We were ferried ashore from the captured privateer that Lord Lovington had provided, an English crew flying the French flag from the ship until they could creep back out of the harbor.
We told authorities at the quay steps that the brig, the Toulon, was en route from Charleston to Martinique and had dropped my wife and me on a diplomatic mission. With Bonaparte’s permission, I was to judge if the French attempt to hold Saint-Domingue could ever succeed and, if not, make recommendations to the American and French governments on the disposition of Louisiana.
It was plausible enough. Yet sentries stared at us as if we were lost.
Why had we been put ashore in Hades?
What a wonder the Paris of the Antilles must once have been! Clear, warm water lapped at mossy stone steps that led from the boat landing to a stone plaza between town and sea. The bay was blue sapphire, the shallow sands golden. A stone balustrade worthy of Versailles marked the perimeter of the breakwater, but after years of war it was marred, chips knocked away by cannon and musket shot. Decorative pillars held up what once must have been a welcoming monument, but that statuary, too, had been blasted away like the nose of the Sphinx. Other royal statues in the parks were headless, a reminder of revolution a dozen years before.
To our right, or west, was a stone fort. Leclerc’s army had stormed it to recapture Cap-Francois from the rebels nearly two years before, and it showed fresh repairs from bombardment. Black cannon jutted from embrasures, but soldiers were invisible, artillerymen staying out of the sun. I was struck by the somnolent quiet of the place, a city waiting for the end.
A French lieutenant named Levine was summoned from the fort to study the forged documents I brought. Lord Lovington’s Antiguan office had helped make French and American papers testifying to my diplomatic status.
“Your mission is out of date, monsieur,” he said. He spoke to me but looked at my wife, his eyes a mix of appreciation and speculation. Maybe he expected me to expire of yellow fever within days, removing the annoyance of a husband. I wished the same plague upon him. “We’re told Louisiana was sold to America late this spring.”
News travels slowly, so my surprise was genuine. “If a sale of Louisiana has already been concluded, I couldn’t be happier,” I said grandly. “I had a hand in the early negotiations, and now can take some credit for success.”
“It’s not just that, monsieur. With renewal of war between England and France, our position here is even more precarious. A British blockade could force our defeat. I must counsel that you put your wife in grave jeopardy by bringing her here.”
I turned to scan the sea. “My wife has a mind of her own, and I see no British ships.” This was my little joke, since I was looking directly at the masquerading Toulon. “But I would like to bring the freshest assessment possible back to my American government. Is it possible to obtain an interview with the commanding general, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, Vicomte de Rochambeau?”
Levine glanced at Astiza again, as if thinking that was not the best of ideas. “I am sure something can be arranged,” he nonetheless said. “Do you require lodging?”
“If you could suggest a still-functioning guesthouse.”
“It functions. Just.”
The lieutenant called a carriage. Our wardrobe was modest, but we’d borrowed a large empty trunk from Lovington so we’d look the part of baggage-heavy diplomats. Our black hire gave us a quizzical look when he lifted the container into the vehicle. We should have stuffed it with extra blankets, but too late now. Then a crack of the whip and Astiza and I rode into town.
While the main boulevards were cobbled, most of the side streets were dirt or, when it rained (which was almost daily), mud. Some buildings were masonry as firmly rooted as a German burgher’s, but the majority were wooden island colonials, elevated on posts a few feet off the ground. Palm fronds, litter, and lumber hid underneath.
“The stilts let the breeze and water through,” our black teamster told us, in thickly accented French. “Hurricane, too.”
The buildings were mostly two stories high, with a continuous arcade along the bottom floor that ran above the ground like a floating sidewalk. From the bedrooms above jutted narrow French balconies with iron railings, just large enough for an occupant to step from a bedroom to survey the world, hang laundry, or empty a chamber pot. Flowers spilled from planting boxes-ragged looking in the stress of the siege-and paint flaked in the humidity.
Despite the humid decay and stress of war, the whites (some of them French born and some locally born Creoles, like Napoleon’s own wife, Josephine) dressed smartly, if illogically. Even in the heat there were plenty of splendid blue uniforms, tailed coats, and dresses that closed all the way to the throat, reflecting new fashion. At least the civilian hats were broad-brimmed, and often white or straw.
More eye-catching were the coloreds. Even besieged, the city was at least a third black and mulatto from house servants, field slaves, and freemen who hadn’t joined the rebellion. The worst were in rags, but the mixed-race population formed a secondary aristocracy at Cap-Francois that was more finely attired. There was a complicated gradation of color with the lightest skin conveying the highest status. Quadroons were the offspring of a mulatto and white, mustees of a quadroon and white, and mustefinos, the finest of all coloreds, were from white and mustee-seven-eighths European but still “colored” by custom and law. Relations between this palette of skin had once been as precisely regulated as court ritual, and now habits were breaking down. Even the loveliest tan had been caught up in an enormously complicated war.
When the revolt began in 1791, Lovington had explained, there were approximately thirty thousand whites, forty thousand mulattos, and more than half a million black slaves in Saint-Domingue. In the last dozen years all three racial groups had at times both allied or been at odds with each other, while forming temporary partnerships with invading Spanish, English, and French. Slaughter had been met with counter-slaughter, and victories with betrayal. Many of the rich had already fled, and I’d seen some of the refugees disembarking two years before in New York City.
Yet what glories of the human skin still mingled in this city! People moved slowly here, but with a floating, flowing gait enchanting in its gracefulness, the sway of the women accentuating hips and bust. Their smoothness made the white troops seem clumsy by comparison, and their beauty was striking with colors from cream through nut, cocoa, coffee, chocolate, and ebony. Teeth were bright, necks high, muscles smooth, carriages erect, and some colored men and women wore fabulous hats topped with plumage as bright as parrots. In gayer times, this would have been paradise.
Cap-Francois, however, showed the wear and tear of war. Paint was unobtainable. Gunfire pocked bricks from when the city was taken by blacks in 1793 and then back by the French in 1802, with numerous battles between. Several blocks were blackened shells. Even in sections still inhabited, broken windows were boarded rather than repaired, because there was little glazing and fewer glaziers. Garbage lay in heaps because it was too dangerous to cart it to the countryside, and the slaves who’d performed this job had fled. The entire town had a pungent odor of rot, sewage, and smoke, with the redeeming whiff of the sea.
“This place has the smell of disease,” Astiza murmured. “I fear for Horus if that monster brought him here. Martel is no nurse.”