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the best-looking we had seen in any of the islands: tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and long-
legged, with a fine carriage of the head and great elegance of movement and gesture. What a relief to
see this colour and splendour and extravagance after the shapeless dresses of the colonies! Many of our
neighbours were pale in complexion, but the majority were of an imposing ebony. A woman sitting at the
next table was perhaps the most beautiful in a room full of sable Venuses. She had fine dark features of
extraordinary delicacy and regularity, and sat with her elbows leaning on the table, clasping and unclasp-
ing her long ringed fingers as she talked, and each time she did so the heavy diamond bracelets on her
forearm flashed. Enormous pearls glowed in the lobes of her ears, and her dress was made of stiff scarlet
taffeta.
It was about an hour short of dawn before we got back to our hotel. When, at last, slightly dizzy, I
went upstairs, I must have mistaken the door, for suddenly I found myself in a strange room. A small fire
of logs and charcoal had been built on a sheet of tin in the centre of the floor, filling the upper half of
the room with smoke. Round it squatted a peasant family, a man and three little girls of diminishing size,
and an old woman who was cooking their breakfast. Their gourd-plates were being filled with ladlefuls
of hot maize. Five startled black faces turned in my direction, their dark features and the whites of their
eyes very distinct in the firelight. We might have been in the heart of the Congo.
Our second hotel, for the first proved too lugubrious to remain in for long, was cheap, and entirely fre-
quented by Haitians. It was built above a pâtisserie and bar on the Champ de Mars. This leafy expanse
is the Haitian equivalent, not of its Parisian namesake, but of the Place de la Concorde, and it is about
as large. It is the real heart of Haitian civic and national life, a clearing covered by a network of paths,
and adorned with statues and bandstands and trees. It was here, during the Revolution, that the patriot
Sonthonax erected a guillotine. An immense crowd, according to Sir Spencer St. John, assembled to wit-
ness the execution of a suspected royalist. 'But when they saw the bright blade descend and the head roll
at their feet, they were horror-stricken and, rushing on the guillotine, tore it to pieces, and no other has
ever been again erected in Haiti.'
I was woken every morning by a bugle just below my window, and standing on the balcony I watched
an officer and a platoon of the Haitian guard breaking the colours from a mast among the trees. The
brazen notes of the National Anthem rang through the air as the little packet of bunting jerked its way up
the mast. The soldiers stood with presented arms, and the passers-by remained riveted to the ground. The
flag fluttered open, the final notes died away, and the Haitians thawed into mobility again. The Haitian
banner is the Revolutionary tricolor of France from which the offending white stripe has been torn: a
red and blue bicolor. The centre is charged with a warlike panoply that symbolizes the Haitian War of
Independence: a palmiste surmounted by the cap of liberty on a pike; a drum and cannon-balls at the
foot of the tree, and cannon pointing their muzzles to dexter and sinister. Round the central palm half a
dozen furled banners radiate in a vainglorious peacock's tail. The two-coloured flag and its martial in-
signia are virtually a heraldic expression of the cry of Boisrond-Tonnerre when he drew up the Haitian
Act of Independence in 1804: 'What we need,' he affirmed, 'is the skin of a white man for parchment,
his skull for a writing-desk, his blood for ink and a bayonet for a pen'.
The statues of the heroes of Haitian liberty form a scattered population in stone, and for many of the
simpler Haitians they have almost the mystic attributes of totem-poles. The most representative of these
is the effigy of Dessalines, the first emperor of Haiti, an imposing figure with strong Negro features, a
braided military frock-coat, enormous epaulettes and a cocked hat, and a fiercely flourished sabre. On
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