The present residents of St. Pierre tuck their houses into the corners of old stone ruins
Ste. Anne is a thatch-roofed little village of perhaps a hundred inhabitants, yet these included at least four grands blessés, cripples from the far off battle-line in France. One blind youth, whose poilu cap looked pale above his ebony face, sat playing a broken violin behind the little hut in which he was born. Yet he would gladly go again, he asserted, if “our dear France” needed him. Another wore the khaki overseas cap marked “321 U. S.” he had picked up on the battlefield the day he lost his leg. The policeman who gave me a shake-down in the hut from which he ruled the community insisted on showing me all six of the scars which decorated his black body, while his female companion displayed the fragments of shrapnel that had inflicted them, precious relics which she kept in a broken pitcher. He was still fighting the war over again when I fell asleep. Simple-hearted, obliging negroes, the citizens of Ste. Anne evidently saw a white man so seldom that they were scarcely aware of the existence of the troublesome “color line.”
On my return, I dropped off at Petit Bourg and walked out to the village of Trois Islets. A mile beyond it, back in a pretty little hollow in the hills, are the ruins of the overseer’s house in which Josephine, once Empress of the French, was born. The walls of the stone building where her parents lived until a hurricane destroyed it just before her birth, can still be traced; the kitchen behind it serves to this day the mulatto family that has built a smaller dwelling on the same site. Farther back in the valley, half hidden by tropical brush and clumps of bamboo, are the roofless remains of her father’s sugar-mill—or, more likely, rum plant—where she lived until the age of fifteen. Its square brick chimney still peers above the encroaching vegetation. A long line of women were hoeing the cane on a steep hillside across the brook, their multicolored garments standing out against the Nile-green background, snatches of the falsetto song with which they cheer one another on at their labors drifting by on the trade wind—just such a scene, perhaps, as Josephine herself had known so well in her girlhood.
Marie Joséphine Rose Tascher de la Pagerie was first married to the Vicomte de Beauharnais, son of a governor of Martinique. Her mother lies buried in the parish church of Trois Islets, on a little knoll overlooking the three tiny islands which give the place its name. A stone set into the interior wall of the modest plaster and red-tiled building informs all who care to read:
Ci Git
L’Auguste Madame
Rose Claire Duverger de Sanois
Veuve de Messire J. G. Tascher
de LA PAGERIE
Mère de SA MAJESTÈ