Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [243]
Throughout the summer the English kept Toussaint occupied with inconclusive skirmishing along the Artibonite. Rumors from the south, where the mulatto general Rigaud commanded, ran to scandal and catastrophe. Sonthonax had sent three delegates—Kerverseau, Leborgne, and Rey—with instructions to undermine the mulatto oligarchy as they found it possible, to investigate the role the southern gens de couleur might have played in the Villatte rebellion, and particularly to ship the notorious Pinchinat to Le Cap in order that he might explain his conduct to the commissioners. The delegates proved adept at stirring up trouble, but Leborgne outdid the others by seducing Marie Villeneuve, a colored beauty of Les Cayes who happened to be engaged to General Rigaud. To put a razor edge on the insult (Isabelle Cigny found this detail peculiarly delicious), Leborgne invited Rigaud to his rooms “to see the most beautiful woman in town,” then drew back his bed curtain to reveal to the general’s dismayed sight his own debauched and ravished fiancée—Rigaud would have strangled Leborgne on the spot and was well on his way to doing just that, the story ran, when the household servants intervened.
A short while later, Les Cayes erupted in a riot, and a good many whites were slaughtered while Rigaud stood by, wondering aloud, Why are the people in such a rage? This time there was no black army standing by to quash the mulatto rebellion, as Toussaint’s men had done in the case of Villatte. Sonthonax’s delegates escaped the massacre by scurrying to different boats which eventually returned them all to Le Cap. Upon their departure, Pinchinat came out of hiding to reoccupy the house he’d abandoned at Les Cayes, and the whole Southern Department moved into open rebellion against the authority of the Commission. When Sonthonax issued a proclamation outlawing Rigaud, the mulatto officer tied it to a donkey’s tail and had it dragged through the streets of the town.
Whenever the doctor visited him, Toussaint was close-mouthed on that whole subject; he had advised Sonthonax to conciliate Rigaud rather than interrogate him, but once the delegation had achieved its disaster, he said no more about it. His mind was fixed on other matters: the campaign he was organizing against the British at Mirebalais, and the election of deputies to the French legislature. “My General, My Father, My Good Friend—” he wrote to Laveaux in August,
As I foresee (and with chagrin) what unpleasantness is likely to happen to you in this unfortunate country, for whose inhabitants you have sacrificed your life, your wife, and your children, and as I would not like to be witness to such unhappiness, I wish for you to be named deputy, so that you can have the satisfaction to see your own country once again, and be safe from the factions that are gestating in Saint Domingue . . .
Sonthonax himself stood for election to the Council of Five Hundred at the same time as Laveaux. His motive for this move was hotly debated in the Cigny parlor and around the dinner table. Monsieur Cigny posited that Toussaint himself would engineer the election to rid himself of Laveaux and Sonthonax, whose authority was an obstacle to his ambition, while Arnaud maintained that Sonthonax, seeing his support eroding on all sides and having made as great a hash of his second mission as of his first, sought election as proof of his popularity and as cover for his eventual return to France, where it had taken all his lawyerly dexterity to escape the guillotine, when he had been recalled the first time. Then again, Laveaux’s election