“It is the chief cause. Some jealousy on this account is not to be wondered at; but it has not the less been punished. I would further ask,” he continued, turning again to Hédouville, “what the First Consul fears, that—”
“Who ever heard of the First Consul fearing anything?” cried Hédouville, with a smile.
“Hear it now, then.”
“In this place?” said Hédouville, looking round. “In public?”
“In this place—among the most loyal of the citizens of France,” replied Toussaint, casting a proud look round upon his officers and assembled friends. “If I were about to make complaints of the First Consul, I would close my doors upon you and myself, and speak in whispers. But it is known that I honour him, and hold him to my heart, as a brother in destiny and in glory: though his glory is now at its height, while mine will not be so till my race is redeemed from the consequences of slavery, as well as from slavery itself. Still, we are brothers; and I therefore mourn his fears, shown in the documents that he sends to my soldiers, and shown no less in his sending none to me.”
“I bring you from him the confirmation of your dignity,” observed General Michel.
“You do so by message. The honour is received through the ear. But that which should plant it down into my heart—the greeting from a brother—is wanting. It cannot be that the First of the Whites has not time, has not attention, for the First of the Blacks. It is that he fears—not for himself, but for our country: he fears our ambition, our revenge. He shall experience, however, that we are loyal—from myself, his brother, to the mountain child who startles the vulture from the rocks with his shouts of Bonaparte the Great. To engage our loyalty before many witnesses,” he continued, once more looking round upon the assemblage, “I send this message through you, in return for that which I have received. Tell the First Consul that, in the absence of interference with the existing laws of the colony, I guarantee, under my personal responsibility, the submission to order, and the devotion to France, of my black brethren. Mark the condition, gentlemen, which you will pronounce reasonable. Mark the condition, and you will find happy results. You will soon see whether I pledge in vain my own responsibility and your hopes.”
Even while he spoke, in all the fervour of unquestionable sincerity, of his devotion to France, his French hearers fell that he was virtually a monarch. The First of the Blacks was not only supreme in this palace, and throughout the colony; he had entered upon an immortal reign over all lands trodden by the children of Africa. To the contracted gaze of the diplomatists present, all might not be visible—the coming ages when the now prophetic name of L’Ouverture should have become a bright fact in the history of man, and should be breathed in thanksgiving under the palm-tree, sung in exultation in the cities of Africa, and embalmed in the liberties of the Isles of the West:—such a sovereignty as this was too vast and too distant for the conceptions of Michel and Hédouville to embrace; but they were impressed with a sense of his power, with a feeling of the majesty of his influence; and the reverential emotions which they would fain have shaken off, and which they were afterwards ashamed of, were at the present moment enhanced by sounds which reached them from the avenue. There was military music, the firing of salutes, the murmur of a multitude of voices, and the tramp of horses and of men.
Toussaint courteously invited the commissaries to witness the presentation to him, for the interests of France, of the keys of the cities of the island, late in the possession of Spain, and now ceded to France by the treaty of Bâle. The commissaries could not refuse, and took their stand on one side of the First of the Blacks, while Paul L’Ouverture assumed the place of honour on the other hand.
The apartment was completely filled by the heads of the procession—the late Governor of the city of Saint Domingo, his officers, the magistracy of the city, and the heads of the clergy.