Biassou looked at him steadily and said, “You love the blacks and the men of colour?”
“Do I love them?” exclaimed the citizen C——. “Why, I correspond with Brissot and——”
Biassou interrupted him with a sardonic laugh. “Ha, ha, I am glad to find in you so trusty a friend to our cause; you must, of course, thoroughly detest those wretched colonists who punished our insurrection by a series of the most cruel executions, and you, of course, think with us, that it is not the blacks, but the whites, who are the true rebels, since they are in arms against the laws of nature and humanity? You must execrate such monsters!”
“I do execrate them,” answered C——.
“Well,” continued Biassou, “what do you think of a man who, in his endeavours to crush the last efforts of the slaves to regain their liberty, placed the heads of fifty black men on each side of the avenue that led to his house?”
C—— grew fearfully pale.
“What do you think of a white man who would propose to surround the town of Cap with a circle of negro heads?”
“Mercy, mercy!” cried the terrified citizen general.
“Am I threatening you?” replied Biassou, coldly. “Let me finish; a circle of heads that would reach from Fort Picolet to Cape Caracol. What do you think of that? Answer me.”
The words of Biassou, “Do I threaten you,” had given a faint ray of hope to C——, for he fancied that the general might have heard of this terrible proposition without knowing the author of it; he therefore replied with all the firmness that he could muster, in order to remove any impression that the idea was his own: “I consider such a suggestion an atrocious crime.”