“Are the cottages enlarged and divided, as I recommended?”
“Universally. Every cottage inhabited by a family has now two rooms, at least. As your excellency also desired, the cultivators have spent their leisure hours in preparing furniture—from bedsteads to baskets. As the reports will explain, there are some inventions which it is hoped will be inspected by your excellency—particularly a ventilator, to be fixed in the roofs of cottages; a broad shoe for walking over the salt marshes; and—”
“The cooler,” prompted a voice from behind.
“And a new kind of cooler, which preserves liquids, and even meats, for a longer time than any previously known to the richest planter in the island. This discovery does great credit to the sagacity of the labourer who has completed it.”
“I will come and view it. I hope to visit all our cultivators—to verify your reports with my own eyes. At present, we are compelled, like the Romans, to go from arms to the plough, and from the plough to arms; but, when possible, I wish to show that I am not a negro of the coast, with my eye ever abroad upon the sea, or on foreign lands. I desire that we should make use of our own means for our own welfare. Everything that is good shall be welcomed from abroad as it arrives; but the liberty of the blacks can be secured only by the prosperity of their agriculture.”
“I do not see why not by fisheries,” observed Paul, to the party in the piazza, as he caught his brother’s words. “If Toussaint is not fond of fish, he should remember that other people are.”
“He means,” said Thérèse, “that toil, peaceful toil, with its hope, and its due fruit, is best for the blacks. Now, you know, Paul L’Ouverture, that if the fields of the ocean had required as much labour as those of the plain, you would never have been a fisherman.”
“It is pleasanter on a hot day to dive than to dig; and easier to draw the net for an hour than to cut canes for a day—is it not, uncle?” asked Aimée.
“If the Commander-in-chief thinks toil good for us,” said Moyse, “why does he disparage war? Who knows better than he what are the fatigues of a march? and the wearisomeness of an ambush is greater still. Why does he, of all men, disparage war?”
“Because,” said Madame, “he thinks there has been enough hatred and fighting. I have to put him in mind of his own glory in war, or he would be always forgetting it—except, indeed, when any one comes from Europe. When he hears of Bonaparte, he smiles; and I know he is then glad that he is a soldier too.”