Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [266]
What a strange world it was, he thought, as the unshod donkey slipped almost silently through the posts of the city gateway. Puddles reflected moonlight from the road; to his left the cane fields bristled against the moonlit sky. When the Revolution had swept over France, the royalists had thought to make this colony a sanctuary for themselves (some of them were still struggling, feebly, in league with the English, to bring that about). Now that the Revolution looked to be faltering at home, perhaps it did make sense for a Jacobin of Sonthonax’s type to try to make the colony a refuge for wandering revolutionaries. Although Pascal was right, of course: in answering for the excesses and failures of his first sojourn in Saint Domingue, Sonthonax had contrived his transformation into a good Thermidorean. Still, in the current climate, that might not be quite good enough.
The air was fresh and pleasant after the rain, and the road was mostly empty. Occasionally he overtook a file of women walking in the fragrant shadows with baskets on their heads, or was hailed by a donkey-riding peasant in a straw hat much like his own. Deeper in the trees to the right of the road, the flicker of firelight appeared at intervals, with the smell of roasting meat or beans boiling with peppers. The doctor took a lump of hard cheese from his pocket and gnawed it as he rode along. It was late when he came to Bréda, but the grand’case was ablaze with light, and he knew it would be a good deal later before his tasks were done.
Next morning the doctor rode back to Le Cap on an ordinary horse (the borrowed donkey had wound up somewhere in the train of Toussaint’s entourage), swaying in the saddle and half hallucinating from fatigue. The letter which had been ground out all through the previous night, through numerous drafts by many secretaries, was in the form of congratulations, praising the successes of Sonthonax in defeating the enemies of the colony, restoring peace and stability and the prosperity of the plantations—in his dictation, Toussaint kept revisiting the phrasing of those lines, which had apparently been discussed with the commissioner beforehand. But the rest of the document underlined the idea that it was now essential for Sonthonax to return to France, in order to present the truth of events of Saint Domingue to the Directoire, at this time when so many others were trying so energetically to misrepresent the situation here.
The letter was carried by a small detachment of Toussaint’s honor guard, along with the doctor and some other functionaries, but behind them by perhaps a half-mile the army was also moving toward the town, though with less than its usual sharp discipline. Toussaint’s party rode across the Rue Espagnole toward the casernes; midway along that route the doctor doubled back and found the donkey, and leading it by its rope behind his horse, he went down to the Cigny house to return it to its owner. Already he could hear the clamor of the troops massing outside the city gate.
Exhausted as he was, he rode back to the casernes at once; for one thing, there was his horse to return, for this mount too had been borrowed out of Toussaint’s cavalry. With that accomplished, he went into the mess hall of the barracks, where the officers of Toussaint’s Etat Major had been summoned to add their signatures to the letter. Maillart, Vaublanc and Riau stood toward the end of the room, and the doctor joined their company.
“. . . May you always be the defender of the cause which we have embraced . . .” Toussaint, standing at the front of the room, was intoning the last phrases of the final draft. “. . . of which