Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
revellers. This fear was soon overwhelmed by a far greater terror
as the volcano erupted with unparalleled violence during the
Governor's firework display:
The night had vanished. Everything was suddenly brighter
than noonday and from the crater of the Saltpêtrière a
broad pillar of red and white flame, thickly streaked with
black, was shooting into the sky like the fire from a cannon's
mouth. It climbed higher every second until it had reached
a fierce zenith miles up in the air, and the roar that accom-
panied its journey was interrupted by hoarse thunderclaps
that almost broke the eardrum.5
Unlike Saint-Pierre on Martinique, but like uninhabited
Krakatoa, Sabrina and Graham Island, the island of Saint-Jacques,
'its mountain and its forests, its beautiful town, and the forty-
two thousand souls who had lived there'6 all disappeared beneath
the sea. By a flick of the novelist's pen, Berthe survived - as did
her pictures, safely by now in Paris. Some time later fishermen
would claim that anyone 'crossing the eastern channel between
the islands in carnival time, can hear the sound of violins coming
up through the water. As though a ball were in full swing at the
bottom of the sea'.7 The painting that roused the narrator's inter-
est at the beginning of the story - 'the last thing I painted in the
Antilles', said Berthe - was signed and dated 'B. de Rennes,
1902',8 as significant a date for the fictional Saint-Jacques, as for
the all-too-real Saint-Pierre.
The event in Martinique was a prelude to another major
eruption of Vesuvius. Here artists were present, on or near the spot,
and in some quantity. Where Saint-Pierre was evoked only by a
novelist and his fictional artist, those present in or near Naples in
April 1906 when Vesuvius erupted included the Italian painter
Eduardo Dalbono (1841-1915) and an American artist resident
in Capri, Charles Caryl Coleman (1840-1928). Coleman, born
in Buffalo, New York, had travelled in Italy as a young man,
studying in Florence and Rome, where from the late 1860s he
settled in the area around the Spanish Steps, long popular with
