1857, feeling the approach of a disease that put his life in danger, he came to Paris to seek the aid of science. It was, alas, unhelpful. In the certain hope that he would be healed, Bergeaud brought along his manuscript to be printed, but when his condition did not improve, he gave the manuscript to me.
Once he returned to the country where he resided, Bergeaud welcomed his final hour with the calm of an irreproachable spirit, with the resignation of a Christian who submits to the will of the Almighty, yet he hoped that the goodness of God would provide happier times for Haiti. I dare say that, after he expressed these premonitions to me, a new order of things came into being, thanks to the pious devotion of a courageous general who recently satisfied the wishes of the nation.
Today I fulfill the promise that I made to my dear departed friend to publish his book when I judged the moment right. I dare hope that our country will welcome with sympathy this work whose patriotism reveals itself on every page, and that it will know how to do justice to the feelings of a virtuous citizen who, lost on foreign soil, deserved his country’s esteem.
Haiti will, without a doubt, see in this literary composition that exile nevertheless held charms for this elite soul, because there a constant desire for the happiness and prosperity of the nation was planted and grew. This happiness and prosperity can be achieved but through the sincere unity of all its children.
May the respectable widow and the family of my friend find in the reception of this patriotic work gentle consolation for the unhappiness that they have experienced!
B. Ardouin
Paris, the 10th of May 1859
Saint-Domingue
Know ye the land of the cedar and vine,
Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress’d with perfume,
Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gul in her bloom;
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute:
Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the sky,
In colour though varied, in beauty may vie,
And the purple of ocean is deepest in dye . . .
Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos
In a favored land, toward the end of the last century, there lived, or better grew, rampantly and humbly in the bosom of a seductive and bounteous nature, a young family that was violently sequestered from humanity. The family lived upon a plain, in a poor hut protected by an orange tree. This tree paternally extended its vigorous branches, as if it had taken pity on the flimsy cottage, leaning over to protect it from the wind.
Not far off, on a hill, rose the high white walls of a superb mansion. Of vast proportions, imposing appearance, and solid construction, the building on the hill had, from the outside, something about it of a feudal castle from the Middle Ages; its tile-covered roof cut a red and sinister slice across the blue sky.
The startling contrast between these two dwellings left no room for mistaking the status of the people living within. Here was opulence amidst misery, pride in the face of humiliation, and power that crushed weakness at will.
The master of this sumptuous house—which was done up in the rustic Sardinian style—had at his disposal the fortune of a king, judging at least by the quantity of gold that he gambled away, wasting it on his ignoble and depraved desires. All the costly pleasures of life were available to him, and there was no taste he could not satisfy—even the desire to hear humanity moan and scream.
The inhabitants of the ajoupa—veritable pariahs of fate—had nothing to call their own. Would you believe it, the poor souls! They were almost reduced to rags so as to feed the plants that they cultivated with their own hands. They hardly dared to take from the tree the fruit that ripened by their door; this is because their garden and their fruit belonged to another, of whom they themselves were the spurned and trembling property.
For the moment we will leave off painting the sufferings of this young family in chains, who lived amidst all this bounty without the possibility of enjoying any of it, having nothing but tears of misery and shame to offer the Divine protector of this happy clime!
Slavery kept these patient creatures bent under its iron hand, condemned to demand from the soil those treasures for which they paid with sweat and blood. Not content merely to enslave their bodies with work and torture, slavery, that insatiable monster, wanted also to kill their souls through degradation and poverty. For to make a human a slave it was necessary to strip away all celestial faculties, to reduce the human to the moral insensitivity of a brute animal. As in the Greek tale in which the sorceress turns men into swine so as to keep them more surely under her fatal sway, this indispensable metamorphosis was accomplished, in reality, through the help of chains, shackles, and the murderous whip.1 And, in the course of this unworldly transformation, the slave—for a simple fault—was as soon sawed into two or thrust into the boiling sugar cauldron as placed on the burning grills of the ovens or even buried alive!!!
But such infamies could not remain unpunished. These crimes brought bolts of lightning down upon the heads of their authors. One day Justice, descending from on high, came to judge solemnly between the oppressors and the oppressed, the executioners and the victims. And vengeance was terrible! . . .
* * *
But what a pleasant outing to Saint-Domingue, the Queen of the Antilles! What beauty, what marvels are united in this place by the glorious Hand of the Creator! Friends of nature, philosophers, poets: come delight, instruct, and inspire yourselves in the midst of such magnificence; come fill yourselves with new emotions, warm your spirit with life-giving sunbeams, quench the thirst of your soul at the springs of poetry and love.
The high mountains ennoble the appearance of this landscape, surrounding and protecting the country like an army of Titans on guard. At their feet stretch immense plains; their shadows fall over an eternal ocean of green. From their fertile flanks escape streams that leap, froth, and rumble at the bottom of cascades, as if from subterranean tempests. Lakes sleep upon some of their high peaks, mysterious waters that seem to form gigantic goblets. Poetic savannahs, luscious valleys, picturesque hills, virgin forests, leafy bamboos, and capriciously winding rivers that come from deep waters fresh and pure: all add to the savage grandeur of Saint-Domingue. Come, contemplate the sky and the sea that are nowhere else as beautiful, and nowhere else speak so much of God.
What a delectable sojourn! . . .
Here the vegetation, astonishing in its vigor and precocity, eternally luxurious, is one thousand times more prodigious after a hurricane—that grand and terrible phenomenon of the tropics—has broken the trees, uprooted the rocks, and turned nature entirely on its head. Here, Autumn hangs her garlands on the ruins, perfumes the woods, sews flowers everywhere, and doubles the magnificence of the cane fields by lending them white plumes that ripple in the wind. Here, Winter, the eldest sister of the seasons—who, in another hemisphere, shivers, weak and sad under her mantle of snow—is the youngest, the gayest, the most opulent of the daughters of the year: nothing equals the abundance of treasures that she draws forth.
The swallow never left this happy country; the musicianI invariably continues giving his concerts and the wood pigeon continues his amorous cooing. See the lemon tree so green, so fresh, so fragrant that it seems to have been born of the voluptuous smile of nature. Remark upon the orange groves that man never planted, and that, achieving everything that poets have dreamed of graciousness and enchantment, perpetually display the luxury of their flowers and their golden fruit.
Admire these forests of palms that rise until they are lost from view; before them, the voyager stops, seized by a sort of religious respect. These majestic trees with their trunks symmetrically aligned, sleek and straight, and with their domed foliage topped by a thin spire, resemble the innumerable columns of a temple with a thousand copulas,