Martinique continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 56

the clouds heaved away into a distant and harmless ring. Looking inland, I saw the brown forms of our
hosts moving under the trees that the raindrops had turned into high baldachins and pagodas of glittering
green. Beyond their crests, the mountains which a moment before had been obliterated were now uncan-
nily clear in detail, suddenly close, impending, about to lean over and topple.
The country through which we were travelling rolled away from the road in the growing darkness. Clean,
independent and sad. We were heading, for the second time, for Josephine's girlhood home of the Pager-
ie, the site and the remains of which Rose-Rosette had bought in order to save this relic by keeping the
jungle at bay from the few shards that remained, and to have somewhere to retire from the dust of the
capital.
The first time we had approached it through Trois Ilets, the nearest village: a collection of pleasant
eighteenth-century houses built of brick and tile opening into a little square with a grey church at one end.
The interior is more ornate than that of most of the churches of the island. Several fine chandeliers hang
in the aisle, and a large slab in the north transept marks the resting-place of Josephine's mother, Madame
Tascher de la Pagerie. The rustic track from the village passed through acres of sugar-cane that narrowed
into a valley, and then rose and sank into the windless green hollow of la Pagerie.
Beyond the rambling farmhouse lie the remains of Josephine's house. The dilapidation is almost com-
plete. Scarcely two stones of the original house remain standing, and only the quadrilateral of the found-
ations, which are nowhere more than three feet high, still stand. The rest has vanished, and its place has
been taken by grass and weed and bramble. A few yards beyond the house lies a circle of truncated walls
that were once the sugar mill, with a flowering tree growing in the heart of its crater. The tall rectangu-
lar chimney of the refinery is still erect, and the walls are intact, though unstable, as high as the second
storey. Part of this was used as a dwelling-house during Josephine's visit after she had become Empress
of the French. It is built of great blocks of hewn stone, and the lintels of doorways and the carved ar-
chitraves of windows are on the point of falling from their sockets. The interior of the house is a wilder-
ness of trees and creepers. Rusty hinges projecting from the masonry of the first storey, just discernible
through the leaves, mark the entrance to a room where one of the Beauharnais children was born, but
neither door nor walls nor floor remain. The roots of an enormous tree, fanning out in the tentacles of an
octopus, hold the ruins in their grip. Creepers and parasites of immense girth reach through gaps in the
stone, like the intruding forearms of burglars. They prise the walls out of their symmetry, as though the
tensing of a single fibre would fling them headlong.
This shell is backed by the out-houses, the barns, the laundry, the rambling and rush-roofed barracoons
where the slaves lived. All these meaner structures have outlived the seigneurial dwelling. Geese pecked
and gobbled among the thick grass by the farmhouse, and cream-coloured cattle grazed across the sloping
meadow that curved from the ruin to the edge of the forest. Below the sugar mill, under an archway of
savonettes and hibiscus, the waters of a river lie in a dark sheet dappled by the shadows of leaves. They
fall in a little cataract and meander away down a leafy tunnel. La Pagerie is at the bottom of a green bowl
whose sides are heavy with vegetation. Tree-ferns and bamboos rear their plumage, and as the evening
comes on, deep shadows collect under the mango trees. Fireflies hang in the air and dart backwards and
forwards in angular patterns, brightening every second as the night falls and the cicadas and the frogs
become more strident, and the woods are full of the cooing of pigeons. Downhill into the dusk winds the
track along which the Taschers and the Beauharnais drove to church in Trois Rivières. Black coachmen