professions, and believing in his protestations.
When, the truce was at its height, and men's
minds most calm and most assured, Toussaint
L'Ouverture was treacherously seized in his
plantations and carried off, he and his wife and
family, to France. There they were treated with
all the refinements of cruelty belonging to
civilisation: the unfortunate black was thrust
into a cold, dank, horrible cell in the prison
fortress of Joux, where, on the 27th of April,
1803, he was one morning found dead—
the prison authorities said by apoplexy,
history says by murder. Napoleon has few blots
on his name more foul, more cruel, more
treacherous, than this episode of Toussaint l'Ouverture,
a man of whom history has only nobleness
and self-sacrifice to record. After his abduction,
the war was carried on with redoubled
severity. The French brought bloodhounds
from Cuba, and hunted the negroes like wild
beasts through the mountains. Reprisals were
not wanting; reprisals so fierce that it was said
forty thousand French perished by the hands of
the blacks, exclusive of those who died of fever
and starvation. For, at last, the famine was so
great that they were forced to eat the very
bloodhounds brought over for negro-hunting.
Hated, expelled, and their rule broken for ever,
the French did the best they could under their
untoward circumstances, and recognised Haïti
as an independent black nation on the 1st of
January, 1804. At that time the negroes were
from four hundred and eighty thousand to five
hundred thousand strong, and had some notable
men among them to take the conduct of
affairs. True, Toussaint, with his lofty daring
and nobleness of soul, was gone, but Christophe,
his friend and companion, remained;
and Dessalines was there, vigorous and strong,
if peremptory and cruel, with others of less
historic weight, and by degrees they put
their house in order, and got things tolerably
well arranged. Dessalines, who had made a
proclamation advising the assassination of the
French, took the west, or French side, as Jacques
the First; and when he was assassinated, Pétion
took the south-west, and Christophe the north-
west, as Henri the First. Christophe had been
one of Toussaint's most ardent friends and
supporters, and had been tampered with and
tempted by the French at a time when his
defection would have strengthened their hands
perhaps for ever; but, loyal and true, Christophe
had stood manfully by his leader and their cause,
and now came forward as the chief of a state,
no longer as only the captain of a band of
revolted slaves. In the sequel Christophe was
either slain in a military revolt, as some say, or,
according to others, committed suicide. But,
indeed, Haïtian history is sadly confused and
indistinguishable; dates, names, events, sequences,
are jumbled together in such utter disorder, that
we can make out little beyond the fact that the
government of the island was handed about from
one to another, that revolutions and assassinations
were thick on every side, that the black
governors had much to learn and much to un-
learn, and that the whole was a series of experiments,
in which sometimes the experiment, and
sometimes the experimenter, came off worst,
and sometimes things went on smoothly and well
for all parties. This historic and dynastic
imbroglio lasts until August, 1849, in which
month and year Soulouque became emperor,
under the title of Faustin the First.

Soulouque was a kind of prophetic parody.
He did in his small way precisely what a certain
neighbour of ours did in a grander fashion two
years later. Elected President, as all the rest
had been from Dessalines upwards, he took the
oaths and his seat, and for a time conducted
himself with becoming presidential moderation.
But the glitter of an imperial crown dazzled
Soulouque, and the Haïtian President
executed a coup d'état whereby he became a
crowned emperor and the loving cousin of all
the regalities in Europe. It was a grand idea,
and by no means weakly executed. Soulouque
was a great nobility maker. His Dukes of
Marmalade and Princesses of Barley-Sugar were the
standing jokes of the Old World, though not
quite fair jokes; and for a time, what with
successfully debauching the army, and surrounding
himself with a creature court devoted to his
fortunes—which were their own—he managed
to steer clear of his enemies, and to overbear all
opposition. He was wise, too, in his generation.
With a keen eye to the future, he amassed three
or four hundred thousand pounds, which he
prudently invested in the European funds—his
uneasy seat, and perhaps an uneasy conscience,
leading hiin to build his boats and bridges
behind him, and make all ready for the day
when flight should be his sole chance of safety.
His immediate cause of failure was not long in
coming. A man of his inordinate ambition
could not let well alone, but must needs plan
and plot, and conspire for something more than
he had, and this something more was the empire
of the whole island. He took his measures,
laid his plans, prepared his plot, but his men did
not second him, the army even failed him, and
the conspiracy fell to the ground in a helpless
and imperfect manner; whereon Soulouque, in
a rage, got hold of his recalcitrants, put them
into pits, kept them without food, and left them
to be devoured by vermin of the most horrible
kind. In short, he acted with all the full-blooded
cruelty of an unmitigated savage tyrant. As
Anthony Trollope says, "He played, upon the
whole, such a melodrama of fantastic tricks and
fantasies as might have done honour to a white
Nero. Then at last black human nature could
endure no more, and Soulouque, dreading a pit
for his own majesty, was forced to run." On
the 29th of January, 1859, he and his black
wife, or wives, his famous daughter Olive, and
his numerous maids of honour, took refuge on
board the Melbourne, bound for Kingston, in
Jamaica. But they found Kingston almost as
hot for them as Port-au-Prince. The banished
Haïtians, of whom Faustin the First had made
quite a colony, had mostly congregated there,
and received their ancient oppressor, as soon as