L’IMPERATRICE
des FRANÇAIS
Décédée le 2 Juin 1807
a l’age de 71 ans
Munie des sacrements de
L’EGLISE
But neither the old municipal secretary who takes it upon himself to have a lunch prepared in the municipal building for all “distinguished visitors”—thereby adding generously to his stipend—nor the dwarfish priest in his garden-framed residence behind the church was interested in Napoleonic history. Their problems were more modern.
“How can a man live,” they condoled with each other, while I studied the decorations of the priestly parlor, “with rum advanced from fifty centimes to six francs a liter?”
Women carrying sewer-pipes and bricks on their heads had loaded the “canoe” which carries the mails daily from Trois Islets to the capital across the bay until its gunwales were barely visible above the water. When a dozen negro passengers and sailors had added their weight to this imminent possibility of disaster, we were rowed out beyond the islets, where the captain of the trusting contrivance stood for some time at the bow blowing on a conch-shell for the wind that at length saw fit to waft us safely across to Fort de France.