Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [150]
So Toussaint was invited to “share his enlightenment” ‘with General Brunet on a nearby plantation. Just ‘why he chose to stick his head into this trap has mystified most students of his story, but whatever his motives, he was easily made prisoner there, ‘while a simultaneous raid on Ennery captured his family. The arrest really was a treacherous ploy, as well as a clear violation of the terms for peace that had been agreed, and Toussaint's exclamations of shock and dismay have a more sincere ring than many other protestations in his memoir. He was especially offended at being treated as a common criminal and denied the respect to which, as a general in the French army, he clearly was entitled.
If you had no more need of my services and if you wanted to replace me, shouldn't you have behaved with me as you always behave with regard to white French generals? You warn them before divesting them of their authority; you send a person charged with making them aware of the order to turn over command to this one or that; in the case that they refuse to obey, then you take extreme measures against them, then you can justly treat them as rebels and ship them to France … Shouldn't General Leclerc have sent for me and warned me himself that people had made this or that report to him, true or not, against me? Shouldn't he have said to me:? have given you my word and promised you the protection of the government; today, since you have made yourself culpable, I am going to send you before that government, to make an account of your conduct.' Or else: ‘The government orders you to place yourself before it; I transmit that order to you.’ But nothing of the sort; on the contrary he acted toward me with means one has never employed even with respect to the worst criminals. No doubt I owe this treatment to my color; but my color … has my color ever hindered me from serving my country with fidelity and zeal? Does the color of my body tarnish my honor and my courage?21
With that, Toussaint had struck into the heart of the matter.
Well before the Leclerc expedition, proofs of the honor and courage of his service to France were written all over his body: “I have spilled my blood for my country; I took a bullet in the right hip, which I have still in my body, I had a violent contusion to the head, occasioned by a can-nonball; it rattled my jaw so severely that the greater part of my teeth fell out and those that are left to me are still very loose. Finally, I have received on different occasions seventeen wounds whose honorable scars remain to me.”22 Toussaint's self-description as a naively frank old soldier may have been difficult to take at face value, but the service record his scars could show was much, much more convincing.
On September 15, 1802, one General Caffarelli appeared at the Fort de Joux. Napoleon considered Caffarelli to be one of his very most skillful interrogators, a man from whom nothing could finally be withheld. Caffarelli grilled Toussaint for twelve days and learned practically nothing at all.
“I committed myself to fulfill this mission,” Caffarelli wrote to Napoleon,
in such a manner as to attain the goal that you desire, and if I have not arrived at that goal, it is because this profoundly double-dealing and deceptive man, master of himself, precise and adroit, had his theme well prepared in advance and said nothing except what he wanted to say.
From the first day he broached a conversation during which he treated me to a very long narrative about what