The Violins of Saint-Jacques

by PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

1

LITTLE distinguishes the history of the small island from that of the other French Windward and Leeward Isles except that less is known about it. Saint-Jacques was originally inhabited by the Arawak Indians, later by ihe fierce Caribs who mounted the island chain in dugout canoes, defeated and devoured the Arawak men, and then married their widows in their usual brisk way. Columbus discovered it on his second voyage and annexed it to the Spanish crown. The Carib name of Twahleiba — the Snake — derived from the terrible trigonocephalus that infested it in swarms, was changed, and the island was christened in honor of the great Spanish saint of Compostella on the vigil of whose feast the island was captured. Santiago de los Vientos Alicios, they pricked it down on those early charts; Saint James of the Trade Winds. (Later on it was facetiously known, in the cant of the English filibusters who haunted the inlets of the northern coast, as Jack of All Trades and occasionally, in chanties that are seldom heard nowadays, as Tradey Jack.)

The small island was neglected by Spain, settled by a certain chevalier Hypolite-Hercule du Plessis, an illegitimate kinsman of Richelieu, and annexed to France. Plessis, after whom the capital was named, exterminated the stiff-necked Caribs, imported the first slaves from Africa, and summoned and enfeoffed a swarm of penniless cadets of noble French families from Normandy, Brittany, Gascony, and the Vendée to colonize the island; and in its small way Saint-Jacques soon rivaled SaintDomingue and Martinique in prosperity. Rumbold and his West Indian Light Fencibles captured it in the Seven Years’ War, and until the Revolution the Union Jack flew from a beautiful little Palladian government house. The English were thrown out at the time of the Convention. During the Terror the guillotine was set up in the Place Hercule, but when the bright blade descended and the first royalist head fell into the basket, a cry of horror burst from the silent throng of Negroes. Breaking through the cordon of guards, they tore the instrument to bits, and the guillotine was never re-erected in Saint-Jacques. A tumultuous period ensued. Order was restored during the Consulate and SaintJacques des Alizés thereafter followed the same quiet course as the other French Antilles.

Little was known about Saint-Jacques in the rest of the archipelago; in fact the very name — except for the fabulous beauty of its mountains and forests, the island’s richness in sugar cane, rum, molasses, and indigo, the elegance of the old buildings, the charm of the inhabitants and the brio with which they availed themselves of the slightest pretext for enjoyment and celebration — seems to have slipped the attention of travelers.

It was in another island, thousands of miles from the Antilles, that I met the person who was to bring to life this vanished world, and especially that baleful and culminating night that singles it out from oblivion.

I first came upon Berthe de Rennes under an umbrella pine on a headland in Milylene two years ago. She was sitting on a rock with a cigarette in one hand and in the other a brush with which she painted in the blue-veined shadows of the Asia Minor coast (which lay just over the water) on a block of cartridge paper propped on an easel. She wore a blue cotton dress and sandals and her gray hair was uncompromisingly arranged. Her intelligent, hawkish, and most distinguished face was shaded by one of those broad wicker hats the Aegean peasants wear in summer. I assumed she was somewhere in her fifties and was surprised to learn, later on, that she was well over seventy. Seeing me hunting in vain for a match, she threw me her lighter to catch — a rough peasant one with a dangling foot and a half of orange wick — almost without looking away from her picture. We were soon in conversation. She talked a lively, descriptive, rather racy French, and her English was of a fluent Edwardian kind scattered with expressions obsolete long enough to be full of charm. Her tales of life in Milylene, and later on her reminiscences of Fiji and Rarotonga, Corsica and the Balearics, and finally, to my redoubled interest, of the Caribbean from which I had just come back, were interjected every now and then by a deep and oddly attractive laugh with a slight rasp in it, and it soon became clear that she was an excellent mimic. She had a very beautiful voice.

Copyright 1953, by John Murray, Ltd.

As she talked she went on painting with an unerring competence, screwing her eyes up in aquiline glances at the fading Lydian hills. There was nothing vague or old-maidish about the picture. Bold, fluid pen strokes outlined the trees and the mountains, the forest of caïque masts below and the distant villages. They were depicted with a swift and rather out-of-date precision and then filled in with sweeping washes of water color rather in the manner of Edward Lear. When it became too dark to paint, an antelope-eyed girl approached on bare feet over the pine needles and began to collect her painting things. “What a goose that girl is!” Mademoiselle de Rennes sighed. “I tell her every day not to come, but she turns up just the same. She seems to think I’m a hundred.” Our paths lay in opposite directions but before we separated she asked me to come to luncheon at her little house next day and “take pot luck.” I watched them disappear through the olive groves. Mademoiselle de Rennes was taller standing than I had suspected. Phrosnula padded beside her holding the Asia Minor landscape as though it were a processional ikon.

Drinking a last ouzo before a lonely dinner on the waterfront, I asked the waiter about the French lady who lived outside the town. He sat down at once. “Kyria Mpertha? She has traveled the whole world over and seen everything. It must be about twenty years ago that she settled here to teach the young ladies of the island French and how to draw and play the piano.” His fingers rattled along an imaginary keyboard. “She was very poor then but she still does it a bit, out of pleasure, as it wore. And they say she is a wonderful teacher. And intelligent and energetic! Like gunpowder! Everybody likes her, from the governor to the bootblack. And she won’t stand any nonsense. We had a bad town clerk here once who quarreled with her, the fool. You should have seen how quickly she got rid of him! Po, po, po! He vanished faster than the dew. She has got more to her than most of the people you see about the place in trousers.”

2

MADEMOISELLE DE RENNES lived in a white, thick-walled island house surrounded by flowers in ribbed white amphorae and by pots of marjoram and basil. The headland on which it rested overlooked a steep bay and a wide stretch of the Aegean bounded on the east by the watersheds of Anatolia and to the south by the floating ghosts of Samos and Chios. Mademoiselle de Rennes, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses across the high bridge of her nose, was reading in a deck chair under a vine trellis. Phrosoula, the girl of the evening before, soon appeared carrying a table that was already laid, and “pot luck” turned out to be the best meal I had eaten for months. The wine, too, from the surrounding vineyards which Mademoiselle de Rennes had tended for years, was excellent. The conversation ranged all over the world once more, but even under the shade of this trellis, the afternoon was soon so hot and sleepy that I gratefully accepted my hostess’s offer of a room for a siesta.

After the sunlight the inside of the house seemed pitch dark and it took a minute for my eyes to acclimatize themselves. My room was empty except for a bed and a large, faded painting, obviously by my hostess. It was the picture of a volcanic island painted from a ship or a raft a few furlongs out to sea. Beyond the swarming sloops and schooners and a white paddle steamer a long quay stretched, where turbaned Negresses presided over stalls of tropical fruit under brilliant awnings. Beyond this lay a main street where carriages of every kind plied up and down. Women with parasols and men in boaters and top hats were poised in cushioned aloofness over the thin-spoked wheels. Below them bustled a swarm of Negroes with pyramids of fruit or bright green sheaves of sugar cane on their heads. All were dominated by a scattered population, hoisted high on their rococo pedestals, of gray and gravely gesticulating statues. Further back still, beyond a row of elaborate gasoliers, arcaded streets receded in vistas that climbed the hillside through successive strata of eighteenth-century terraces. Their balustrades were lined with urns and statuettes, and awnings shaded many of the windows. The bells of half a dozen church towers were suspended in wrought-iron hampers above roofs of semicircular rose-colored tiles, and at the summit of the little metropolis, corresponding to a bastion and a lighthouse at the end of the mole, the round lower of a fort aimed cannon from its battlements like the truncated radii of a compass. A tricolor fluttered from the flagpole; slender palm stems raised pretty pale green mops; a froth of creeper and hibiscus overflowed the walls. Above the town, a tropical forest rose in a cone, hiding to its crater the steep and concave flanks of a volcano from whose blunt apex curled a languid blue-gray banner of smoke.

“It’s the last thing I painted in the Antilles,” said Mademoiselle Berthe as she closed the shutters. “It’s not too bad.”

When she had left I looked at it more closely. In one corner the signature was neatly inscribed in ink: B. de Rennes, 1902, and in the other, to my suddenly heightening excitement: Fort du Plessis, Le Mouillage et la Salpêtrière, Saint-Jacques des Alizes, Outside, the scraping of the cicadas rose and fell and a single arrow of sunlight, penetrating the cool shuttered gloom, sent a bright shaft across the lowers and statues of Plessis. By the time that I fell asleep in a mood of vague conjecture about the mysterious little town, the trajectory of its aim had slanted upward to the Salpêtrière’s smoking cone.

3

DURING the next two weeks, not a day passed without my calling at least once on Mademoiselle Berthe. I would walk along the shore and bathe in the late afternoon and climb to her terrace at ouzo time. Often I stayed to dinner and we would talk till late. She was delightful company and the distant Caribbean island I had never seen, but which she described so lucidly, remains far clearer in retrospect than the beautiful Aegean one in which we were sitting. Berthe seemed to enjoy these long sessions and the chance of talking to someone who had a slight knowledge of the distant waters where much of her youth had been spent. She had a gift for conversational autobiography and I soon had a clear outline of her life.

She belonged to an old and impoverished chouan family of the lower Vendée. An only child, she was brought up in a semicastellated manor house in that flat green region. Her father, an ex-colonel in the colonial cavalry, died before she had grown up and left her in the care of an equally impoverished aunt, a lay canoness living in Paris. Unwilling to be a burden on her, she accepted the offer of a distant relation to act as governess to his children in the faraway Caribbean island of Saint-Jacques. She had never met these cousins à la mode de Bretagne, but she made ready without hesitation, caught the packet from Le Havre to Guadeloupe, where she took the fortnightly paddle steamer — the same that appeared in the picture — to Plessis: no mean feat for a girl of eighteen in the 1890s. The entire Serindan family was waiting for her on the quay: a handsome middle-aged couple, a tall boy in his early teens, three girls in huge hats ranging downward at varying intervals, and a little boy. A voluminous Negress held him by the hand and a mongoose’s head peered out of the collar of his sailor suit. They all kissed her and called her “Cousine Berthe” and the little boy gave her his mongoose to hold. Negro servants hoisted her meager luggage onto their heads and trotted away, and the party piled into an immense landau. A smart Negro coachman cracked his whip and away they bowled up the steep main street.

I could never tire of hearing her stories about the life of the island. She stayed in Saint-Jacques six years and, had the fortunes of the island turned out more propitiously, she might have been there still. She was entirely happy. Her descriptions were illustrated by a number of commonplace books and albums of sketches and paintings which she had filled, apparently, for the amusement of her old aunt in Paris, dispatching each one on its completion, and receiving them all back years later on her aunt’s death. There were about a dozen, and, at my entreaty, she had fished them out of a trunk and lent them to me. How much more alive and revealing they were than the single photograph album which had also survived! There was one photograph, however, to which I often turned back: one of Berthe herself, a slim girl in a riding habit buttoned up to the neck in the fashion of Winterhalter’s heroines of a few decades earlier. Her gloved hands were folded over an elegant riding switch. A preposterous curly-brimmed billycock, nesting behind on a heavy golden coil of plaits, was tilted forward over slightly frowning brows and wide eyes set in a grave and lovely face. The photograph had faded to the pallor of khaki drill and insects had freckled it with little holes; yet the fine bone structure was unmistakably that of the slightly sardonic but still rather beautiful features opposite, which the summer sun had scorched.

The sketchbooks covered the entire life of the island. All the fine buildings of the capital were there; views of savanna and volcanic ravine and stifling forest; punctilious flower paintings of hibiscus and balisier, of looping lianas, tree ferns, and dark branches where the night-flowering cereus grew. As I listened and slowly turned the pages, the life of this happy, patrician, slightly provincial minority, into the heart of which Mademoiselle Berthe had suddenly been propelled, took shape. How leisurely and remote it all sounded! The cohorts of Negro servants, the balls and the races, the long rides in cavalcades twenty or thirty strong; the picnics by the ever-smoldering cone of the Salpêtrière, the love affairs and quarrels and duels and reconciliations and marriages; the glimmering indoor life of the rainy season; the lazy afternoons in hammocks slung between mango trees and the hot nights under milky pavilions of muslin.

The Serindans were drawn so often and Berthe described them in such lucid detail that I soon felt I had known them all for a long time. The family, and indeed the whole of Saint-Jacques, was benevolently dominated by her distant cousin, Count Raoul-Agénor-Maric-Gaëtan de Serindan de la Charce-Fontenay (Berthe smiled as she repeated the prodigious name), the owner of Beauséjour, which was the richest and largest of the Jacobean estates. The Count de Serindan was a descendant of Plessis in the female line, and, though a scorner of Napoleon (and, for that matter, of the Orléans family, which, he often declared, were a band of upstarts and a disgrace to the House of France), he would frequently mention his kinship with Josephine de Tascher of near-by Martinique, the victim of that lamentable Corsican mésalliance; and old prints of the ruins of La Pagerie hung on the walks. The news of the death of the Comte de Chambord had struck the Count’s ears like a knell and a black crape ribbon still adorned a lilied shield in his study.

4

THE Serindans were related to all the French families of the archipelago and their affiliations spread as far afield as the Guianas and Louisiana and Quebec; even to Nova Scotia — or rather, as he still insisted on calling it, to Acadie. Their position in Saint-Jacques was Olympian. The church at Beauséjour, which had been unroofed by a score of hurricanes and a score of times roofed over again, was wailed and paved with memorial slabs, each topped by a stone helmet with its frozen foliage of manteling and the emblems of dead Serindans. The orgulous record of their gestures — the carnage they had wrought among the Caribs and the English, their Christian virtues, the multitude of their progeny, their valor in attack and their impavid patience in adversity, the suavity of their manners, the splendor of their munificence, and their pious ends — was incised with a swirling seventeenth-century duplication of long S’s and a cumulative nexus of dog-Latin superlatives that hissed from the shattered slabs like baskets full of snakes.

In company with the other creole landowners the Count was not only exaggeratedly vain of his family’s long history in the island and its total freedom from any colored admixture — though not all of them, Berthe darkly interjected, could be equally sure on this head — but of its freedom from unarmigerous alliances. Again like his Jacobean compeers, he had frequent outbursts against the Third Republic—a band, he would affirm, flinging both hands into the air, of robbers, atheists, freemasons, Jacobins, traitors, and (at the beginning of the Affaire) filthy Dreyfusards. He had even been known to box one of his children’s ears for whistling the “Marseillaise.”

Both his sons were destined for the army, and he himself had achieved some distinction in the FrancoPrussian War. He had finally, at the unanimous insistence of his fellow islanders, accepted the position of mayor of Plessis; but he had only given in after a siege lasting half as long again as that of Troy, and he had always managed, somehow, to avoid donning the tricolor sash. (His first action as mayor had been to design and erect the magnificent gasoliers along the arcaded waterfront. Each little quincunx of white glass globes was held aloft by the spiraling and intertwining tails of five castiron dolphins: a measure which, in the eyes of his all-proud fellow islanders, converted their little capital into the glory of the Antilles.) Fountains and drinking troughs rose in abundance, Jacobean holidays assumed a new momentum, and the life of the island profited by numerous solid benefits to which the Count himself liberally contributed. But his many pictures by Berthe — on horseback, asleep in a rocking chair with a cigar and a wide hat tipped over his nose, and, once, slightly absurdly, in a tail coat with a Knight of Malta’s cross round his neck—depicted someone different from the forbidding traditionalist one might suppose. Page after page revealed a tall, handsome man with a forked beard and hair growing thin on top, often in disorder; loose tropical clothes, a flowing lavallière tie, and an expression of candid and almost childish good humor. For, when nothing occurred to arouse his political bias, all rancor would deflate and the most transparent benignity would take its place.

All his life, indeed, had been devoted to pleasure, and his passion for every kind of sport, his skill at light verses, and his mania for amateur theatricals made him the natural center of the island festivities. He performed competently on half a dozen instruments, on the violin almost with virtuosity. He grasped any pretext for giving holidays to his Negroes, often organizing and participating in these rustic occasions himself. His kindness and generosity were famous and he was an object of affection, suitably tempered with awe, to the whole population.

The Count’s sympathy for the colored majority during his younger days was solidly proved in his maturity by the features of many of the mulattoes on his estates and in his houses. The paler complexions of these African faces were modified by the unmistakable Serindan stamp — “of which the most notable sign,” Mademoiselle Berthe observed, “was the junction of the eyebrows over the bridge of the nose; ce qui donnait un vrai air de famille à toute la maisonnée. . . .” It was rumored that Gentilien, the grizzled, nearly omnipotent mulatto butler — a man of the Count’s age who had served in Bazaine’s army in Mexico — was the result of a similar liberal expansiveness of the Count’s father, who had been, by all accounts, as well as the largest slaveowner in the island, as passionate a follower of the two veneries as his son. Nothing was ever made explicit, but an almost fraternal friendship had united the two men since they were children. The Count frequently expressed his failure to understand the bad terms prevailing between planters and their laborers in less fortunate islands; “Il ne savent pas s’y mettre,” he would observe with a shrug. In later years as a married man, his gallantries were restricted to the white race.

5

IT GOES without saying that the susceptible Count’s heart, in unison with those of most of the masculine creole population of Saint-Jacques, thumped faster at the sudden vision of his beautiful and unknown cousin, and when he, like they, received a kindly but inflexible negative, his disappointment was mitigated by thankfulness for his rescue from a situation which, his natural delicacy may have told him, would have been awkward and undignified. He was quite unaccustomed to his overtures ending thus in the past and his feelings changed to admiration and affection and an almost superstitious awe of Berthe’s good sense. She became his confidante and his counselor on countless matters, and earned the lasting gratitude of the Countess. Madame de Serindan was a beautiful and kindhearted creature resembling a drawing by Boldini or Helleu. Almost permanently ailing and not particularly clever, she spent much of the year at European watering places. She shared her husband’s wonder at Berthe’s sagacity. “They looked on me as a kind of oracle,” Berthe said. Advising the Count about music and horses and the management of his estate — functions for which her upbringing had qualified her in a measure — and the Countess about servants and cooking and dressmaking, became as important a part of her new life as the bringing up of their children.

It was inevitable, too, that the fourteen-year-old Sosthène, in a slightly more articulate fashion than the blind adoration of the other children, should fall in love with her — “All of which made my task a great deal easier.” (There was nothing boastful about these affirmations. They emerged more by implication as incidental illustrations to other points in her narrative than as direct speech.) Their education at the hands of some local Ursuline sisters and a resident abbé — a very nice man it seemed, but rather an old duffer, whom Madame de Serindan had summoned, to be tutor to Sosthène, from her parents’ house near Vauclin in Martinique — had been adequate but uninspired. M. l’Abbé’s chief activity in his old age was saying grace and acting as partner in the games of whist and picquet and bezique which helped to fill the Countess’s inexhaustible leisure. His instruction went little further than elementary Latin and the use of globes. Berthe, whose own schooling had been rather of the same kind as her charges’, but carried far beyond it by the random and hungry reading of a solitary girl in the country and by a year in Paris, succeeded in changing this considerably. The girls were soon reciting long fragments of Racine and Molière, rattling away at the piano, the harp, and the guitar, and drawing and painting and composing with an erratic brilliance that was common to the whole family except the poor Countess.

In Berthe’s sketchbook they emerged at first as delightful children, turning, in the years these records covered, into pale beauties with lustrous black hair and large and long-lashed violet eyes. Their natures swung with startling and unpredictable motions from a rather dreamy creole idleness to an excess of animation over which it was difficult even for the capable Berthe to have any control. Everyone else had long since abdicated. Josephine was twelve, Lucienne nine, and Solange eight. The youngest of the family, Anne-Jules, who was five when Mademoiselle de Rennes arrived, was the least tractable of all. He would vanish, in spite of threats of punishment, for hours at a time on mysterious expeditions with little Negro boys of his own age: errands usually connected with animals, which he had a passion for and a curious knack of taming.

It became plain from the number of drawings, following her slow metamorphosis from a pretty little girl into a ravishing wild-eyed creature of eighteen, that Josephine was the governess’s favorite. Berthe did everything she could to conceal her preference. In time this became more than a preference and turned into a passionate friendship, protective and possessive on Berthe’s side, romantic, adoring, and dependent on Josephine’s. Her three years seniority to the eldest of her sisters in a measure separated her from the other girls, and as she grew older, with increasing freedom and permission to slay up late, it flung her more completely into the company of Berthe. After Sosthène’s departure for France, three years after Berthe’s arrival, to study for Saint Cyr (still desperately in love with his beautiful cousin and ex-governess), the two girls were seldom apart. Their friendship flourished by dint of numberless evenings sitting up late in their rooms at the top of the house. (I knew these upper regions well from the sketchbooks — the tents of mosquito netting, the crucifix on the wall with its plaited palm frond, the rosaries lying about, images d’Épinal cut out and stuck on the wall, a toy penguin and a couple of dolls superannuated and pensioned off on top of a cupboard; guitars and paintboxes, and the faded bindings of the Bibliothèque Rose; the elaborate West Indian dressing tables, the upheaval of treetops under the windows.) Their intimacy was fostered by long rides through the waving avenues of sugar cane and the nocturnal highwoods alive with fireflies. Everything that an idyl possesses that is most primitive and innocent seemed to surround these girls, like a Garden of Eden on the volcano’s side. The Atlantic storms pounded to windward beyond the watershed, but the demesne of Beauséjour sloped peacefully down between tree-feathered canefield and parkland. It was bounded by mountains and by ravines where the distant cascades fell through the gloom of the forest like shining horsetails. Its western boundary was the calm leeward shore and the smooth sweep of the Caribbean Sea. For Berthe and Josephine it was a miraculous region suspended in space, where everything — the forests, the sea, the air, and the sunset — united in a favorable conspiracy. “All this may sound a bit silly,” Mademoiselle Berthe suddenly broke off, “but it was the happiest time of my life. I asked nothing more than for it to go on forever.”

6

IT DID, almost. For as long, that is, as anything was allowed to continue in Saint-Jacques. But, a few weeks before the ball in which all the island affairs culminated, something went wrong.

This was in the early years of the present century. Berthe was twenty-four and Josephine eighteen. Relations between the creole squirearchy and the government administration from France, never very cordial, had been growing steadily worse. It had not been too bad in the past, for the Governor and his staff had been content to take the advice of the creoles on most matters; and, as Saint-Jacques, unlike many of the Antilles, had long been famous for the harmony of its internal affairs, all had gone well.

But two years ago a new Governor, called Valentin Sciocca, and an entirely new staff had been appointed. It was the time when Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes were the most prominent figures in French politics, the era of the Expulsion of the Congregations and the Affaire des Fiches; and Sciocca, an affluent professional politician of Corsican origin — formerly implicated, it was rumored, in several shady affairs — was all that was most unacceptable to the Royalist and profoundly Catholic creoles; a radical, an anticlerical, an atheist, a suspected freemason and an open Dreyfusard. (“He was right on the last point of course, as all the world knows,” said Berthe, “and the Jacobeans were wrong. But feelings ran very high at the time.”) His manner and his general vulgarity, it appeared, were as disagreeable to the creoles as his political associations. What was perhaps stranger at first glance was his lack of success with the Negro population. A herald of reform and a noisy demagogue at every chance he could find for a public speech, he was politely clapped each time, but frustrated in the implementation of his measures by obstructiveness among the black officials and among the laborers themselves. He was maddened at every turn by the reiteration of “fê dimandé ça à Messié le Comte.” As the popular mayor of Plessis, the Count’s position was strong. As head of the creoles and a figure beloved by the whole island, it was invincible, He availed himself of it with savage delight. It was the most exciting and satisfactory sport with which he had yet experimented and the administration of the island was soon at a standstill.

“The pity,” Berthe went on, “was that Sciocca wasn’t a bad fellow really. But he had the manners of a cab driver and less tact than a boot.” The whole island began to suffer from this deadlock and soon the administrative body and the creoles themselves began to wish with equal fervor that the feud between the Count and the Governor would end. Something had to be done. “It was patched up in the end,” Berthe continued, “partly by me, partly by the Captain.

“Haven’t I told you about the Captain?” She turned the pages of a sketchbook and handed it across to me. “There you are: Henri Joubert, capitaine de frègate en reiraite, Beauséjour 1898 — the year he settled in Saint-Jacques. He was a wellknown writer and poet, though few people read him now. He specialized in outlandish settings — islands, deserts, pagodas, icebergs, and so on, in a most melodramatic style. I don’t expect you have ever come across any of his books— Dans le Bled, Aurore Boréale, Crépuscule du Bosphore, Chandernagore, and Les Tonkinoises. I never cared for them much, but we were all very fond of the Captain himself.”

It was a very detailed sketch. The author’s face, one eyesocket expanded with a ribboned eyeglass, gazed deep-eyed from the page. The hair, parted in the middle, swept away in two curling wings, and a little mustache was twisted up musketeerishly above a mouth with many curves whose benignity and humor belied the bristly overshadowing challenge. One hand, emerging from a stiff striped cuff fastened with large cameo links, trailed, limp and gloved, over a rakishly crooked knee; a long quill pen flourished from forefinger and thumb. The other elbow rested on an African drum. The forearm rose perpendicular, and the hand, the gloved ring-finger of which was adorned with a heavy signet, was twisted outward and palm upward, holding a thick cigarette in a foppish gesture.

“Poor Captain!” Berthe said. “He was charming, but in some ways rather absurd. He lived in a little house in the Negro quarter, surrounded by gongs and incense burners and narghile and a host of young Negro servants that he called ‘my bronze and ebony Apollos.’ They said he smoked opium and he was sometimes known as le parfumeur because of the cloud of exotic scents that always followed him about; and his gray hair was dyed a deep chestnut. He had a fin de siècle style that one rarely meets nowadays.”Berthe laughed. “He was very kind and everybody liked him, the Count especially—he was such a diverting companion and such an inventive collaborator in the conduct of fêtes.”

The Captain was a brilliant storyteller, and the family would listen to him with the raptness of a Renaissance court. After dinner on the terrace he would entertain the Serindans for hours with tales of his far-flung adventures on the pampas, in Papua, on the Siberian tundras, or in Madagascar at the court of Queen Ranavalo. His anecdotes of literary colleagues and high life and the stage, and his imitations of Castellano and Montesquieu, of Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane and Eleanora Duse, Coquelin and Mounet-Sully, would set the Count, mopping the tears of laughter from his cheeks with a large bandana handkerchief. He was an ardent bicyclist; he had been for a ride in an automobile and had even made an ascent in a balloon, the story of which the Count never tired of hearing.

But he was also — and in this dual function the Captain was unique in Saint-Jacques — a favorite at Government House. Berthe had for some time been exhorting the Count on the folly of his feud with Sciocca, and when she enrolled the Captain in her support. (“Come, come, my dear Agénor, you are driving the poor man mad”), the Count gradually began to give way; the more easily as his unbroken string of victories was beginning to rob the conflict of its zest. Also, perhaps, because Madame Sciocca, a flamboyant creature from Marseilles for whom the Count had invented, without a shred of ascertainable foundation, raffish origins on the waterfront of her native town, was by no means ill-looking. The Captain tactfully proposed that, as a magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, Sciocca and his staff should be invited, for the first time since their arrival, to the Serindans’ Shrove Tuesday Ball, the apex of the Jacobean carnival and the great social function of the year. The Count’s united eyebrows descended in a spasm of disgust and his beard and mustache bristled like the spines of a hedgehog.

“What? Ask that animal into the house with all his Jacobin scum ?”

The Captain stood up. “My dear friend,”he sighed wearily, “if you were a modern Italian living in Rome instead of a Frenchman in the Caribbean, I really believe your whole life would be spent plotting the return of the Tarquins.”

The Count laughed and then, with one of those sudden changes for which he was well known, he threw his hands negligently into the air and exclaimed, “Enfin! Qu’ils viennent! We can always have the house spring-cleaned next day. . . .”

“Agénor,” the Captain murmured, as his gloved hand descended lightly for a moment on his host’s forearm, “you are goodness in human form.” Picking up his straw boater before another change could occur, he sailed away like a dove crossing and returning to the ark with an olive twig locked in its beak.

7

MEANWHILE, in the private world of Berthe and Josephine, all had not been well. Toward the end of January, Berthe fell sick with an attack of malaria which kept her bedridden for a month. During most of this time Josephine would keep her company; rearranging her pillows, sitting by her bed, and, when Berthe was capable of listening, reading aloud. But the younger girl, who was never able to stay indoors for long, would absent herself on long rides, solitary ones now, returning later and later in the evening. As the severity of the disease abated, Berthe thought she noticed that Josephine came back from these lonely expeditions in a state of elation she found difficult to conceal. One evening she rushed into Berthe’s room with shining eyes, threw her hat and whip on the sofa and then, scrambling inside the mosquito net, flung herself flat on Berthe’s bed. Leaning on the pillow, she propped her chin in her hands. After gazing wildly at the invalid for a few seconds, she said: “Darling Berthe, I’ve got a great secret to tell you,”and then, after a pause, “I’ve fallen in love.” Berthe succeeded in hiding the sudden stab of anguish that transfixed her, and, forcing a smile, said, “I thought something had happened. Please tell me.”

Josephine, it seems, had met this new figure, also on horseback, by chance on the second of her lonely rides, behind the canefields of Savanne dc Rohan in the foothills of the Salpêtrière. Since then they had met every afternoon; declared their love; kissed; sworn to marry. “I knew something of the kind was bound to happen,”Berthe said meditatively, “and assumed he must be the young La Tour d’Astirac of Savanne, or one of the Tharonnes of Morne Zombi, the estate beyond; perfectly eligible and proper after all, distant relations of the Serindans and admirable matches. Tiresomely, Josephine refused for a long time to tell me his name.”At last, hiding her anxiety, and after endless teasing and coaxing, Berthe managed to extort a conditional answer.

“I’ll tell you, Berthe darling, if you promise to keep it a secret.”

“I promise.”

“Well,” Josephine said hesitantly, “it’s Marcel Sciocca, the Governor’s son.”

Berthe jerked bolt upright in bed. “Josephine!" she exclaimed. “I hope this is a joke.”

“By the terror of the girl’s expression,” Berthe said, “I must have looked as if I were about to lay hands on her. I managed to control my anger and soon understood that it was far from being a joke. ‘But Josephine,’ I kept asking her, ‘how could it be Sciocca?’

“For, if his father was perhaps not so bad as he was painted, his son was horrible. He combined the appearance of a Neapolitan barber with the manner of a prize bounder and the reputation of a crook; all of which I didn’t hesitate to tell her. But no, she insisted, that was all prejudice and part of her papa’s political hobbyhorse. This was odd language for her to use. She was passionately devoted to the Count. I told her as well, in the conventional way, that it would kill her father should he ever hear of it. I didn’t mention my own savage feelings of jealousy in the matter but I made her promise not to see him again. It all ended in floods of tears until at last she fell asleep.”

During the following weeks of Berthe’s convalescence, Josephine was seldom far from her side, and everything, except for long abstracted silences on Josephine’s part and a terrible anxiety on Berthe’s, seemed as it had been before. Their ideas were suddenly changed by the joyful event of Sosthène’s arrival from Saint Cyr, where he had had a stormy but not altogether unsuccessful career. He was due to return soon for a course at Saumur before joining a regiment of hussars, He came back with Madame de Serindan, who had been spending the winter between Paris and Contrexéville. Sosthène seemed more deeply than ever in love with Berthe, and she was submitted to an impassioned fusillade of proposals and, alternatively, to threats of suicide. Sosthène looked younger than his age, and his character was an odd and contradictory mixture of youthfulness and extreme precocity. It was plain that his ardor was no longer to be stemmed, as it had been before his departure, by telling him not to be a Silly Billy. If Berthe had consented, the Serindans would have been delighted at the match, in spite of the four years’ difference in age. “But it was out of the question,” Berthe concluded. “How ridiculous and rather pathetic it all seems now, and what a long time ago. . .”

8

I KNEW the appearance and the atmosphere of the Serindan house in Plessis so well from Berthe’s discourse and her innumerable sketches that it was as though I had been present at the preparations for the Shrove Tuesday Ball she so evocatively described: the great white rooms opening to each other through fluted Corinthian pillars of wood; the crowding, rather primitive portraits of dead Serindans in wigs or, later, in high collars, by Clamart, the student of Liotard; the plaster flourishes and rococo cartwheels of foliage on the ceilings; the chandeliers with their prismatic and melodiously jangling lusters, all of them bright now with innumerable candles and already the meeting place of an army of little moths, which, in advance of the guests, had fluttered in from the forest.

The Serindan house was not only the biggest in Plessis, but the highest perched. It was islanded among ascending and descending terraces, and the balustrades were adorned with posturing graces and marble nymphs. Beyond their elegant barrier, the forest began: a huge wilderness of tangled ceibas and balisiers and tree ferns that only halted a slanting six miles beyond at the jagged crater of the Salpêtrière. The day had ended in a flaunting sunset so apocalyptic — a Last Judgment, an apotheosis, an assumption, one could have thought — that each falling ray seemed a ladder for the descending Paraclete, and Berthe almost expected to see longshafted trumpets advance along the slanting beams from the gold and crimson clouds. Then it suddenly died away into night. The volcano had been burning for the last week or so with unaccustomed vigor. Now it hung in the dark like a bright red torch, prompting the island wiseacres, mindful of the terrible eruptions that had coincided over a century ago with the fall of the Bastille, to shake their heads. But such renewals of activity and such gloomy presages recurred every few years. Each minor overflow of lava, heralded invariably by showers of ashes and overpowering heat, was always halted by those intervening canyons known as les chaudières — a gray desert region of fumaroles and volcanic gas and half-fossilized trees. “Ga’dez Salpêtwière!” the Negroes said joyfully to each other, “Li pas faché, li fait bomba pou’ Ma’di Gwas, commne nous”; and the carnival drums beat vigorously all over the town. There had been not a drop of rain for many days — a rare event even in this dry season — and the Trade Winds had ceased altogether. The heat was appalling.

But nothing could repress the Count’s enthusiasm on such an occasion. (The Countess, ensconced in a rocking chair, gently fanning herself in a cool little room with a pretty Clamart pastoral scene on the ceiling, had long ago resigned from such duties. Lavenderand barley-water and hartshorn stood ready on a little table. Safely embowered there among indoor shrubs, she turned over the pages of La Mode à Paris.) He and the Captain and Berthe were directing the decoration of the two great saloons where the dancing would take place. Negroes had been at work all day plaiting thick festoons of bougainvillia and poinsettia, and when the Captain arrived, the Count, Berthe, and Gentilien, with the children and an army of servants, were looping them from the walls to the chandeliers. The Captain’s hands had gone up in horror.

“Agénor! Berthe! Gentilien! It’s hideous! Pray throw those monstrosities away at once, it’s worse than an English Christmas at Cape Town. Nothing but hibiscus and magnolia, I beg!”

The Count was only downcast for a moment and the work had to begin all over again. The new decorations were ready just in time. “No, not strung from the chandeliers but like this,” the Captain insisted, “hanging in swags from the cornice and twisted in spirals round the curtains and pillars.”

The result was charming. The heavy scent of the garlands mingled with that of polish and beeswax. Together they arranged the great sheaves of flowers and chose the places for the branching candelabra. (Each candle was enclosed in the swelling and waisted cylinder of a glittering hurricane glass.) Next they inspected the cold table, with its hams and its quails in aspic, the giant lobsters and crabs, the ivory pyramids of chou coco and chou palmsite, for each one of which a tall palm tree had been felled in order that the precious heart might be dislodged; the mounds of soursop and mangoes, the pineapples and sapodillas and sweetsops and granadillas and avocado pears; the cold barracks for champagne, where on banks of ice from Nova Scotia the magnums of Aï reclined in green and gold battalions; the arrays of rum and syrup jugs, the lemons and the nutmeg and the newly cut yardlong swizzle sticks for the punch martiniquais; the ingredients for the sorbets and sangaree were methodically laid out along a dresser. At noon the Count and Gentilien had descended the spiral to the cellars with the gravity of turnkeys, reascending from the cobwebbed catacombs (which warraned the volcanic rock on which the house was built) like chaplains bearing a succession of fragile and wonderful reliquaries. Now the Count gazed with the tenderness of a nurse at the alcove where, like sleeping, children who must come to no harm, the fabulous clarets, uncorked with almost alchemical skill, lay at rest; cradled there for the last few hours, sleepers of Ephesus all gently waking, they mingled with the Antillean air the quiet breath they had held since their infancy by far-off castles on the banks of the Garonne.

In the kitchen, urchins, sea eggs, and dwarf oysters — the last still clustering in scores on lengths of mangrove stalk — were heaped in pails. The snowwhite whorls of the conch shells (each of them opening to display a pink internal helix) were arrayed like a tritons’ orchestra announcing, in a silent fanfare, the later delights of lambi flambé au rhum. A swarm of little frogs swam agitatedly round their tank; the great shell of a turtle had already been evacuated by its lodger. Horny-backed iguanas, trussed like captured dragons, moved restlessly in their baskets. The Count stopped and gazed at them.

“What beautiful and mythical creatures!” he apostrophized. “To think that our pygmy ancestors trembled before their giant ancestors in prehistoric times!” He picked one up. Its tail swayed in uneasy protest. “And now, poor creatures, how the roles are reversed!” Stooping, he whistled a few bars from the overture to Lucia di Lammermoor, and soon the dragon was motionless, as though these notes had mesmerized it into an aesthetic trance. Running his finger along its jagged backbone to the tip of the slender striped tail, he replaced it with a sigh. “They love Donizetti,” he said; then, with a slight change of key, turning to the Captain; “I’ve discovered a new way of cooking them, Henri,” he said. “Don’t forget to tell me what you think of it. . . .” Outside under the mango trees a dozen Negroes turned spits on which sucking pigs were impaled over trenches of charcoal. White teeth were bared in greeting among the shadows. “Goutez ca, Messié le Comte,” said one of the Negroes, snipping off a crisp ear. “Ou ka volé au pawadis!”

They returned munching to the hall, where the servants were waiting. The Count always dressed them for this dance in the liveries of his greatgrandfather’s time, which had been preserved in great chests in the attics. Many of them, drawn by Berthe, were familiar figures: Charlemagne, Gratien, Mignon, Ajax, Fortuné, Hyacinthe, Zénon, Félix, Théodule, Sarpedon, Numa Pompilius, Siriaque, Clovis, and Hiram Abif, a rather secretive young man formerly apprenticed to a bricklayer; and a dozen more. They were dressed in white breeches with a bunch of ribbons at the knee, and their feet and legs were bare. Their white linen shirts had billowing sleeves and ribbons at the collar and the cuff. Broad yellow sashes bound their middles, and their torsos were enclosed in black plush boleros gallooned with gold lace. They wore golden earrings and large black and yellow turbans fastened with plumes, and round their necks hung silver plaques on chains incised with the Serindan cognizance: a shield bearing three greyhounds passant on a bend on a field of cross-crosslets within a tressure flory-counterflory.

Then the girls — Dody, Uldarix, Modestine, Lucette, Baby, La Grande Suzanne, Vénus, Eulalie, Marie Médicis, Léocade, Scholastique, Jug Betty and Joan fron Antigua, Bibiane and a swarm of others — lined up giggling. Berthe and Gentilien — the latter dressed in buckled shoes and a black and gold frock coat with epaulettes and aiguillettes, his grizzled hair redundantly powdered —straightened the tall cylindrical turbans of the girls and the huge yellow and black bows down the front; puffed out a pannier here, tightened a sash there, and smoothed the pleated skirts over their bare feet. The Count beamed, exclaiming, “Charmant, mes enfants!” — a familiar mode of address which in three cases, and possibly more, was literally exact in this instance — then clapped his hands, and the girls scuttled off laughing. But the orchestra, assembled and trained by himself at Beauséjour and transported to Plessis for the Carnival, was his favorite care. He had sent for the sheet music of the most recent dance tunes from Paris, and, sitting at the piano, seizing now a violin, now a cello, he went over the difficult passages till all seemed perfect .

“Now, Henri,” he said to the Captain, “it’s time to change. And, I entreat you, please be here when your Metropolitan friends arrive. We shall all be lost without you.”

The Captain shouted from the doorstep that he would rather be late for the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

9

UPSTAIRS in the girls’ rooms, all was at sixes and sevens. A flotsam of stockings, petticoats, cardboard boxes, and tissue paper smothered the beds and overflowed to the floor. Gentilien’s wife, the old and bulky Fanette, who had been the Da, or Nanny, of the Serindan children since they were born, presided over half a dozen maids who knelt round the four girls with their mouths full of pins: taking in last-minute tucks, arranging ribbons, brushing and braiding hair. The Count had given all four of them new dresses for the ball. Berthe’s was green — “They thought it went best with my fair hair” — Lucienne’s pale blue, and Solange’s pink. Josephine ran into Berthe’s room, pirouetted on one white satin toe with a swirl of skirts, and then stood still with a look of expectancy. It was her first low dress, a stiff pagoda of white taffeta that made the warm olive skin of her shoulders and the dusky smoothness of her cheeks shine with the luster of ivory and burn with the utmost fervor of creole beauty: a warmth accentuated by the pallor of the gardenias along the corsage of her dress and the three gardenias in her blue-black hair.

“Oh, Josephine,” Berthe could not help saying. “How lovely you look!”

“Do I, darling Berthe?” she answered in a gasp. “And you!” They held each other at arm’s length.

“Josephine had been very excited all day,” Berthe explained to me, “and I hoped she had forgotten all about her romance with M. Sciocca. She was the giddiest of the three girls and excitement at the prospect of the ball and her new dress easily accounted for her exaltation. But I could not forget that he would be there with his father, and decided to keep my eyes open. While we were gazing at each other in admiration, Anne-Jules burst into the room. ‘You girls may think you’re something,’ he shouted, ‘ but you wait. I’ve got a surprise in here’ — he pointed to a mysterious basket — ‘that’s going to wake everybody up!’ He had been more than usually hard to find during the last week, always returning from the woods late for meals, and invariably in the company of a little black boy of his own age, Gentilien’s son, Pierrot — though Anne-Jules did not know it, his own first cousin — who now hovered in the background. The other girls came running in and the boys disappeared. They were joined by Sosthène, who emerged from his room looking tall and grave in a brand-new uniform. After suitable exclamations, we joined hands and rustled down the great staircase, all feeling very proud of ourselves. Modestine, Josephine’s maid, ran halfway down to give Josephine a fan that she had forgotten. We were only just in time, for the first guests were arriving as we reached the hall.”

The first arrivals were cousins and neighbors: the entire vast family of La Tour d’Astirac-Belcastel of Savanne de Rohan. They streamed into the hall with kisses and exclamations of wonder at the dresses and the flowers. After that, the carriages rolled up one after the other, till the courtyard was ringing with trampling and spark-striking hooves. Wheels ground and squeaked on the flagstones. Many kinds of vehicles appeared — modern barouches and victorias, neat flies and coupés, antiquated berlines and bourbonnaises, and here and there a smart turnout à la Daumout — each unloading at the Count’s staircase the denizens of all the gentilhommiéres of Saint-Jacques. With shouts and cracking whips the equipages moved on. The newly alighted groups flowed indoors between two gigantic stone figures of Atlas which stooped with frowning brows and contorted biceps beneath a massive pediment loaded with blazons and cornucopias hewn out of coral rock. Here and there a visiting cousin turned up from another island — a de Jaham or a Despointes from Martinique, a du Boulay from English St. Lucia. A few prominent members of the little Jewish community of Plessis — names like Spinoza, Leon, da Costa, Astrólogo, and da Cordova — arrived together. These were the descendants of Sephardic families that had fled from Ferdinand and Isabella to the Brazilian town of Pernambuco, taking refuge, when the town was captured, in the hospitable Antilles. Most of the sugar and rum and molasses brokerage in SaintJacques was in their hands, and they had occupied for generations an honorable position in the island.

The Captain’s arrival was greeted with acclamation, for—“with his cheeks a little pinker than usual,” Berthe said, “and his eyebrows a little more poignantly dark” — he came swaying along in a painted sedan chair upholstered in purple satin and borne by two of his dark retinue. He swore that the streets where he lived were too narrow for any larger equipage. Alighting with the resilience of an aeronaut, he coiled toward the Count and Countess, and stooped over her hand with a delicate interweaving of compliments. The effluvia of Oriental essences surrounded him. His hair had been brushed and cajoled into an ambrosial nest, his mustache was crisply tonged, and the hand that held the flattened opera hat against his erect and pigeon-breasted torso was gloved in lilac. Screwing in his eyeglass, he peered challengingly round the room with an air of debonair severity, epitomizing, his attitude seemed to say, the fourfold essence of mariner, explorer, man of letters, and balloonist.

The band and the Count’s tunes from Paris were a quick success; the floor soon filled with couples, and the intervals were loud with the planters’ deep voices and the fluttering and lighthearted tones of their wives and daughters, as bright, all of them, and as lively as hummingbirds. The strange creole diction, whose oddity and charm in Berthe’s ears still survived its six years’ familiarity, twittered in the warm candle-lit air. The brilliant dresses of the women were flanked by the high collars and stiff round plastrons, the white clothes and the scarlet sashes of the men. Negroes in their black and gold liveries skimmed among the guests, holding great silver trays laden with champagne glasses or long goblets of Martinique punch high above their turbans. A violet splash betokened the presence of the Bishop of Plessis, deep in colloquy with a dowager from the other side of the island. Every time the music stopped, the sounds of carnival from the rest of Plessis sailed in through the windows.

“Son Excellence le Gouverneur,” Gentilien announced in one of these pauses, “et Madame Sciocca.” The Count, with the Countess rustling beside him in the new Worth dress she had brought back from Paris, moved to meet them. The august visitors appeared in the doorway. The Governor was a stocky figure in a black evening coat. A broad red ribbon ran across his shirt front and he wore a heavy black mustache, a fringe and pince-nez. Standing hesitantly between the Corinthian columns, he mopped the back of his neck with a silk handkerchief. Madame Sciocca quite overshadowed him. She was a tall and opulent woman with a mass of red hair. Her towering coiffure was crowned with a high mauve aigrette that matched the mauve sequins of her dress and also her long mauve gloves, round one wrist of which a heavy pearl necklace was twisted; a large ostrich feather fan fluttered up and down as languorously as the flabella that once cooled the brow of the Egyptian queen. The Captain, presiding in the midst of the newly formed group by the door, tactfully abetted the meeting of the creoles with the gubernatorial couple and the somber-looking staff attending them. The group moved slowly across the floor to a table by the largest window.

“Madame,” the Governor said feelingly, offering one arm to the timid Countess, and mopping his brow, “quelle épouvantable chaleur! ” The Count’s natural affability was never more apparent. Madame Sciocca rested her hand on his gallantly crooked elbow and gazed round the room. “Mais quelle splendeur chez vous, mon cher comte,” she sighed, and her eyelids seemed to move with the same torpid voluptuousness as the long white feathers of her fan. “C’est une vraie splendeur. . . .” The Count’s eyes, glancing down at the thick white throat and the monumental curves at his side and catching the glint of the two green eyes now swiveling toward his own, were focused in a masked and expert appraisal that soon kindled into a bright answering spark of approbation.

A quarter of an hour later, when the party was safely established, Berthe was standing in one of the window recesses talking to the Captain. “Thank God!” he murmured in her ear, “I believe everything is going like a honeymoon.” He looked down with satisfaction at the outstretched lilac fingers of one of his hands and smoothed an imaginary wrinkle on the little finger. “I wonder who told la belle dame Sciocca about my new gloves — not that I mind, my dear — far from it. Plagiary is really very flattering. . . .”

The Count by now was waltzing gaily round and round with Madame Sciocca. Nimbly reversing toward Berthe and her companion, his revolutions brought him and his partner close to the alcove. The Count smiled at Berthe over his partner’s shoulder, and she thought she could catch the ghost of a wink in his jovial face. She burst out laughing and said to the Captain: “I believe you are right.” The Captain placed his hand on his shirt front and rolling his eyes histrionically, said: “C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée!” and, delighted that all was going so well, went off to assist Madame de Serindan with the Governor.

M. Marcel Sciocca — the Governor’s son by an earlier marriage that had been dissolved by divorce (it was rumored in whispers), in order to make way for the present Madame Sciocca — sat on the Countess s other side, fluently reinforcing his father’s rather cumbrous devoirs with a florid battery of compliments. “He was a tall, blue-chinned brute of about forty,” Berthe said, “with a pale fleshy face smothered in rice powder, a deep and modulated voice, an oily address and a permanent flashing smile whose total emptiness was only diversified by half a dozen gold teeth — a dancing master beginning to run to fat, and rigged out in huge diamond studs. He was, in fact, so much a caricature of the ideal rastaquouère that Josephine’s former infatuation became every minute more difficult to understand. But I was relieved to see that not only did he not ask Josephine to dance, but not a glance was exchanged between them. Josephine had taken refuge at the other end of the room, dancing entirely with her cousins and several times running with Hubert de la Tour, the young man whom the parents on both sides had in mind as Josephine’s future husband. I heaved a sigh of relief. The dance came to an end and Cousin Agénor led Madame Sciocca back to his table.”

(To be continued)