I thought that I must be dreaming. None who did not witness the
sight could form any idea of it. I will, however, endeavour to depict
something of it. I will simply recount what I saw with my own eyes. This
small portion of a great scene minutely reproduced will enable you to
form some notion as to the general aspect of the town during the three
days of pillage. Multiply these details _ad libitum_ and you will get
the ensemble.
I had taken refuge by the gate of the town, a puny barrier made of long
laths painted yellow, nailed to cross laths and sharpened at the top.
Near by was a kind of shed in which some hapless colonists, who had been
driven from their homes, had sought shelter. They were silent and seemed
to be petrified in all the attitudes of despair. Just outside of the
shed an old man, weeping, was seated on the trunk of a mahogany tree
which was lying on the ground and looked like the shaft of a column.
Another vainly sought to restrain a white woman who, wild with fright,
was trying to flee, without knowing where she was going, through the
crowd of furious, ragged, howling negroes.
The negroes, however, free, victorious, drunk, mad, paid not the
slightest attention to this miserable, forlorn group of whites. A short
distance from us two of them, with their knives between their teeth,
were slaughtering an ox, upon which they were kneeling with their feet
in its blood. A little further on two hideous negresses, dressed as
marchionesses, covered with ribbons and pompons, their breasts bare, and
their heads encumbered with feathers and laces, were quarrelling over a
magnificent dress of Chinese satin, which one of them had grasped with
her nails while the other hung on to it with her teeth. At their feet
a number of little blacks were ransacking a broken trunk from which the
dress had been taken.
The rest was incredible to see and impossible to describe. It was a
crowd, a mob, a masquerade, a revel, a hell, a terrible buffoonery.
Negroes, negresses and mulattoes, in every posture, in all manner of
disguises, displayed all sorts of costumes, and what was worse, their
nudity.
Here was a pot-bellied, ugly mulatto, of furious mien, attired like
the planters, in a waistcoat and trousers of white material, but with a
bishop’s mitre on his head and a crosier in his hand. Elsewhere three or
four negroes with three-cornered hats stuck on their heads and wearing
red or blue military coats with the shoulder belts crossed upon their
black skin, were harassing an unfortunate militiaman they had captured,
and who, with his hands tied behind his back, was being dragged through
the town. With loud bursts of laughter they slapped his powdered hair
and pulled his long pigtail. Now and then they would stop and force the
prisoner to kneel and by signs give him to understand that they were
going to shoot him there. Then prodding him with the butts of their
rifles they would make him get up again, and go through the same
performance further on.
A number of old mulattresses had formed a ring and were skipping round
in the midst of the mob. They were dressed in the nattiest costumes
of our youngest and prettiest white women, and in dancing raised their
skirts so as to show their lean, shrivelled legs and yellow thighs.
Nothing queerer could be imagined than all these charming fashions and
finery of the frivolous century of Louis XV., these Watteau shepherdess
costumes, furbelows, plumes and laces, upon these black, ugly-faced,
flat-nosed, woolly-headed, frightful people. Thus decked out they were
no longer even negroes and negresses; they were apes and monkeys.
Add to all this a deafening uproar. Every mouth that was not making a
contortion was emitting yells.
I have not finished; you must accept the picture complete to its
minutest detail.
Twenty paces from me was an inn, a frightful hovel, whose sign was a
wreath of dried herbs hung upon a pickaxe. Nothing but a roof window
and three-legged tables. A low ale-house, rickety tables. Negroes and
mulattoes were drinking there, intoxicating and besotting themselves,
and fraternising. One has to have seen these things to depict them.
In front of the tables of the drunkards a fairly young negress was
displaying herself. She was dressed in a man’s waistcoat, unbuttoned,
and a woman’s skirt loosely attached. She wore no chemise and her
abdomen was bare. On her head was a magistrate’s wig. On one shoulder
she carried a parasol, and on the other a rifle with bayonet fixed.
A few whites, stark naked, ran about miserably in the midst of this
pandemonium. On a litter was being borne the nude body of a stout man,
in whose breast a dagger was sticking as a cross is stuck in the ground.
On every hand were gnomes bronze-coloured, red, black, kneeling,
sitting, squatting, heaped together, opening trunks, forcing locks,
trying on bracelets, clasping necklaces about their necks, donning coats
or dresses, breaking, ripping, tearing. Two blacks were trying to get
into the same coat; each had got an arm on, and they were belabouring
each other with their disengaged fists. It was the second stage of a
sacked town. Robbery and joy had succeeded rage. In a few corners some
were still engaged in killing, but the great majority were pillaging.
All were carrying off their booty, some in their arms, some in baskets
on their backs, some in wheelbarrows.
The strangest thing about it all was that in the midst of the
incredible, tumultuous mob, an interminable file of pillagers who were
rich and fortunate enough to possess horses and vehicles, marched and
deployed, in order and with the solemn gravity of a procession. This was
quite a different kind of a medley!
Imagine carts of all kinds with loads of every description: a four-horse
carriage full of broken crockery and kitchen utensils, with two or three
dressed-up and beplumed negroes on each horse; a big wagon drawn by oxen
and loaded with bales carefully corded and packed, damask armchairs,
frying pans and pitchforks, and on top of this pyramid a negress wearing
a necklace and with a feather stuck in her hair; an old country coach
drawn by a single mule and with a load of ten trunks and, ten negroes,
three of whom were upon the animal’s back. Mingle with all this bath
chairs, litters and sedan chairs piled high with loot of all kinds,
precious articles of furniture with the most sordid objects. It was
the hut and the drawing-room pitched together pell-mell into a cart, an
immense removal by madmen defiling through the town.
What was incomprehensible was the equanimity with which the petty
robbers regarded the wholesale robbers. The pillagers afoot stepped
aside to let the pillagers in carriages pass.
There were, it is true, a few patrols, if a squad of five or six monkeys
disguised as soldiers and each beating at his own sweet will on a drum
can be called a patrol.
Near the gate of the town, through which this immense stream of vehicles
was issuing, pranced a mulatto, a tall, lean, yellow rascal, rigged out
in a judge’s gown and white tie, with his sleeves rolled up, a sword in
his hand, and his legs bare. He was digging his heels into a fat-bellied
horse that pawed about in the crowd. He was the magistrate charged with
the duty of preserving order at the gate.
A little further on galloped another group. A negro in a red coat with
a blue sash, a general’s epaulettes and an immense hat surcharged with
tri-colour feathers, was forcing his way through the rabble. He was
preceded by a horrible, helmetted negro boy beating upon a drum, and
followed by two mulattoes, one in a colonel’s coat, the other dressed as
a Turk with a hideous Mardi Gras turban on his ugly Chinese-like head.
Out on the plain I could see battalions of ragged soldiers drawn
up round a big house, on which was a crowded balcony draped with a
tri-colour flag. It had all the appearance of a balcony from which a
speech was being delivered.
Beyond these battalions, this balcony, this flag and this speech was a
calm, magnificent prospect-trees green and charming, mountains of superb
shape, a cloudless sky, the ocean without a ripple.
Strange and sad it is to see the grimace of man made with such
effrontery in presence of the face of God!