Читать книгу Stella - Emeric Bergeaud - Страница 20

Know ye the land of the cedar and vine,

Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;

Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress’d with perfume,

Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gul in her bloom;

Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,

And the voice of the nightingale never is mute:

Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the sky,

In colour though varied, in beauty may vie,

And the purple of ocean is deepest in dye . . .

Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos

In a favored land, toward the end of the last century, there lived, or better grew, rampantly and humbly in the bosom of a seductive and bounteous nature, a young family that was violently sequestered from humanity. The family lived upon a plain, in a poor hut protected by an orange tree. This tree paternally extended its vigorous branches, as if it had taken pity on the flimsy cottage, leaning over to protect it from the wind.

Not far off, on a hill, rose the high white walls of a superb mansion. Of vast proportions, imposing appearance, and solid construction, the building on the hill had, from the outside, something about it of a feudal castle from the Middle Ages; its tile-covered roof cut a red and sinister slice across the blue sky.

The startling contrast between these two dwellings left no room for mistaking the status of the people living within. Here was opulence amidst misery, pride in the face of humiliation, and power that crushed weakness at will.

The master of this sumptuous house—which was done up in the rustic Sardinian style—had at his disposal the fortune of a king, judging at least by the quantity of gold that he gambled away, wasting it on his ignoble and depraved desires. All the costly pleasures of life were available to him, and there was no taste he could not satisfy—even the desire to hear humanity moan and scream.

The inhabitants of the ajoupa—veritable pariahs of fate—had nothing to call their own. Would you believe it, the poor souls! They were almost reduced to rags so as to feed the plants that they cultivated with their own hands. They hardly dared to take from the tree the fruit that ripened by their door; this is because their garden and their fruit belonged to another, of whom they themselves were the spurned and trembling property.

For the moment we will leave off painting the sufferings of this young family in chains, who lived amidst all this bounty without the possibility of enjoying any of it, having nothing but tears of misery and shame to offer the Divine protector of this happy clime!

Slavery kept these patient creatures bent under its iron hand, condemned to demand from the soil those treasures for which they paid with sweat and blood. Not content merely to enslave their bodies with work and torture, slavery, that insatiable monster, wanted also to kill their souls through degradation and poverty. For to make a human a slave it was necessary to strip away all celestial faculties, to reduce the human to the moral insensitivity of a brute animal. As in the Greek tale in which the sorceress turns men into swine so as to keep them more surely under her fatal sway, this indispensable metamorphosis was accomplished, in reality, through the help of chains, shackles, and the murderous whip.1 And, in the course of this unworldly transformation, the slave—for a simple fault—was as soon sawed into two or thrust into the boiling sugar cauldron as placed on the burning grills of the ovens or even buried alive!!!

But such infamies could not remain unpunished. These crimes brought bolts of lightning down upon the heads of their authors. One day Justice, descending from on high, came to judge solemnly between the oppressors and the oppressed, the executioners and the victims. And vengeance was terrible! . . .

* * *

But what a pleasant outing to Saint-Domingue, the Queen of the Antilles! What beauty, what marvels are united in this place by the glorious Hand of the Creator! Friends of nature, philosophers, poets: come delight, instruct, and inspire yourselves in the midst of such magnificence; come fill yourselves with new emotions, warm your spirit with life-giving sunbeams, quench the thirst of your soul at the springs of poetry and love.

The high mountains ennoble the appearance of this landscape, surrounding and protecting the country like an army of Titans on guard. At their feet stretch immense plains; their shadows fall over an eternal ocean of green. From their fertile flanks escape streams that leap, froth, and rumble at the bottom of cascades, as if from subterranean tempests. Lakes sleep upon some of their high peaks, mysterious waters that seem to form gigantic goblets. Poetic savannahs, luscious valleys, picturesque hills, virgin forests, leafy bamboos, and capriciously winding rivers that come from deep waters fresh and pure: all add to the savage grandeur of Saint-Domingue. Come, contemplate the sky and the sea that are nowhere else as beautiful, and nowhere else speak so much of God.

What a delectable sojourn! . . .

Here the vegetation, astonishing in its vigor and precocity, eternally luxurious, is one thousand times more prodigious after a hurricane—that grand and terrible phenomenon of the tropics—has broken the trees, uprooted the rocks, and turned nature entirely on its head. Here, Autumn hangs her garlands on the ruins, perfumes the woods, sews flowers everywhere, and doubles the magnificence of the cane fields by lending them white plumes that ripple in the wind. Here, Winter, the eldest sister of the seasons—who, in another hemisphere, shivers, weak and sad under her mantle of snow—is the youngest, the gayest, the most opulent of the daughters of the year: nothing equals the abundance of treasures that she draws forth.

The swallow never left this happy country; the musicianI invariably continues giving his concerts and the wood pigeon continues his amorous cooing. See the lemon tree so green, so fresh, so fragrant that it seems to have been born of the voluptuous smile of nature. Remark upon the orange groves that man never planted, and that, achieving everything that poets have dreamed of graciousness and enchantment, perpetually display the luxury of their flowers and their golden fruit.

Admire these forests of palms that rise until they are lost from view; before them, the voyager stops, seized by a sort of religious respect. These majestic trees with their trunks symmetrically aligned, sleek and straight, and with their domed foliage topped by a thin spire, resemble the innumerable columns of a temple with a thousand copulas, erected by some pious Jinn of the desert.

Will we invite you to other spectacles? . . . Come to the shore in the evening, when the resplendent moon—that divine queen—takes hold of the heavens and shakes her diamonds into the sea; better still, climb one of our peaks, risen at the dawn of days. There you will feel your imagination exalt, and your spirit well over; there you can but kneel and pray in quiet ecstasy.1

These landscapes need no painter. Let us leave the virgin field to He whose skill we have no intention of challenging, but also let us hasten to say that it is in this ravishing country that we find sites more picturesque than those of Switzerland, romantic landscapes to make Italy envious, and curiosities far superior to the charms of Spain.

And—a remarkable thing—not one dangerous reptile, not one ferocious beast, not one enemy, even, exists to challenge man for the abundant fruits of his easy labor.

neque illum;

Flava Ceres alto nequicquam spectat Olympo . . . 22

Such is this marvelous island whose slave name was Saint-Domingue.