Eugénie said quietly, but with even greater force than Solange had shown: ‘A knife, poison, a gun … but they’re difficult to smuggle in. How did the Corday woman finish her tyrant? Drowning him in a bath or stabbing him when he was there?’‡
Toward the end of 1797 the two women decided that since their prey was so eager to get Solange into his bed, she should mask her loathing and allow him to do so, but as Eugénie pointed out: ‘Only if you can do so … shall we say … on some kind of permanent basis.’ She hesitated: ‘So you’ll have opportunities to do whatever we decide.’
‘Oh no!’ Solange protested. ‘Once I go there, I can never come here again, Eugénie. It would be too dangerous for you.’ Solange then looked at this precious friend who had been so helpful in their growing up, and said softly: ‘I could not bear losing you and Paul, both. This I must do by myself, but I shall do it,’ and she started to go, but Eugénie reached out for her hand, and for some time the two young women stood thus in the shadows of the apothecary’s house.
‘Did you love him so deeply … that you’ll risk your life?’ Eugénie asked, and Solange replied: ‘You’re willing to risk yours,’ and Eugénie said sensibly: ‘Of course, but we were married,’ and the beautiful mulatto, even lovelier in the shadows, replied: ‘We were too, in another way. And Hugues must die for the great wrong he did us both.’ With this confession from the past and commitment to the future, the two creoles embraced for the last time, reconciled to the fact that if things went wrong, they might never see each other again, and as they parted in the darkness Eugénie whispered: ‘Rest easy, beloved sister. If you don’t succeed, I shall.’
In December 1797, Solange Vauclain moved into the House of Lace with the man she was determined to murder, and for some six weeks this grotesque love affair progressed. She dissembled her feelings so adeptly that Hugues felt the elation that any thirty-five-year-old man would feel at having won the affections of a beautiful twenty-four-year-old woman, but since he never underestimated his potential enemies, he told his spies: ‘Find out about this one,’ and they reported: ‘She hasn’t seen her friend Eugénie Lanzerac since the execution. No danger there. She is, of course, the daughter of a French Royalist, now dead. Her mother could be trustworthy or not. You’re the best judge of that.’
There was more, but none of it added up to a serious suspicion of Solange except for the one irrefutable fact: ‘She was, at one time, you must always remember, in love with Lanzerac, but so far as we can determine, nothing came of it.’
Lulled by such reports and assured that Solange was not seeing the Lanzerac widow, Hugues continued the affair, congratulating himself on having organized his living arrangements so amicably. One morning following a dinner party at which Solange had proved a radiant hostess, he even admitted to himself as he was shaving: She would grace any salon, that one. I get the feeling sometimes that she was made for Paris.
He spent the rest of that morning at his usual duties, including approval of the next batch of executions, then took his lunch with Solange on the balcony of his quarters, the House of Lace, overlooking the square. In the afternoon he and Solange went riding, and he was again impressed with the way she seemed to be able to do almost anything a gentlewoman should; he felt like an adoring husband as he watched her dismount, and kissed her ardently when inside the house which she had known so intimately when Paul and Eugénie occupied it.
Dusty from his ride, Hugues repaired to an upstairs room, to which former slaves brought buckets of hot water for his bath. When they were gone and he was luxuriating in the tin tub which he had brought from Paris, he heard a rustle at the door, and called out: ‘Is that you, Solange?’ and she came slowly, purposefully into the room, holding extended before her a long, sharp knife. With extraordinary speed and deftness, he sprang from his bath, sidestepped her attack, and knocked the blade from her hand. Screaming in terror ‘Help! Assassins!’ he cowered in a corner.
First into the bathroom was Mme. Vauclain, Solange’s mother, who understood instantly what her daughter had attempted. ‘Ah! Girl!’ she cried. ‘Why did you fail?’ And she leaped upon Hugues, trying to wrest the knife from him and finish the job. Before she could do so, guards burst into the room and pinioned both women, while Hugues continued to moan: ‘They tried to kill me!’ But as the women were being led away, Mme. Vauclain broke away from the guard, rushed to Solange, and embraced her: ‘You did right. Don’t fear, the monster will be destroyed.’
At high noon next day, his private guillotine having been moved into the lovely square, Victor Hugues watched as the African slave woman Jeanne Vauclain was led forth in chains, her face a mass of bruises from her interrogation by the guards, and dragged onto the execution platform. Thrown to her knees, she was locked into position, and the great knife fell. Moments later her exquisite daughter, slim and graceful as a young palm tree in a tropic breeze, was pushed up the three stairs to the platform and forced down till her neck was properly exposed, and again the knife fell.
This time the blade did not fall instantly, for Hugues felt he must issue a warning to his people: ‘See what happens when reactionary royalists seduce and mislead our mulattoes and blacks. These women were traitors to the cause of freedom, and for that they must die.’ Slowly he raised his hand to make this heroic point, held it aloft for a moment, then dropped it dramatically, and the knife roared downward in its sickening fall. Solange Vauclain, loveliest creole in her generation, was dead, and as her head rolled into the square her executioner looked across to the house of the apothecary, where Eugénie now lived, and saw that the Lanzerac widow had been watching.
With Solange out of the way, Hugues’ pursuit of Eugénie became more concentrated, and although he could not reasonably expect her to move into his quarters, he did apply ingenious pressures to make her consider an alliance: ‘Madame Lanzerac, we need a new apothecary in the town, so it becomes inevitable that you must leave your home to others who will put it to better use.’
When she asked: ‘Where shall I live?’ he replied hesitantly: ‘There’s always room in your old home,’ but she professed not to understand what he was proposing.
Once, in extreme irritation, he reminded her: ‘You remember, of course, that on the night of our arrival you were sentenced to death? Spared only by my generosity. That sentence still hangs over you.’
But still she repelled his suggestion, not masking the fact that she considered it odious. So he adopted harsher methods. One morning as she returned from her marketing at the far end of the square facing the ocean, she was greeted by a screaming woman: ‘Eugénie! They’ve stolen your boy!’ and when she rushed to the room in which she had left him, she saw that he was gone.
In the anguished days that followed she received a bombardment of bewildering rumors, orchestrated by Hugues but never voiced by him, for he intended to step forward later as her savior: ‘The boy Jean-Baptiste was found dead!’ and ‘The little Lanzerac boy was found in a marketplace near Basse-Terre.’ In this cruel broth he would let Eugénie stew until she became, in his words, ‘ready for my closer attention.’
No longer having any woman friend to give her support, and with all the young Royalist men who might otherwise have helped executed, Eugénie had, in her almost paralyzing grief, no one to whom she could turn; even the priests who would have aided her had been guillotined in those first terrible days. She could, of course, do what many young women like her had done, seek assistance from generous-hearted slave women who now possessed power, but Mme. Vauclain was dead and Eugénie knew no one like her, so she huddled alone in her empty house and wondered when she would be dispossessed and forced to accept Hugues’ hospitality.
The closer this eventuality came, the more certain she was that within a week of such a move, she would murder this dictator, even if she herself was guillotined the next morning: He must not be allowed to live, wallowing in his crimes, and this curious phrase became her shibboleth, the rubric that defined her. She would allow him to posses
s her over the dead bodies of her husband and son, but in achieving this triumph, he would be signing his death warrant. She, unlike Solange, would not let him see her coming at him with a knife. She would murder him as he lay beside her in his sleep.
But Hugues, more or less guessing her thoughts, confused the situation by sharing with her astonishing news: ‘You know, Eugénie,’ he said in the street one day, ‘if you shared my quarters, there might be some way of finding your son.’
She did not raise her voice or charge him with being an inhuman monster for using a child, supposed to be dead, in this way, for she did not wish anyone to see her anger and remind Hugues of the perilous game he was playing. Instead, she asked quietly: ‘Commissioner, are you intimating that my son is alive?’ and he said, with a carefully composed smile: ‘What I meant was, that under proper circumstances I could direct my men to search more closely.’
As he left her to consider this persuasive offer, she remained in the square, staring after him as he entered her House of Lace, and each item of his ugly appearance she found more repulsive than the others: That grisly hair. That slouching walk. Those ridiculous pipestem legs, the shoes that look too big. Those long arms like in the pictures of monkeys, and the hands covered with blood. Comparing him with her memories of Paul, she felt faint to think that one so ill-favored should live and that Paul should be dead.
She was more determined than ever that Hugues must die, but the possibility that her son might be alive, and recoverable, forestalled her, and for some days she wandered Point-à-Pitre trying to resolve her dilemma. There was no solution. If Jean-Baptiste was alive, she too must stay alive to rear him, which meant that she must tolerate the only man who could restore her son, the unspeakable Hugues.
Resigning herself to the prospect of a life with Hugues that must end in murder, she went to him voluntarily: ‘Commissioner, I live only for my son. If your men can find him …’
‘They already have,’ Hugues said, his hooded eyes sparkling with desire, and from an inner room a black maid appeared with Jean-Baptiste, four years old and each day a closer replica of his father. With a cry of ‘Maman!’ he rushed into her arms, and Hugues smiled benevolently at the sight of this reconciliation of a boy who might one day be his adopted son and the mother who would soon be his mistress. Then, as she prepared to take Jean-Baptiste to her home across the square, he warned her: ‘Remember, Mme. Lanzerac, you are still under sentence of death.’
Miraculously, an unexpected event occurred the next day which spared her from Hugues and removed the necessity for her to commit murder; a ship arrived from France with exciting news: ‘Napoleon’s won victory after victory, and he’s now heading for Egypt.’ A much less radical government was in control and its more sober members felt disgusted with Hugues, whom they were replacing with a new commissioner carrying surprising orders: ‘Send Hugues back to Paris under close arrest.’ By nightfall he was thrown out of his quarters and into a small cabin aboard the newly arrived ship.
When Hugues, defiant and undaunted, learned that the ship would require seven days to unload its cargo and take on the sugar and foodstuffs that Paris required, he demanded: ‘Give me pen and paper.’ And when his captors complied, for they knew him to be an important official, he sat in his cabin scratching unceasingly with his pen and composing a masterpiece. It ran to sixty pages and depicted the many miracles of good government he alone had engineered. He spoke glowingly of his courage in battle, of the economic revolution he had inspired, of the many victories his aggressive little fleet had won against Britain and the United States, of his freeing of slaves, and especially of his overall probity and unmatched insight into the problems of the Caribbean.
His self-written panegyric was so mesmerizing that it would have befitted a Pericles or a Charlemagne, and it achieved its purpose, for when the very officials who had ordered his arrest read it, they cried: ‘This Hugues must be a genius!’ and forthwith they appointed him governor of another colony, from which he wrote similar reports of his achievements in his new post.
He did not remain there long, for when Napoleon assumed power, and said in effect: ‘No more of this nonsense about outlawing slavery, it’s restored,’ Hugues was brought back to Paris, where he became a principal spokesman for the new order, and was often heard giving harsh instructions to young officers headed for the colonies: ‘You must be careful to keep those damned noirs in their place. They’re slaves, and don’t you let them forget it.’
His most unbelievable switch, however, came in 1816, after the coronation of a new king to replace Napoleon, for he now revealed that he had always been an ardent Royalist, ignoring the fact that on Guadeloupe some years earlier he had beheaded more than a thousand such people without giving one of them a chance to defend himself.
He was allowed to make this amazing volte-face for several reasons: he really was a first-class administrator; in 1794 he had with only eleven hundred troops defeated ten thousand; and in the naval wars his few little ships did capture nearly a hundred American ships and an equal number of British. It is recorded that even in his sixties he was pursuing and often catching beautiful women, and he died in bed … covered with honors.
Meanwhile, Eugénie Lanzerac, shed of her oppressor and reunited with her son, became one of the most desirable young creole widows in the French islands, and more than a few officers, refugees from the terrors of Paris, sought her hand, for they were hungry for the tranquillity of Guadeloupe. She finally married a young fellow from the Loire Valley, scion of one of the castled families in that region, and with him worked to restore the quiet beauty of Point-à-Pitre.
After they had been married for some months, she sought the stonecutter who had made the infamous marker for the Dundas gravesite, and gave him a strange commission: ‘Find me a small, stout stone and fashion it as if it were two headstones in one.’ When this was done she asked him to inscribe on it the first names of the two she had loved: PAUL ET SOLANGE, and this she embedded in the wall of her House of Lace, where it remained for many decades after her death.
* * *
* Creole has many different definitions. In Russian Alaska it signified a child born of a white Russian father and an Aleut woman, and it was not pejorative. In Louisiana and other American areas which heard the word, it was often used to denote a person born of a white French father and a black woman, and was pejorative. In the English-speaking islands it was used to imply ‘a touch of the old tarbrush, doncha know?’ but, as one expert explained: ‘Mulatto is the word we use when referring to that unfortunate condition.’ In the French islands it meant simply ‘any locally born persons or thing of whatever color or derivation,’ and the name bore no adverse connotation. There could, for example, be creole horses or cows.
† Sahn-doh-mong: with the last letter pronounced something between a g and a nasal h.
‡ The young women are referring to a case whose drama swept France and the colonies. Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d’Armont was of noble lineage but supportive of the more rational aspects of the Revolution. Appalled by the excesses of Jean Paul Marat, she posed as a news reporter, interviewed him while he was in his bath, gave him a list of suspected Royalists, and when he said: ‘We’ll guillotine them all,’ she stabbed him to death and went herself to the guillotine.
IN 1789 the world’s most profitable, and in many ways the most beautiful, colony was that portion of Columbus’ grand island of Hispaniola owned by France. The colony formed the western third of the island—the eastern two-thirds having remained in Spain’s hands—and was called St.-Domingue.
Its terrain was mountainous, covered with a growth of marvelous tropical trees, and watered by many tumbling streams. Its yearly rainfall was precisely that required for the growing of sugarcane, coffee and a host of luscious tropical fruits not known in Europe, especially succulent mangoes and plantain, a kind of banana eaten fried. Interspersed among the low mountains were numerous flat areas ideal for plantations, of which it had well over a t
housand, each one of them capable of earning its lucky owner a fortune.
How did this colony, once so firmly in the grasp of Spain, happen now to be French? Its history fit the old saying: ‘There’s nothing so permanent as a temporary arrangement.’ In the preceding century when the buccaneers of Henry Morgan’s day flourished on the little offshore island of Tortuga, French pirates tended to come and go, using the stronghold for temporary advantage, and some of them came and stayed. The informal rulers of Tortuga and the pig-hunting grounds on the west coast of Hispaniola were invariably French, with the result that in 1697 when a comprehensive treaty among European nations was being formalized, France said: ‘Since our people already occupy the western coastline of Hispaniola, why not cede it to us?’ and it was done. Persistent French pirates had accidentally won their homeland a treasure chest.
St.-Domingue, which would soon be surrendering its French name for the old Indian Haiti, produced so much wealth that one planter said before heading back to Paris with his fortune: ‘You plant sugarcane and the soil turns to gold.’ The colony’s two main settlements—Cap-Français in the north, Port-au-Prince in the south—each a small city, gave proof of this fact with the profligate way they displayed their wealth.
Of the two, Cap-Français was bigger and more important because it fronted on the Atlantic Ocean, and was thus the first and easiest port of call for ships arriving from France. It had a spacious anchorage, a splendid waterfront and a population of some twenty thousand. Its glory was its huge theater, seating more than fifteen hundred patrons, with an ‘apron’ stage that brought the actors well out into the middle of the audience. Since these players had to come all the way from France, it was good business to hold them in the colony for a three- or four-year stint, and this was practicable because there was an even finer theater in Port-au-Prince, seating seven hundred, plus half a dozen rural theaters in the smaller towns in between. Thus the colony could easily support two or three full-sized companies, and Paris actors passed the word among their colleagues: ‘St.-Domingue is a fine experience.’