My determination seemed to embarrass him. After a few moments of thought he again addressed me.
“Listen, young fool. I am less obstinate than you are; I give you until to-morrow evening, up to the setting of the sun, when you shall again be brought before me. Think well then, before you refuse to obey my wishes. Adieu. Let night bring reflection to you, and remember that with us death is not simply death—much comes before you reach it.”
The frightful sardonic grin with which he concluded his last speech too plainly brought to my recollection the awful tortures which it was Biassou’s greatest pleasure to inflict upon his prisoners.
“Candi,” continued Biassou, “remove the prisoner, and give him in charge to the men of Morne-Rouge. I wish him to live for another day, and perhaps my other soldiers would not have the patience to let him do so.” The mulatto Candi, who commanded the guard, caused my arms to be bound behind my back, a soldier took hold of the end of the cord, and we left the grotto.
| [3] | It is a fact that this ridiculously characteristic letter was sent to the Assembly. |
CHAPTER XXXVI.
When any extraordinary events, unexpected anxieties or catastrophes, intrude themselves suddenly into a life up to that period peaceful and happy, these unexpected emotions interrupt the repose of the soul which lay dreaming in the monotony of prosperity. Misfortune which comes on you in this manner does not seem like an awakening from bliss, but rather like a dream of evil. With the man who has been invariably happy, despair begins with stupor. Unexpected misery is like cramp—it clasps, and deadens everything. Men, acts, and things, at that time pass before us like a fantastic apparition, and move along as if in a dream. Everything in the horizon of our life is changed, both the atmosphere and the perspective, but it still goes on for a long time before our eyes have lost that sort of luminous image of past happiness which follows in its train, and interposes without cessation between it and the sombre present. Then everything that is, appears to be unreal and ridiculous, and we can scarcely believe in our own existence, because we find nothing around us that formerly used to compose our life, and we cannot understand how all can have gone away without taking us with it, and why nothing of our life remains to us.
Were this strained position of the soul to continue long, it would disturb the equilibrium of the brain and become madness—a state happier perhaps than that which remains, for life then is nothing but a vision of past misfortune, acting like a ghost.