In Christophe's time English educators were much concerned with the "modern" teaching theories of Joseph Lancaster, and the British and Foreign School Society with headquarters on Borough Road, London, had been established for the purpose of carrying out that once famous gentleman's theories.
Christophe heard of the society, corresponded with it, and before long drove down to Cap Henry to greet six Lancastrian teachers who had come to Haiti at his urgent invitation. By special proclamation the six Englishmen were declared exempt from the passport and other restrictions which to some extent limited the free movement of other white men in Haiti. And before they had wholly recovered from their seasickness, Henry placed gangs of masons and carpenters at their disposal and told them to build schools.
In a miraculously short time exact replicas of their far-away structure on the Borough Road, London, were erected in the four principal ports of the kingdom—Cap Henry, and Port de Paix on the north coast, and Gonaives and St. Marc on the west. And, so Henry could watch the work, one was built at Milot just under Sans Souci.
Educated mulatto and negro men were found, put through a swift course of instruction, and installed. Soon the five national schools were giving instruction to over two thousand pupils.
The study of English was required. The more advanced students were urged to learn Spanish. Two-thirds of the island was owned by Spain and the King dreamed of a greater kingdom. Christophe, who had never learned to read or write, was ambitious for the future of the blacks.
It was his own fancy to found a royal college. Out of his own purse he established a chair of anatomy and surgery and arranged for Dr. Stewart, who was already director of the royal hospital, as well as private physician to the King, to give occasional lectures. In Pétion's republic educated men flatly refused to turn their energies to anything more productive or less dignified than government clerkships—a peculiarly mulatto tendency. So black Christophe compelled every boy of ten years old or more to learn a trade. He supplied the masters and the tools.
Ever since the peace which followed the expulsion of Rochambeau, Baron Vastey had been the tutor of King Henry's only son, fat, domineering, obstinate Prince Victor-Henry. For years Madame Christophe had devoted several hours every day to the task of instructing their two daughters, Améthiste and Athénaire. But the education of Marie-Louise, though great for the wife of a negro waiter, was inadequate for the consort of a King and she soon came to the end of her knowledge.
Sometime, when a little more was done and the friends of the negro were a trifle more numerous and more generous, Henry hoped the princesses might go abroad. So it was important they be taught all graces and accomplishments. He began to cast about for special tutors for them.
Dupuy said Philadelphia was a center of propriety and culture and suggested that through friends there he could probably find teachers in every way suitable for the position. Christophe intrusted the business to him.
After a prolonged correspondence two Americans were selected, and after natural delays arrived at Cap Henry. They were two white maiden ladies well past middle years.
History has neglected to preserve their names, unique though they were in the annals of feminine adventurers. But tradition has it that one was tall and lean and virulently correct, and the other, her life-long friend, rather plump and jolly, and that they wore tight-waisted black spencers and knitted mittens without fingers. It is also recorded that their voyage from Philadelphia lasted fifteen days and was stormy all the way, with the result that they arrived at the Cap very pale and much depressed in spirit.
Baron Vastey met them. As the two gallant Philadelphians alighted from the small boat which brought them from their ship's place of anchorage, he offered an arm, and in the same instant, with his eyes like twin points of fire, asked the startling question:
"Ladies, what would you do if the French should come?"
To that, with great presence of mind, the taller one replied: "Sir, we would place ourselves under the protection of His Majesty King Henry," and Vastey was silent.
The city of the Cap was a bitter disappointment. It was rising newborn from the ruins, but ruins there still were. And the clatter and confusion of the building which was everywhere going on was hardly more cheering than the piles of old embers. Cap Henry was so little, the ladies confided to each other, hardly more than a village. It boasted almost no cultured society. Baron Vastey was very learned, of course, and the English schoolmasters were of one's own sort . . . but it was hard not to be a trifle homesick.
With careful courtesy they indicated to Baron Vastey that it might be pleasanter if room could be found for them at the palace. The original plan had been that they were to live in Cap Henry and drive each day out to Sans Souci.
King Henry readily assented. But five weeks passed before the chambers at the palace were ready to receive them. At the end of that time Baron Dupuy drove in for them.
A cool breeze was blowing in from the sea. There were flowers at each side of the road and the negroes at work in the fields were singing. Dupuy asked them many questions about Philadelphia. The ladies gradually relaxed into a new cheerfulness.
On their arrival under the mounting, splendid walls of Sans Souci, a more superb structure than the Americans had ever seen before in all their lives, a pleasant middle-aged mulatto woman whom Dupuy introduced as the Duchess of Port Margot, wife of the King's nephew, greeted them with informal courtesy and showed them into a grand salon filled with people—the full court.
Many of the younger negro nobles had never seen a white woman before. One exclaimed aloud upon their beauty—which was pleasant but a trifle upsetting.
At eleven, after coffee and time to refresh themselves after their journey, the ladies were shown into the library and in a moment six black pages in gold and blue livery entered, followed by King Henry.
They had had no idea he was so tall. Nor had they imagined him as quite so "dark complexioned." But his large eyes were kind and smiling and his gracious manner put them at their ease at once. He asked them to be seated; but "of course," they later confided to friends in Philadelphia, "we refused."
Before nightfall the two ladies had met the Queen and discovered her to be a gentle and kindly mistress. They had talked with the princesses, found them "congenial," and, what impressed them most of all, they had learned from Henry himself that he had played an humble part in the American War of the Revolution. Christophe, who loved to reminisce, had roused that first adventure for them from the storehouse of his faded memories and had painted a vivid picture.
"It makes one," remarked the stout little maiden lady to her friend, "feel quite at home." And she smiled with intrepid reassurance.
Before long the two ladies found things reminiscent of Philadelphia singularly precious. Athénaire and Améthiste were willing and cheerful pupils. The Queen, when she was not secluded in her beloved garden, was kind. Mr. Moor and Dr. Stewart were most agreeable, of course. But, when all was said and done, life at the palace of Sans Souci was, frankly, dull.
Milot, in spite of its being the residence of the sovereign, was only a tiny negro village half asleep under the tropic sun. Each day was the double of all others.
The court, following the lead of the King, who rarely devoted more than five hours of the twenty-four to sleep, rose early, but only Christophe seemed able or willing to keep every moment of the long, murmurous hours of daylight filled with some sort of activity.
Nearly every morning His Majesty might be seen striding down the grand staircase across the lower park and disappearing into the concealing jungle that clothed the mountains that rose up on three sides of the palace.
It was his invariable custom to take a daily walk, accompanied by a page who carried his battered brass telescope wrapped in a white napkin. No one knew just where he might go, but every cultivator, landlord, and civil servant within a radius of fifteen miles knew that Christophe might appear at his elbow any moment. Then woe betide anyone whom he found idle! Much was going on and he gave his personal attention to everything. Roads were being made, bridges built, reservoirs constructed, farms surveyed, and a postal service to every section of the kingdom being organized. The telescope played an important part in each undertaking. From rocky eminences in the hills the King would look down into the near-by valleys. Often peasants would be punished because from a distance he had sighted them asleep in the sun during the hours the law set apart for labor. The brass telescope, the uses of which were only vaguely understood, soon gave the King a reputation for magical omnipresence.
But what troubled the ladies from Philadelphia, at first subtly, then acutely, was a mood which they sensed was gathering slowly over the majestic peace of Sans Souci.
There were whispers in the corridors and queer looks exchanged. On several occasions they could not help observing that conversations between courtiers broke off suddenly and that voices shifted to an artificial note on their approach. It made them nervous. The King seemed so pleasant and so "capable." They wondered if it were possible he had enemies. Obviously something was seriously the matter. Perhaps, they confided to each other, it was the Citadel.
In 1819 the Citadel had become the supreme absorption of the King. The ladies from Philadelphia had never visited it. Due to the formation of the hills, it was invisible from Sans Souci, but in the five weeks they spent at Cap Henry they had often noted its immense gray silhouette on the summit of the cone-like mountain the peasants called Le Bonnet a l'Evêque, and its history was common talk.
The Citadel la Ferrière, was the gigantic fortress King Christophe was building on the crown of a peculiarly inaccessible mountain 3,000 feet above sea-level. Work on it had been begun in January, 1804, at the order of Dessalines, and for fifteen years the work had gone toward completion. But not until Henry had been King for seven years, not until Haiti had been made immaculate, her fields planted and her people enriched, had the King driven on the work with more than common urgency.
Its construction was a task to stagger the ambition of a Pharaoh and to test the utmost skill of the engineers of any time. But the Citadel was to answer many purposes. It was to be a refuge against that dreaded but receding time when the terror of Vastey might be fulfilled and the jealous French would come. It was to be a great gray fist thrust threateningly into the sky to warn the yellow men beyond the border that majesty was not to be trifled with. But above everything, it was to be the king's grand gesture, a dream of empire wrought in everlasting stone, a monument the blacks could turn their eyes to, lay their hands on, the essence and the foundation of their pride.
A Haitian mulatto engineer named Henri Besse had evolved the design under Christophe's supervision. Following the original specifications, the fortress took the shape of an irregular square, tapering to a gigantic prow that pointed magnetic north. The height of the walls, measured from the tip of the steeply sloping mountain-crest, ranged from 80 to 130 feet. They were from 20 to 30 feet thick and surrounded a central parade ground.
As the work progressed the original plans were elaborated. In spite of the difficulties of the situation—the Citadel was at the end of a strenuous three hours' climb up a winding and sometimes dangerous trail—365 huge bronze cannon, one for every day in the year, were dragged up and ranked in batteries. And hundreds of casks of gunpowder, thousands of fifty-six-, thirty-, and twelve-pound iron cannon balls were borne up the trail by panting, sweating men and women and piled in chambers behind the guns.
An enormous underground cistern caught every drop of rain that fell on the Citadel. A miniature palace for the King was erected at one corner of the parade ground, and another, somewhat larger, named after the King's favorite bird, Le Ramier, was constructed at some little distance on a neighboring hill-slope. There were deep dungeons, treasure chambers, powder magazines, long corridors of cannon, and room sufficient in an emergency for the housing of a garrison of 10,000 men. La Ferrière, as Christophe proudly knew, was more gigantic than any fortress ever erected on this side of the sea.
But it was costly. While the fear of France had been close, the work, carried on chiefly by soldiers of the standing army, had gone forward with little protest. But by 1819 Haiti had grown fat from prosperity and France at last seemed far away.
In 1814 Louis XVIII had sent two envoys to Haiti to negotiate for a return of the island to the status of a French colony. But Henry had executed one of them as a spy and sent the other ignominiously home with a jug filled with tiny seeds and instructions to tell Louis that twice as many men as the jug held seeds would be required for Haiti's subjugation.
In 1815, on Napoleon's return from Elba, he had written King Christophe suggesting an alliance between them. Henry had replied with a short contemptuous challenge.
Why then, grumbled the nobles, must Henry still have his Citadel? They hated it. It took money that might have found its way into private pockets and men who could have swollen retinues. Besides . . . somehow, without a word being spoken or a law proclaimed, it had become Henry's own, not theirs or Haiti's. It was, they knew in their hearts, magnificent—the supreme physical creation in the history of the negro race—but it was his. He had dreamed it and his vitality had got it done. And Henry, the rich, the educated, and the powerful could not forget, was a full-blooded black.
That was the rallying call, that the foundation fact on which was being reared a growing discontent.
