would have more leisure to employ them. Choufleur straightened in his saddle and called out an order to the front lines to draw back, passing through the ranks of those who stood behind. Captain Maillart saw what would happen and he could not but admit that Laveaux had not overestimated the competence of this one colored officer at least.
He snatched the man nearest him by the back of his collar and threw him headlong on the ground, calling out an order for all to follow suit as he plunged into the dirt himself. The first volley from the Sixth passed clean over their heads and behind them the captain heard a wounded man cry out in outrage and somewhere a horse was screaming. He raised himself on his elbows and saw the first rank of the Sixth kneeling to reload while powder flared from the barrels of the men who stood behind; an instant later came the noise of the volley like a cloth raggedly tearing. Maillart kissed the earth with his teeth. When he heard an answering volley from behind him he could have wept for joy. They must after all have brought up some ammunition from the arsenal at the barracks.
A charge of the Regiment Le Cap passed over him; when it had gone by he got up and reformed his own unit and supervised the distribution of cartridges from an ammunition cart that had been wheeled up. The mulattoes of the Sixth had held off the charge; they were still keeping up a disciplined fire, standing to shoot and kneeling to reload. Still the captain thought that they could not hold long. They would not have much ammunition, and they were now cut off from resupply.
He thought. Some of the petit blancs were contributing fire from small arms or hunting guns to the melee, but apart from their participation it was a well-drawn, clear-cut battle, so utterly different from those anarchic encounters in the jungle with the blacks. In this respect, the captain was much reassured. He massed his men and moved them up, stepping over bodies of the fallen. They came to a halt to fire, moved up again. This time it was corpses of the Sixth they walked among. The mulattoes counterattacked, charging the front line of the Regiment Le Cap—a brave ploy, but probably a desperate one; with ammunition low they must elect hand-to-hand fighting if they could.
The Regiment Le Cap stood off the charge. The mulattoes were in retreat again, but keeping good order. Gradually they were being driven from the Champ de Mars and into the broken ground beyond the field, then withdrawing into the cemetery proper, the marshy ground of La Fossette.
The low ground of the cemetery was virtually a swamp at this time of year, and the men slipped and slithered and fell as they tried to charge across it. Captain Maillart was staggering over the bones of those many comrades of his who’d died of fever in this place…Every movement brought clouds of stinging mosquitoes out of the stagnant pools to persecute them. Surely they ought to have annihilated the mulattoes by now, the captain thought, and would have too, had it not been for the calm and courage of their officers, for the colored men were now outnumbered and out-gunned. But the momentum of the white troops had bogged down in the cemetery swamp. The mulattoes had gained higher ground on the other side, and were holding it well. Captain Maillart saw Choufleur, still on horseback, directing fire, and thought how useful it would be to bring him down. He recharged his big dragoon’s pistol and carefully sighted on the freckled face, but when he fired there was no effect. He reloaded and took aim again, holding the heavy gun with two hands, but held his fire.
The range was possibly too great. And Choufleur himself was pulling back, suddenly—with about half the remaining men of the Sixth as well. The pistol swung down in Captain Maillart’s numbing hands, bounced off his thigh and bruised it. A trapdoor slammed in the back of his throat; for a second he thought he’d actually vomit. There was nothing he or anyone could do but watch, while Choufleur’s part swept over the thinly manned earthworks that defended the town from landward attack.
Now the men of the Regiment Le Cap had fought their way off the marshy ground and were breaking the skirmish line of the Sixth that had been left to hold them off—but it was too late. The mulattoes controlled the earthworks now—and there’d be ammunition aplenty there. The Regiment Le Cap was charging once again but now it was mere folly. The mulattoes were cutting them down from the cover of the breastworks, and Maillart could still see Choufleur’s uniform moving, distinct among the yellow uniforms of the Sixth—he was ordering the cannon to be turned around to bear on the town and its defenders.
One man made it up the earthwork almost to the top, but someone shot him full in the face and he tumbled over backward. Cannon fire cut three separate swaths through the advance of the Regiment Le Cap, halting the charge. As the men were wavering, Laveaux came riding across the front lines, calling them to fall back, withdraw out of range. Now, at last, they heard him and obeyed.
The retreat went staggering over tangled bodies, white and colored laced together. A drummer boy was beating a loud tattoo, which Captain Maillart seemed to hear now for the first time, and all at once the firing had stopped. Not far from him, Laveaux pulled up his horse and faced the earthworks. He had lost his hat in the confusion, and his chest heaved with his breathing; above, his fine features looked completely stricken. The drumming stopped, and from the hills they heard the calls of crows. It seemed to the captain they had been fighting only a few minutes, but it must have been nearer to four hours, for the sun was plumb vertical overhead, a pale disk searing through the haze. Out of range of the cannon, the men of the Regiment Le Cap stood down.
BY NIGHTFALL THE SKY HAD CLEARED COMPLETELY and now the stars and a hangnail’s worth of moon appeared to mark the slopes of Morne du Cap on the horizon. When the darkness was complete the movement of many torches could be seen on the dark face of the mountain. Sonthonax and Laveaux were advancing cautiously toward the earthworks, under the cover of a few guards. As a sort of mental fidget, Sonthonax tried to count the lights by multiplying their rows, but they kept shifting, kept increasing, and soon he saw he could not number them.
“Would it be more gens de couleur coming in from the countryside?” he muttered to Laveaux.
“The blacks moving up from the plain, more like.”
“Eh, mon Dieu…”
“Justement,” Laveaux said grimly. “On verra…”
There were torches aplenty among their own party, as they had no wish at all to come upon the mulatto position unobserved. They were thirty yards out from the earthworks when someone fired a warning shot and a voice called out to know their business. Laveaux drew his breath deep into his belly and shouted back his name and that of Sonthonax and said that they were come to remedy the misunderstanding that had taken place that afternoon (Sonthonax having prompted him to this phrasing). After a couple of minutes a different voice hailed them from the earthworks and gave permission for them to approach.
Sonthonax and Laveaux clambered over the dirt ramparts, leaving their attendants to hold their horses. The damp curve of the wall was overgrown with vine and grasses, going back to jungle. Sonthonax slipped on the wet growth and fell to one knee; Laveaux reached a hand back to pull him up.
There were three soldiers of the Sixth who escorted them along the twisting declivity between the earth walls to a place where a small fire was burning. Choufleur and another colored officer named Villatte were just within the aureole of its light, seated on the carriages of the cannons that had been turned to cover the town. With them were two black men whom Sonthonax and Laveaux had never seen before, one dressed in a mismatched assemblage of military clothing, the other bare-chested and breech-clouted and ornamented like some chief fresh out of Africa.
“Please be seated,” Choufleur said, “Bienvenu…” Laveaux and Sonthonax took places on gun carriages of their own. Beside the fire an orderly was brewing coffee in a fired-clay pot. Choufleur snapped his fingers at him and he offered Sonthonax and Laveaux each a cup.
“There has been reckless impetuosity on both sides—” Sonthonax began.
“You mean,” said Choufleur, “that through this so-called impetuosity the royalist troops betrayed that conspiracy they had long been hatching to exterminate all les citoyens du quatre Avril.”
Sonthonax sniffed his coffee and turned to set it down, untasted, near the touchhole of the cannon he was sitting on. All his intelligencing during that evening had failed to discover just whose conspiracy was whose, nor could he even learn just who had sent that pack of ammunition into the ranks of the Sixth, or why.
“Perhaps there are some few officers of the ancien régime who have difficulty in accepting the changes with which the times present them,” Sonthonax said. “But I assure you that these matters will be expeditiously resolved and that you and your fellow officers will be accepted with no further difficulty.”
“Oh, that is without importance now,” Choufleur said. “I and my fellow officers, as you put it, have no longer the slightest interest in serving with the Regiment Le Cap. Au contraire, I believe that all of our men would absolutely decline to serve in any force into which the Regiment Le Cap was incorporated.”
Sonthonax swallowed dryly and looked toward Laveaux, who seemed to be enjoying his coffee; he frowned and shook his head just slightly, but Laveaux did not notice him. Sonthonax’s head had been filled with stories of poisoning since he arrived; he rather delectated on these tales, but though a republican he feared poison as much as any king.
“I see,” said Sonthonax. “You know of course that our Commission’s most important duty here is to maintain le loi du quatre Avril and so to protect the rights of all new citizens.”
“I have heard much lip service paid to that notion,” said Choufleur. “It strikes me that if it were sincere, then any factions who continue to resist the law would have been disposed of with less delay.”
“Don’t presume that you can dictate terms,” Sonthonax said. “You must remember that the Commission is the highest authority in this land.”
“Forgive my discourtesy,” Choufleur said. “I’ve failed to introduce my two compatriots. Pierrot”—he indicated the black man in the uniform, who was staring broodily into the coals of the fire without apparently following the conversation—“and Macaya. No doubt you will have heard their names.”
Pierrot did not acknowledge the introduction at all, but Macaya, when he heard his name pronounced, raised his head and grinned fixedly at the two Frenchmen. He was of a coppery color, compared to Pierrot’s glossy black, and had high cheekbones that seemed to pinch his eyes in slits. His hair had grown very long during the time of the rebellion, and it was propped up with little bones and stiffened with clay in a shape that resembled a peacock’s fan.
“Yes,” Sonthonax said. “I know these reputations.” Immediately he covered his mouth with his hand, out of fear his chin might tremble. He knew that Pierrot and Macaya were the chieftains of the mob of rebel slaves who swarmed in the nearest vicinity to Le Cap; these were far less organized than the men collected under Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou, but their sheer numbers presented an almost overwhelming threat.
Villatte raised his head and also smiled, but neither he nor Choufleur seemed disposed to make any further remark. Sonthonax studied the neutral faces of Pierrot and Macaya for a moment more and decided to risk the assumption that they understood only Creole, not proper French.
“I had not known,” he said to Choufleur, “that men such as these were precisely your compatriots.”
“Ah, but we live in a time of rapidly shifting alliances,” Choufleur said. “Do we not? You will have observed this truth since you arrived here on our island…”
“Vraiment.” Sonthonax stood up. “Allow me a moment with my colonel.” He plucked at Laveaux’s sleeve and drew him away into the dark.
On the hill above them the lines of torches continued to snake and circle down. A drumming had begun just at the edge of earshot, thin and parched like a rustle in dry leaves or the first irritating tickle of a cough. Sonthonax turned in the direction of the town and rested his elbows on the breast-high barricade. The lights of Le Cap were interrupted by the mute curve of the barrel of a sixteen-pound cannon.
“How many are they, do you suppose?”
“Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand?” said Laveaux. “No one has had the opportunity to count.”
“And Pierrot and Macaya control them all.”
“Control is perhaps not the most exact term,” Laveaux said. “I expect that they can deliver them.”
“What is your estimation, then?”
“Bon,” said Laveaux. “They are already inside our defenses—assuming the mulattoes act in concert with them. With disciplined troops of the Sixth to stiffen the spine of this African horde, I have no doubt they could sweep us all into the sea in a matter of hours. Thus an end of French rule in the north and possibly in all of the colony.”
“Ah,” said Sonthonax. “It is fortunate, then, that les gens de couleur have no good cause to side with these insurgent blacks.”
Laveaux took off his hat and scratched the back of his head unconsciously. The tone of his civilian superior suggested that he was practicing his words for some other audience.
“No,” Sonthonax continued. “It is well that the fortunes of les gens de couleur are so closely allied with our own. For we, after all, have been pledged from the beginning to defend their rights as citizens; we recognize only two classes of men in Saint Domingue: the free and the slaves. Equality is irresistible! Whoever stands against it must be swept away.”
“Let us hope that they will yield to such persuasions,” said Laveaux.
“But it is not at all a matter of persuasion.” Sonthonax began leading Laveaux back toward the fire; he noticed now that the two rebel chieftains had withdrawn, or been dismissed, from the circle of light.
“Courage,” Sonthonax said. “We have only to recall for them the mutuality of our interests.”
ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 3, Sonthonax returned to Le Cap with the regiment of mulattoes at his back. The rebel blacks from the northern plain had fallen away beyond Morne du Cap, and no one spoke of the threat they had presented, but there was no further resistance to the integration of les gens de couleur into the French troops. Or if resistance did appear, it was sharply and suddenly put down.
Within days, Sonthonax had deported the Regiment Le Cap en masse. He set up a tribunal to purge “les aristocrates de la peau” from the civilian townspeople as well, and these also soon began to fill the holds of ships in the harbor bound for France. “It is hard for Frenchmen to rule by terror,” Sonthonax wrote to his new minister of marine, Mongé, “but one must so rule here at Sainte Domingue, where there are neither morals nor patriotism, neither love of France nor respect for her laws; where the ruling passions are egoism and pride; where the chain of despotism has weighed for a century on all classes of men from governor to slave. I have chastised; I have struck down: all the factions are in fear before me. And I shall continue to punish with the same severity whosoever shall trouble the public peace, whosoever shall dare deny the national will—especially the holy law of equality!”
During these same days, Laveaux was scurrying among the various military departments, taking such steps as he might to retain those officers whose services he was loath to lose. It was not long before he came to Captain Maillart, who sulked in his quarters in a fog of gloom, expecting his own deportation hourly.
“Now hear me out before you answer—” Laveaux took a bundle of paper from his coat and strummed it against his opposite palm. “I have here a commission transferring you to a regiment under Rochambeau…”
Maillart sat up in his chair with a start. He saw at once that this could be the salvaging of his career, for he did not doubt that in France all the officers of the Regiment Le Cap were likely to be ignominiously dismissed from service.
“Will I serve under colored officers?” Maillart said.
“Eventually, perhaps…” Laveaux said, then changed his mind. “Yes, undoubtedly you will. And you will do it honorably.”
Maillart lowered his eyes and chewed on a fingernail.
“Should you accept this new commission,” Laveaux said, “I have also papers for a six-week furlough—long overdue in your case. It will allow you time for reflection. Now I can scarce give you more than a day. You know the situation. But I trust you, Maillart. Never once have I doubted your loyalty. You are a good officer and I refuse to let all my good officers be swallowed up by these political disturbances. Tomorrow I must return for your decision.”
He turned and made to leave the room. Maillart stood up.
“I accept,” he blurted. “I accept the commission.”
Laveaux turned back and nodded. “Good,” he said. “I hoped you would.”
“With thanks,” Maillart said.
Laveaux smiled slightly, his hand upon the doorknob. He opened the door and put a foot through it.
“Colonel,” Maillart said. Laveaux turned back, raising an eyebrow.
“Have you not trusted me too easily?” Maillart said. “Is not your confidence too great?”
“I cannot say,” Laveaux said. “I don’t think so. I do not believe so. I think you will be moved to justify whatever confidence is reposed in you.” And he went out into the stony barracks yard before Maillart could think of another word to hold him back.