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attempted to withdraw on his tracks. Then Garat fired a tremulous shot that only struck the Emperor's
horse, and Dessalines and his mount rolled together on the ground. The Emperor struggled to free him-
self, crying, “Come to my help, Charlotin!” Charlotin, leaping from his horse, had seized Dessalines
round the body when a hail of bullets mowed them both down.
'A terrible scene ensued. The Emperor was stripped of his clothes and his arms, his pistol and his
sabre were stolen. The fingers were hacked from his hands in order that the rings might be more easily
removed, and Yayou had him laid out on a stretcher of rifles. “Who would think,” he sneered, “that only
a quarter of an hour ago this miserable little wretch made the whole of Haiti tremble!”
'While they made their way, drunk with joy, to Port-au-Prince, the body of the Emperor was allowed
again and again to fall, and the crowd hurled themselves on it and stoned it and slashed it to bits with
their sabres. When, half an hour later, they threw it into the middle of the Place du Gouvernement, the
Emperor was no longer recognizable. The skull had been beaten in, the hands and the feet cut off. For
hours he was left there, frequently stoned by children who were encouraged in their violence by their
seniors.
'When evening fell, an old mad woman called Desirée put the bleeding remains of the Emperor in a
bag, and carried them off to the Inner Cemetery….'
The idea of a monarchy cropped up again in the middle of the century, when an illiterate and not very
intelligent Haitian called Soulouque made himself Emperor Faustin I in 1849. The fact that this strange
event took place so soon after Louis Philippe had been driven from his throne, when crowns were still
shaking on most of the royal heads of Europe, is another illustration of the entirely individual trend of
Haitian politics. But, except for his tyranny and his executions and the vast nobility that he created—four
princes, fifty-nine dukes, ninety-nine counts, two hundred and fifteen barons and three hundred and forty-
six knights, to be exact—the fantastic splendour of his coronation and the showers of medals, crosses,
ribbons and stars that he scattered among his subjects, he was a feeble version of Dessalines and Chris-
tophe. He ruined the economy of his Empire and finally lost the support of the whole country. The usual
conspiracies began, and he only avoided the inevitable murder by escape. Trollope, on his West Indian
travels, encountered him in Jamaica on his way to obscurity and death in exile.
A last, faint and rather comic echo of these emperors and kings occurred in the 'twenties of this cen-
tury. A rather simple-minded N.C.O. in the U.S. Marines, called Faustin Wirkus—a man of Polish ori-
gin—was stationed, as commander, on the small Haitian island of Gonave. On the strength of the simil-
arity of his Christian name with that of the Emperor Soulouque, the islanders, at the instigation of a very
intelligent Mambo, persuaded him that they proposed to regard him as their king. I think he was actu-
ally crowned. Gratified by the deference, real or simulated, by which he was surrounded, his rule was
very much milder than the normal rigour of an occupation, and everybody was happy. The white king of
Gonave died some years ago, and his daughter is now married to the painter Louverture Poisson.
Compared to our other island sojourns, we had stayed so long in Haiti that our departure was almost
a deracination. Acquaint-anceships had begun tentatively to take root, and the mood of departure hung
heavily upon us.
We had spent the morning in Morne Marinette, talking, in her
tonnelle
, to Madame Luc la Forêt, a
beautiful priestess of Erzulie. It was a very different place from most of the Voodoo temples we had seen.
It was whitewashed, spotlessly clean, and, in the sober light of mid-morning, free of the sinister, brooding
atmosphere that pervades them at night. The great painted drums were neatly piled and sunlight poured
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