Caribbean (75 page)

Then, with a speed which seemed incredible to the terrified watchers, Hugues said, in a low voice which only a few of the watchers could hear: “Let the accused be brought forward,” and in these opening moments of his performance he always liked it best if the most powerful representative of the old regime was dragged before him, some petty
nobleman who had been ostentatious in the exercise of his prerogatives or some landowner fat from the produce of his many fields. On this day he was pleased, for when he asked in his low, menacing voice: “And who is this prisoner?” one of his spies shouted accusingly: “The Compte Henri de Noailles!” and when Hugues continued: “And what are the charges against him?” any impartial listener would have been aghast at the meanness and lack of specificity as the count’s accusers poured forth their accumulation of petty grievances:

“He was always an enemy of the people.”

“He let his pigs roam in my garden.”

“He made us work on feast days and paid low wages.”

Raising aloft both hands to stanch the flow of charges, Hugues said in a sepulchral voice: “He is condemned!” and the quivering wretch, too frightened to comprehend fully what was happening, was dragged by the constables to the guillotine and up its three steps to the fatal platform. There the carpenters took charge, bound his hands behind his back, forced him onto his knees, and brought his head forward so that his neck fitted into the curved portion of the block. With a noisy creaking of wood against wood, the upper bar was brought into play, pinning the neck fast. Then, slowly, one of the carpenters cranked a windlass, dragging the immense slanted knife high aloft in the twin grooves of the tower. When it was in position, Hugues addressed the crowd: “This is the punishment that overtakes all enemies of France,” and with an upraising of his right hand he signaled the carpenters to release the knife, which fell with silent swiftness onto the exposed neck and with such awful force that the head rolled away while the severed neck gushed blood.

In each small town he visited, Hugues liked to guillotine three prominent citizens on the first day; he had learned that this brought the whole area to attention and made his inquisition of the remainder easier, for each man was eager to testify against his neighbors before they testified against him. His procedures, swift and remorseless and certain, caused two different reports concerning his work to be sent to Robespierre:

But a second report represented the majority of judgment on his work in the near provinces:

Robespierre read these reports in September 1793, and thought: How effectively the barber gives his haircuts. I do wish I had a dozen more like him in Lyons and Nantes. These were two strongholds of Royalists where shortly an appalling number of resisters would be slain in ways far less neat and effective than those utilized by Hugues and his traveling guillotine. Ten thousand would die in Lyons in mass murders of the wildest frenzy involving all sorts of excesses, fifteen thousand in Nantes while Hugues plodded along, methodically lopping off the heads of his eight and ten, day after day, with never an uprising in protest. “The man’s a genius,” Robespierre told his associates, and when in mid-October, Queen Marie Antoinette, that foolish, giddy thing, was to be beheaded, Hugues was invited back to Paris to participate in the celebrations that followed. It was during this holiday that Robespierre intimated to him that a more important assignment was in the offing. Since he did not say what, Hugues returned to his deadly travels and lovemaking, assured that his efforts toward freedom were appreciated in Paris. Then, at the close of that frightful year, came the communication he had been awaiting:

Repairing at once to Rochefort, a tiny Atlantic harbor on the Atlantic between Nantes in the north and Bordeaux to the south, Hugues learned to his disgust that his supposed fleet consisted of two overage frigates, a corvette, two small vessels and two lumbering cargo ships with exactly 1,153 poorly trained farmers as troops. When he complained, the harbormaster assured him: “Not to worry. Ship arrived last week from Guadeloupe. Island’s safe in our hands. All you have to do is reinforce our ships and troops already in command.”

The harbormaster was right; so were the officers from the trading ship recently arrived from Guadeloupe, for when they left their island it was still French. What they could not know was that shortly after they sailed, Admiral Oldmixon leading a strong British force had stormed ashore, captured the island, and dug powerful emplacements for his guns and fortifications for his thousands of hardened troops. The St.-Domingue barber and brothelkeeper was heading into a hornet’s nest of which he was totally unaware.

Nevertheless, he was nervous, for a cart which he had dispatched from Paris well before he left had not yet arrived, and it looked as if he might have to sail without this precious cargo. “Can we delay two more days?” he pleaded with the captains of his ships, but they said, properly: “Our job is to avoid British warships. We sail as planned.” To Hugues’ relief, at dawn on the last day the big cart rumbled onto the dock to deliver its seven crudely wrapped packages.

There was much speculation as to what kind of precious cargo might have warranted such concern, and the sailors who struggled to bring the items aboard made many guesses, until one farm boy, more daring than the rest, furtively tore open the end of one package and found himself facing an immense steel blade.

“Mon Dieu!”
he whispered. “A guillotine.”

It would be difficult to guess who was the more astonished that bright June day—Hugues, who found his island occupied by the enemy, or Oldmixon, who saw this ragtag armada heading his way to do battle.
The odds in favor of the English were overwhelming: at sea, some twenty battle-tested ships against seven nondescripts; on land, 10,000 men against 1,153, plus control of the civil government thanks to the cooperation of Royalists like Paul Lanzerac. Of course, Oldmixon could not summon all his ships at once and many detachments of his troops were scattered among lesser islands, but the force confronting Hugues was not merely intimidating, it was terrifying.

Too uninformed on warfare to realize that he had no chance of winning, Hugues ordered his little ships to clear the harbor, which amazingly they did, whereupon he led his troops ashore in a charge three times as valiant as Oldmixon had ever seen before, and after unbelievable heroics the Hugues forces had recaptured that half of the island. An English colonel said later: “This French barber who had never read a book on tactics was too stupid to know he couldn’t win, so he won.”

The first thing Hugues did on taking possession of Point-à-Pitre was to draft a report to the Convention back in Paris. In it he described himself as ten times braver than he had been, which was brave enough, and the message was so inspiring that the authorities caused it to be published in a Paris broadsheet illustrated with a fine woodcut showing Hugues, saber in hand, leading a charge into the very muzzles of the British guns. It was entitled:
SANGFROID INTRÈPIDE DE VICTOR HUGUES, COMMISSAIRE DU GOUVERNEMENT Á LA GUADELOUPE
.

Both English and French reporters testified that Hugues actually did these things; with his few Frenchmen he defeated an enormously superior enemy, but in one statement his admirers were wrong: he did not
charge ashore
. When the battle was over he
walked ashore
like
some great, detached conqueror humble in victory and weighed down by his responsibilities as Agent Particulier. Retreating quickly to his anonymous look and posture, he represented to the citizens of Point-à-Pitre the picture of an undistinguished Frenchman of thirty-two, slightly overweight, slightly shorter than they might have expected in a conqueror, with a kind of sandy hair, pocked face, very thin legs, long arms and hooded eyes which kept darting about as if to intercept any would-be assassin.

By the time he came ashore, Hugues was overcome by an inner determination of tremendous force to be the revolutionary governor of this precious island that had strayed so far from principles which now governed France. And the citizenry of Point-à-Pitre would have been terrified had they realized what the seven huge packages he had brought with him contained.

His men started unloading the packages at two in the afternoon, lugging each piece to the sunlit square in front of the House of Lace, and while this was being done Hugues was following the routine which had served him so well in the little towns around Paris. Assembling the island’s revolutionary spies, he inspected their lists of Royalist names, flicked them with an official tick of his right forefinger, and said: “Arrest them all.” But before the men could go about their task, aided by armed sailors, he asked: “And who is the banker? The richest plantation owner?” and when they were identified, he said. “Be sure to fetch them. And who has been the most outstanding Royalist?” and when this was agreed upon among the spies, he said: “That one we want for sure.”

At about a quarter to five that first afternoon the guillotine was placed at the center of the square, and when practice drops of the great knife proved its good working order, an awful hush fell over the crowd of watchers, for prior to this they had only heard of this monstrous machine as it operated in distant Paris and had never dreamed that it might one day appear on their island.

“You must hurry,” a local spy warned Hugues. “There’s no twilight here in the tropics. Six o’clock it’s night, just like that.”

“I know, I know,” Hugues retorted, but added: “You’ll see. This will be a twilight to remember. All we need, fifteen, sixteen minutes,” and he signaled for the first batch of prisoners to be brought forward. When they were, Solange Vauclain, watching from a spot not far from Hugues, uttered such an agonized cry that he had to turn to see where it came from, and he looked into the eyes of the most dazzling
woman he had seen in many months: tall, face like a Raphael Madonna, graceful even in the way she brought her two hands to her chin in horror at what she was seeing, and gifted with that rare quality that makes men hesitate and look a second time.

“Who is that one?” Hugues asked, and a mulatto, who had participated in the earlier riots but who had now turned spy for the revolutionaries, whispered: “Name’s Solange. Daughter of a white planter the rebels killed and that black woman you just released from jail.”

“And why did this Solange cry out?” and the spy whispered: “Because she grew up with those two,” and he pointed to where Paul and Eugénie Lanzerac stood among the first group to be executed, and it seems preposterous to say, but in the very instant when this cold, bloodthirsty man saw the Lanzerac woman, more desirable in her peculiar French way than even Solange, his warped mind devised a battle plan: he would have both these women.

A sailor from the ships beat out a drum roll, an assistant to Commissioner Hugues lifted a sheet of paper closer to his eyes and read: “Plantation owner Philippe Joubert, you have stolen sugar that belonged to the people, you have mistreated your slaves, and you have declared yourself an enemy of the Revolution. You are condemned to death.” And the terrified man was dragged to the well-used platform, brought to his knees, and strapped into the neck restraint. The drum sounded, almost softly, the sun sank lower in its own swift descent, and down came the knife in its awful rush, striking the exposed neck with such a powerful slicing force that Joubert’s head rolled into the street, where a sailor lifted it from the paving blocks and tossed it into a basket.

“Paul Lanzerac,” the man with the list shouted, and two sailors rushed him to the execution area. He was twenty-four that June evening, recipient of the best education that France provided, and possessor of a mind and character and the kind of precious talent that would have proved invaluable to the nation. Yet here he stood, listening to the charges against him: “You have tried to defeat the Revolution by bringing a new and foolish king to the throne. You have mistreated slaves and you have misused public property. You are condemned to death!” And brutal hands dragged him up onto the platform and fixed the wooden frame about his shoulders.