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been recognized, and these myrmidons of Death all wear the Baron's livery. A hounci-bossale swiftly
appeared with a collection of headgear, and, in spite of the Ghédé's shouts and her jerks to free herself,
they contrived to hold her while a broken bowler hat was crammed over her ears. A battered trilby was
thrust on top of it, and on the very summit of this pagoda, an ancient top-hat. A great pair of black glasses
was hastily straddled across her nose, and the moment she was released the Ghédé flew galloping round
the tonnelle once more, screeching and laughing and firing a child's cap-pistol into the air. The drums
thundered, and the drummers roared and snarled over their cylinders like three jaguars. As she cavor-
ted past us, we could see that her eyes were turned back in the revulsion that had become so familiar.
Soon another Lwa descended, and by the first light at least half a dozen dancers had fallen and died and
risen again, each of them possessed and transformed into members of this ghoulish horde—Baron Ci-
metière, Général Criminel, Capitaine Zombi and the rest, whose rites are celebrated with cracking whips
and gunpowder and the wielding of colossal bamboo phalli—until the peristyle seemed to be filled with
the top-hats, coat-tails and goggles, the shrieks and the cantrips of a troop of demented and nymphoma-
niac scarecrows.
I spent the next afternoon, as usual, in the library of the Institut de Saint Louis de Gonzague. It is a mi-
raculously cool and neutral refuge from the incandescent streets. Recognizing me with a smile, Brother
Yves, the little Breton librarian, would climb up the ladder and descend with his arms full of vellum-
bound memoirs of the colony of Sainte Domingue, and all the nineteenth-century works about the War of
Independence and the ephemeral reigns of King Henri Christophe and the Emperor Faustin Soulouque.
Occasionally another cassocked figure, a fellow-countryman from Morbihan, would come rustling in
from the cloisters, and I could hear their quiet conversations in Breton as I turned the pages. I asked
Brother Yves what he thought of people who practised Voodoo. He looked at me with tolerant amuse-
ment, and said: ' Mais ils sont tout à fait coucou .'
Cuckoo. It was a new ecclesiastical standpoint, and a more reasonable one, I thought, than that of poor
Father Cosme. There had been something really tragic about those photographs of the abandoned anti-su-
perstition campaigns, the felled Resting-Places, the holocausts of idolatrous gear. Yet what should be the
attitude of the Church in these extraordinary circumstances? A pretty strong anti-clerical bias exists in
many of the Latin-American republics, a delayed-action Voltairianism which aims at the influence of the
Church the conventional accusations of obscurantism and reaction. But the defective religious practice
of the Haitians springs from exactly the opposite reasons. For if the Church is reactionary, it reacts to a
different and an alien past, and the only drawback of its obscurantism and its magic is that they are not,
compared with the intoxication of Voodoo, obscure or magical enough. A religion thrives on proscription,
but, failing through competition on grounds such as these, it can only repine. It is an undeserved reverse,
for the Catholic Church has done more than any other form of Christianity to mitigate the essentially un-
promising circumstances of the West Indies.
We went back to the tonnelle after dinner to see the new initiates emerge from the houmfor. The
hounci-canzos of either sex were dressed in their best Sunday dresses or in neat blue suits. Several girls
wore high-heeled shoes made out of celluloid, so that the feet inside looked as though they were in aspic.
Coloured sweets and glasses of liquor were being offered on trays, and only the softly beating drums, the
fire of Marinette, and the dismal cross of Baron Samedi reminded us that we were in the precincts of a
tonnelle .
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