Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 196

months later, for the identity of these arms, I discovered that they could only have belonged to the Duke
of Montagu, to whom, in 1722, George I had made a grant of the Windward Islands. Four years before,
the King of France had made a similar grant to the Marshal d'Estrées. Both of them sent out expeditions
to colonize their estates, and the two parties came to blows in St. Lucia and St. Vincent. The Duke's gun
must have been captured in some skirmish by the Marshal's men before the islands became neutral at the
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, six years after the gun was cast in London. It would then have been brought to
Sainte Domingue by the French Fleet, and here, during the revolution, have fallen into the hands of the
revolted slaves of the north to be finally dragged up to the Citadel by the myrmidons of Christophe.
Lying on my stomach, I gazed down the expanse of wall to the point where it joined the rock in a
green constellation of banana trees. The Bonnet d'Evêque is the highest peak in this particular range, and
the forested mountains, seen from above, rolled away like a relief map. Here and there the shadow of a
cloud, twisted out of shape by ravines, floated across the upheaval. Disturbed by my presence, a kestrel
peered up from his hole in the wall, and then plunged down like a plummet towards the tree-tops. The air
trembled in the heat, and to the north the distant line of sea could only be distinguished from the sky by
the dim outline of the island of Tortuga, the most notorious haunt of the old buccaneers and filibusters in
the whole of the Caribbean. The kestrel returned and flew past the keep with its flagpole and the languid
Haitian flag, and dropped down the other side. I got up and joined Joan and Costa in one of the gun gal-
leries, and descended through the chill depths of the Citadel towards our wilting horses. Si monumentum
quaeris …. I wonder which is the more apt memorial to the genius of Henry Christophe— this great mar-
tial acropolis, or the ruined palace, miles below, of Sans Souci?
The tropics are merciless to ruins. So savage is the onslaught of the rain, the creepers, the insects and
decay, that dwellings which are abandoned for a single year have the appearance of centuries of derel-
iction. But something uncompromisingly stubborn in the fabric of Sans Souci has redeemed it from this
dateless anonymity. From a distance, the great staircases, converging like a truncated pyramid, lend it the
appearance of an Aztec or a Maya ruin, but with every advancing step through the wooded valley, the
columns and arches and balustrades become clearer and assign it more unmistakably to the heroic era of
its construction.
The drive leads through great gateways of clustering pillars and sentry boxes past the white Palladian
rotunda of the chapel with its pillared portico surprisingly crowned with a dome that is almost Moorish.
And then it leads onwards, in a royal sweep, to the foot of the grand staircase: a portentous colonnaded
zigzag that branches at a platform with a romantic rockery, and joins, and then branches again in beautiful
shallow flights in the fashion of the grand staircase of Saint Cloud. It was this palace, indeed, that King
Henry, as he leant over the designer's shoulder, had in mind: a staircase that would outsweep its French
equivalent, and a palace that could compare in splendour with that of any monarch in Europe. And he
got it. Yellow plaster now peels from the massive ribs of brick and stone, and brambles smother the re-
cumbent pillars. But the main skeleton still stands, and it is easy, in the mind's eye, to reassemble this
venerable wreckage into the splendid building that it must once have been, that old prints and paintings
prove that it was.
Brother Yves, in the library of Saint Louis de Gonzague, showed me a picture of Sans Souci painted,
it is supposed, by one of the royal pages. [4] The palace, flying with arbitrary perspective above the dome
of the chapel, stands among brilliant palm trees and mangoes: an opulent, golden, graceful building sur-
rounded by lawns and pleasances and embowered in trees. In the centre of the facade, pillars support a