Cap-Haïtien was a shabby city. Only a man with an excellent memory could have said which way the streets, now filled with broken bricks and mortar, were supposed to run. Some little parts of each of the 800 buildings Christophe had burned were still standing; a gaunt wall, a blind window latticed with rusted iron, or a lonely garden gate that gave on heaps of stone, charred by fire and covered gratefully over with vines run wild. Goats, cows, pigs, and scrawny hens hysterically mothering broods of chicks, followed the zigzag paths through the ruins.
Pauline's palace on the hill was empty. Old horses with slat sides, grown too old for usefulness, browsed on the weeds that grew through the chinks in the paved terraces and from the beds of the dry fountains. When a stone knocked loose from the slope above by the bare feet of a peasant woman rattled suddenly down on the sagging roofs, the horses would whinny, arch their necks, and gallop through the banquet halls. Black sows slept amid the mud and whitened weeds in the shadowy, molding chamber where Pauline and her young groom had slept.
The country presented the same spectacle of sorry disuse. Filthy negro shacks, three walls of which were mud and the fourth the side of a French planter's ruined mansion, were lost in a scrub jungle of coffee trees, sugar cane, plantains, and bananas grown ragged and unfruitful from neglect. Over all the region, far flung and once magnificent, hung the rank odor of defeat—a carrion world that stank of wood burned by fire, sodden by rain, then dried by the dead, heavy warmth of the tropic sun.
There was much to do.
From the sad procession of the years, a parade of men gone gladly down to death, two men who loved Christophe had stepped out. Now, with history behind them and only the gaudy phantoms of ambition in front, they had attached themselves to their leader. Wherever he went, they went too. Technically, they were his secretaries. In their hearts they were his impassioned lovers.
Pompée Valentin Vastey, the English traders said, could "almost pass for a white man." He was the bastard son of a white father whose memory he scorned and a mulatto mother he had forgotten. He was slender, small, and wore his reddish brown hair clipped short. His skin was the color of old parchment. But no one of his time had more tightly wound the fibers of his mind round the outcast dream of the negro's greatness. Vastey, the "white nigger," loved the blacks with a fierce, consuming love. And he hated all whites with a double fury.
Dupuy was gentler, except in the strength of his devotion to Christophe. Dupuy in 1811 was in his early thirties. He had served as a subaltern in Dessalines's army, had emigrated to the United States after the Tiger's accession to power, and had made a small fortune in business in Philadelphia. But when he had heard that Dessalines was dead and that Christophe was in power, he had sold his Philadelphia "interests" and come home to see what fortune held for him.
They always accompanied Christophe when he rode over the mountain trails to visit the outposts of the state.
Once they stopped their horses, winded from a long slow climb, on a ledge of a mountain. While the horses nibbled the grass that grew beside the path they stood together and looked at the world spread at their feet. The sun, a brazen gong, hung in the blue sky. The villages in the green valleys were like toy towns. Through the utter quiet of noonday faint echoes lifted up to them.
Somewhere, miles away, a negro cultivator was singing a throbbing, high-pitched song of Africa. A goat bleated. Blue-gray clouds of humid mist were hanging motionless on the gaunt, distant hilltops on a line with their eyes.
Vastey spoke: "If the French should come, Henry, what would we do? They have not forgotten this." He moved his arm in a half circle to include the panorama below them. "They have not forgiven us for beating them. And what are the reports that travelers take home? Pétion, President in the south, Christophe, President in the north—two weaklings, they think. The French, sir, have no respect for republics. Napoleon knows that." He paused for breath. "But if Haiti had a king!"
For an instant Vastey looked with dog-like devotion into Christophe's face. "Majesty, Christophe, has a ring to it! A king can order, but a president can only suggest. The cultivators must have a master. The whole world is watching us. They think all black men are undignified." Vastey's straight little body grew stiff with anger. "A king—a court—a kingdom! We would show them, sire."
Christophe's eyes sought the face of Dupuy. He found it radiant with approbation. Henry drew in his breath sharply and his lips drew back from his gleaming teeth in a sudden, boyish smile. "Come," he said abruptly. "We must not waste time. We have a long road to go before night. While Vastey talks of kings we risk our supper."
Dupuy and Vastey dropped behind, and as they rode through the remainder of the afternoon talked together in rapid undertones. Now and then they would glance forward at Christophe. His horse was walking, finding its way carefully among the loose stones of the narrow trail. The reins hung slack on its mane. But it seemed to them that Henry Christophe rode as if on dress parade. His long legs were thrust out and his broad back seemed even more erect than usual. Once he raised his right hand and set his huge cocked hat (that was trimmed with gold braid and bore a white ostrich plume) at a jauntier angle on his head.
In the following month, March, 1811, the nine members of the Council of State met privately at a little town on the coast some distance east of Cap Haitien and subscribed unanimously to a motion to make Christophe king. A messenger brought the news to where Henry was engaged on administrative matters in another part of the country. The first draft of a royal constitution had been prepared.
As he rode back to his capital the sonorous phrases ran through and through his mind. His big hat was tied to the saddle, his head was bare to the blazing sun, and the wind was in his face. The galloping hoofs of his white horse kept time. The words tumbled under his tongue:
"President Henry Christophe is declared King of Haiti under the name of Henry. This title, its prerogatives and immunities, will be hereditary in his family for the male and legitimate direct descendants to the exclusion of women. . . . All the acts of the Kingdom shall be published and proclaimed in the name of the King and sealed with the Royal Seal."
Peasant women ran to the doors of their mud shacks as he galloped by. His bodyguard were far behind him, outdistanced. The trees, the huts, the vistas down the valleys flashed past like the ragged vestiges of memories, but the voices of the women followed him. "Vive le roi! Vive l'homme Christophe!" they were calling.
Christophe, the slave, the stable-boy, the waiter, was King!
Majesty. . . . Majesty. . . . Majesty.
"Majesty has a ring to it!" Vastey had said. Christophe's head went back and a great laugh of joy came out. The wind was in his mouth. All over the kingdom the women were calling: "Vive le roi! Vive l'homme Christophe!"
Cap Haitien changed its name again. It was now Cap Henry, named for the King. How Comte d'Estaing would have stared! How the young officer whose boots young Henry blacked as they sailed to Savannah would have laughed in wonder.
"Henry I." With stiff fingers and perspiring brow, while Vastey and Dupuy leaned over him, helping and guiding, he learned to write it. Henry. Once one learned it, it was easier to write than Christophe. It was shorter.
