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ralized in the old capital; and all obliterated in the space of a few minutes. Everything that the colony
boasted in the way of fine buildings, private houses, pictures, furniture, silver and works of art—for the
houses on the plantations were often little more than temporary places destined more for administrative
than domestic ends—also vanished in the conflagration. The only hints we can glean of this vanished
magnificence are a few broken pieces of sculpture, and one or two twisted and half-melted bits of cutlery
in the Musée Volcanologique in the outskirts of the town.
I felt surprised and, I suppose, disappointed at the aspect of the town. Our eyes were prepared for a
total ruin, a West Indian Pompeii, a landscape of the moon. But below us, on a flat terrain between the
spurs of lava and the leaf-covered scoriæ, lay a thriving little town. The houses were sparsely placed, it is
true, among shapeless masses of green. Tall, well-grown trees were everywhere, and over their branches
a building appeared which might have been a young New York skyscraper. It was only when we were ac-
tually inside the town that we were able to descry the great heaps of weed-grown rubble; but it is possible
that an uninformed stranger, wandering through the few crowded and shop-lined streets and the populous
market-place, might have gathered no hint of the catastrophe. But, hidden and scarcely discernible under
the bread-fruit trees, lay the charred ruins of the old theatre, which, quite plainly, had once been a graceful
eighteenth-century building. Now we were just able to locate, among the lianas and the tumbled masonry,
the shallow and elegant ellipse of two curving staircases which joined in a horseshoe at the pedestal of a
statue, continued as one for four or five steps and then ceased. We gazed with wonder at the cell which
had saved the only survivor from the hecatomb.
The fact that a new and populous town has sprung so soon and so gaily from the wreck of the old is
baffling. Is it dauntlessness, insane fecklessness, or a cautious reckoning on the law of averages? I asked
an old man in a rum shop if he thought the mountain was no longer dangerous. He shrugged his shoulders,
grinned, and said: ' Espéwons .'
It is hard to reconstruct from the ruins and the new houses the beautiful old capital that novels and
memoirs describe. It was founded by d'Esnambuc, and after his death became the headquarters of his
nephew, le Sieur Duparquet, who owned the island as his personal domain, along with St. Lucia, Gren-
ada and the Grenadines. He administered this enormous property with great skill, patching up quar-
rels between settlers, quelling mutinies, fighting the Caribs, and laying out towns, among them Fort-
de-France, which is still sometimes called “Fwoyal” after its pre-Revolutionary name of Fort-Royal.
However, his widow, during the minority of the heirs, was less fortunate, and the island was on the brink
of ruin when Louis XIV bought it from her for 120,000 pounds tourney, and turned it into a Crown Co-
lony. Thanks to the importation of sugar-cane in 1654, by a Brazilian Jew called Benjamin da Costa,
and the later arrival of coffee and cocoa trees and indigo, the island became, in the eighteenth century,
the most prosperous of all the French king's possessions overseas. For over a hundred years St. Pierre
was the market-place and sorting-house for all the French Antilles, and the town grew correspondingly
in grandeur and wealth. During the reigns of the last two Louis, Martinican fortunes were as famous in
Paris and Versailles as those of the East Indian nabobs in London.
The Martinican world at this period was roughly the following. The leading section of society were
the colonists and landowners, many of them descendants of old French families, who owned large estates
and paid a yearly levy on their crops to the government in tobacco, cotton or sugar. These were the people
who built the large houses, imported the slaves, advised the governor on the conduct of the colony, of-
ficered the local forces, set the tempo of life in the Antilles, and echoed in their remote island the fashions
and thought of Paris. Immediately below these were the bourgeoisie, who descended from the former en-
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