Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We grew to loathe Pointe-à-Pitre. It was hard to choose between the day—the dust and mud and the vacu-
ity of the streets—and the night, those interminable hours of damp torpor under a mosquito net. These
edifices of muslin give to all sleepers the appearance of tented heroes on the Dardan Plain, and under-
neath them, lulled by the falsetto of thwarted insects, one hovers between sleeping and waking till dawn.
On se réveille
, states a French guide-book to the western tropics,
lourd et endolori.
Heavy and dolorous,
we would descend to explore the dwindling charms of Pointe-à-Pitre.
Our last conscious sight-seeing expedition was a visit to the Musée Schoelcher. It was a small derelict
building. Inside, we gazed at a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo, and another of the Apollo Belvedere,
two turtle shells, a faded engraving of a mango tree, and our visit was over. There was nothing else. Ex-
cept, in the railing-enclosed dust outside, a colossal plaster head—larger than a man—of Schoelcher, the
French Wilberforce: a white Roc's egg with Louis Philippe whiskers, beaming into the suffocating An-
tillean emptiness. We determined there and then to make a getaway.
[1]
Another eccentricity (or survival?) in the pronunciation of these Creole squires is the flattening of the
French
oi
sound into the equivalent of the English
aw.
Can this be the explanation of Barham's seemingly
arbitrary rhymes in the Ingoldsby Legends?
E.g.
—
'And no poet could fancy, no painter could draw
One more perfect in all points, more free from a flaw,
Than hers, who now sits by the couch of St. Foix …'
(The Black Mousquetaire)
[2]
Doudou
in the vocative means, exactly, darling, but in any other sense is the mild French-Antillean
equivalent of
poule.
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