Travel Reference
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rolled between his horse's feet. It was the end. He was helped back into the palace, where, deafened by
the noise outside the windows, he took a pistol that was ready loaded for such a contingency, it is said,
with a silver bullet, and fired it through his heart.
The kingdom collapsed. The enemy was triumphant everywhere, and in a few days the streets of Cap
Haitien were resounding with cheers for Boyer, the Mulatto president. Some faithful servants carried the
king's body up the mountain-side and buried it in the Citadel in secret. The crown prince was assassin-
ated, and the queen and the princesses, fleeing the country under the protection of the British admiral,
Popham, found refuge in London and finally, after a long, impoverished hejira, in Pisa. Prince Ferdinand,
the last of the dynasty, later expired in Paris in the utmost misery.
Little now remains of the mosaic floors, and the panelling of precious Haitian woods has been torn
from the walls where the tapestries and portraits and the great French looking-glasses used to hang. We
followed a little Negro, his bare feet pattering over the flagstones, through derelict saloons and halls and
libraries where the evening shadows were assembling. The palace is open on all sides to the weather, and
anybody can wander through thresholds from which the doors have vanished. Grass flourished every-
where, and a sound of birds was audible in the rafters overhead. Behind the royal stables, a stream fell in
little cascades under the archways of the bread-fruit and paw-paw trees, and in the centre of a lawn the
branches of a great star-apple tree, under which the king used to hold council and deliver justice, opened
its great umbrella. A pedestal supporting the white marble bust of a woman who might be a heroine of
Chateaubriand now moulders there romantically under the leaves. A long colonnade on the garden-side
of the palace runs along a terrace. The lawns descend in unkempt stages to the gloom of a valley where
everything, in this last moment of daylight, glowed with colours that dwindled as we watched them, and
died. Large white moths flew past, and the last shoals of crimson faded from the mackerel sky. The fire-
flies kindled erratically against the dark foliage of the mountain-side, and the song of the crickets and the
frogs grew louder, while the broken arches around us signalled through the dusk more legibly than any
of the sonnets of Du Bellay or the engravings of Piranesi, their obsolete messages of grandeur and decay.
The lives of these great Negroes of Haiti (and, above all, their deaths), the ferocity of their battles, the
pinnacles of power that they achieved and their ineluctable disasters unroll with the tragic inevitability of
the Atridae; and the atmosphere through which these trajectories soar from slavery to the throne thickens
as the curves ascend into a mould from which there is no escape: the despotic solitude, the overcloud-
ing of their lustre in the fumes of conspiracy, the last blinding flash of the tyrant's fall and the final dark
whirlpool of bloodshed. It is the unbreathably heroic and doomed air, heavy with magnificence and hor-
ror and the grotesque, that weighs on the pages of the Duchess of Malfi and Tamerlane . It is scarcely as-
tonishing, one reflects, that these tremendous figures who lived and acted little more than a century ago,
still obsess the imagination of the whole of Haiti; especially when it is remembered that the last outcome
of all their gestures was not the destruction of states and empires, but the final victory over slavery and
the birth of a free republic.
Listen to Dr. Dorsainvil's account of the death of the Emperor James I of Haiti, Jean Jacques Dessa-
lines; an event which was to prove a model for the end of several subsequent rulers:—
'Surrounded by a feeble escort and revolving in his mind projects of vengeance, the Emperor arrived.
Suddenly a voice cried, “Halt! Surround him!” and soldiers rose from the bushes and made a ring round
Dessalines. But respect and fear prevailed, and nobody obeyed the officers' order to fire. “I am betrayed!”
the Emperor said. He struck at those round him with his cane, shot a soldier dead with his pistol, and
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