Caribbean (77 page)

He, too, was aware of this, but he savored the challenge of bringing
them to his bed despite their bitterness, imagining himself to be like the hunch-backed Richard III of England, who found sexual delight in wooing the widow of the young king whom he had just caused to be slain.

His pursuit of the two women could have been played out as one of those delightful European comedies in which a pompous official from the capital swaggers into some Italian or Spanish or French country town, casts his lecherous eye on two comely housewives, and is made a laughingstock by their superior wit. But this master plot could not play in Pointe-à-Pitre because the scrawny Hugues was no fat Falstaff; he was an ogre with his own guillotine.

Finding Eugénie unapproachable, since she was preoccupied with mourning her dead husband and caring for her son, he turned to Solange, who, since the destruction of her family’s plantation, lived in town with her freed mother, and the more often he saw her moving about the square, the more desirable she became in his fantasies. She was the epitome of those black and mulatto people he had rescued from oblivion; she represented his vision of the future when all the Caribbean islands would exist under what he interpreted as a benevolent French leadership, the tyrannical whites having been exterminated. Thus she became not only an extremely attractive young woman of beautiful face and exquisite movement, but she was also a kind of spiritual symbol of the new world that he was creating.

Of course, coincident with this growing infatuation with Solange, he was bringing to his bed at night an endless chain of whatever women he could inflict his hungry body upon, and some of the stratagems he devised to accomplish this were so wretched that they seemed antithetical to any normal concept of sexual passion. How could a man who spoke of loving a woman cause her husband to be guillotined on Tuesday and derive pleasure from forcing her into his bed at the House of Lace on Thursday? Hugues found no contradiction in such behavior, and he also applied pressure against children to bring their mothers to him and separated girls of fifteen from boys of sixteen who were striving to protect them. One observant Frenchman, an advocate of the revolution in France insofar as he understood it, wrote in a secret letter to Paris: “In your city they speak of a Reign of Terror. Here we whisper about a Reign of Horror, for all decency seems to have fled.”

The recipient of this letter read it, snorted his disgust, and sent it
back to Hugues with the notation: “Now you have a spy in your midst,” and on the evening of its arrival in Guadeloupe, when the drumbeats rolled, the sender of the complaints was guillotined.

Hugues started his assault on Solange by promoting her black mother from a position as his aide to one which required her to work in his office, and when she was comfortably established, he made it plain that she would retain his favor only if she made it possible for him to see her daughter frequently. “You might invite her to help you here,” he suggested, and she replied: “Solange is no longer under my control,” and he said in tones that could not be misinterpreted: “She’d better be.”

When Mme. Vauclain alerted her daughter, Solange said nothing; because of the barbarous conditions in Guadeloupe she was afraid to confide anything to her. Since her mother had been the recipient of the murderer’s favor, she could very well have been enrolled as one of his spies, so she kept her counsel, but sometimes late at night she would slip into Eugénie’s house to resume plotting with her only confidante.

“I had the strangest feeling yesterday, Eugénie. I was talking with my mother and she asked me a question … can’t remember what it was … probing, though. And I warned myself: ‘Better not tell her anything. She may be one of his spies.’ ” She looked down at the floor, then looked furtively about, for Hugues’ spies were everywhere, but she had to share her bitterness with someone, so she continued: “That horrible man. We must go ahead.”

Eugénie said quietly, but with even greater force than Solange had shown: “A knife, poison, a gun … but they’re difficult to smuggle in. How did the Corday woman finish her tyrant? Drowning him in a bath or stabbing him when he was there?”
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Toward the end of 1797 the two women decided that since their prey was so eager to get Solange into his bed, she should mask her loathing and allow him to do so, but as Eugénie pointed out: “Only if you can do so … shall we say … on some kind of permanent basis.” She hesitated: “So you’ll have opportunities to do whatever we decide.”

“Oh no!” Solange protested. “Once I go there, I can never come here again, Eugénie. It would be too dangerous for you.” Solange then looked at this precious friend who had been so helpful in their growing up, and said softly: “I could not bear losing you and Paul, both. This I must do by myself, but I shall do it,” and she started to go, but Eugénie reached out for her hand, and for some time the two young women stood thus in the shadows of the apothecary’s house.

“Did you love him so deeply … that you’ll risk your life?” Eugénie asked, and Solange replied: “You’re willing to risk yours,” and Eugénie said sensibly: “Of course, but we were married,” and the beautiful mulatto, even lovelier in the shadows, replied: “We were too, in another way. And Hugues must die for the great wrong he did us both.” With this confession from the past and commitment to the future, the two creoles embraced for the last time, reconciled to the fact that if things went wrong, they might never see each other again, and as they parted in the darkness Eugénie whispered: “Rest easy, beloved sister. If you don’t succeed, I shall.”

In December 1797, Solange Vauclain moved into the House of Lace with the man she was determined to murder, and for some six weeks this grotesque love affair progressed. She dissembled her feelings so adeptly that Hugues felt the elation that any thirty-five-year-old man would feel at having won the affections of a beautiful twenty-four-year-old woman, but since he never underestimated his potential enemies, he told his spies: “Find out about this one,” and they reported: “She hasn’t seen her friend Eugénie Lanzerac since the execution. No danger there. She is, of course, the daughter of a French Royalist, now dead. Her mother could be trustworthy or not. You’re the best judge of that.”

There was more, but none of it added up to a serious suspicion of Solange except for the one irrefutable fact: “She was, at one time, you must always remember, in love with Lanzerac, but so far as we can determine, nothing came of it.”

Lulled by such reports and assured that Solange was not seeing the Lanzerac widow, Hugues continued the affair, congratulating himself on having organized his living arrangements so amicably. One morning following a dinner party at which Solange had proved a radiant hostess, he even admitted to himself as he was shaving: She
would grace any salon, that one. I get the feeling sometimes that she was made for Paris.

He spent the rest of that morning at his usual duties, including approval of the next batch of executions, then took his lunch with Solange on the balcony of his quarters, the House of Lace, overlooking the square. In the afternoon he and Solange went riding, and he was again impressed with the way she seemed to be able to do almost anything a gentlewoman should; he felt like an adoring husband as he watched her dismount, and kissed her ardently when inside the house which she had known so intimately when Paul and Eugénie occupied it.

Dusty from his ride, Hugues repaired to an upstairs room, to which former slaves brought buckets of hot water for his bath. When they were gone and he was luxuriating in the tin tub which he had brought from Paris, he heard a rustle at the door, and called out: “Is that you, Solange?” and she came slowly, purposefully into the room, holding extended before her a long, sharp knife. With extraordinary speed and deftness, he sprang from his bath, sidestepped her attack, and knocked the blade from her hand. Screaming in terror “Help! Assassins!” he cowered in a corner.

First into the bathroom was Mme. Vauclain, Solange’s mother, who understood instantly what her daughter had attempted. “Ah! Girl!” she cried. “Why did you fail?” And she leaped upon Hugues, trying to wrest the knife from him and finish the job. Before she could do so, guards burst into the room and pinioned both women, while Hugues continued to moan: “They tried to kill me!” But as the women were being led away, Mme. Vauclain broke away from the guard, rushed to Solange, and embraced her: “You did right. Don’t fear, the monster will be destroyed.”

At high noon next day, his private guillotine having been moved into the lovely square, Victor Hugues watched as the African slave woman Jeanne Vauclain was led forth in chains, her face a mass of bruises from her interrogation by the guards, and dragged onto the execution platform. Thrown to her knees, she was locked into position, and the great knife fell. Moments later her exquisite daughter, slim and graceful as a young palm tree in a tropic breeze, was pushed up the three stairs to the platform and forced down till her neck was properly exposed, and again the knife fell.

This time the blade did not fall instantly, for Hugues felt he must issue a warning to his people: “See what happens when reactionary
royalists seduce and mislead our mulattoes and blacks. These women were traitors to the cause of freedom, and for that they must die.” Slowly he raised his hand to make this heroic point, held it aloft for a moment, then dropped it dramatically, and the knife roared downward in its sickening fall. Solange Vauclain, loveliest creole in her generation, was dead, and as her head rolled into the square her executioner looked across to the house of the apothecary, where Eugénie now lived, and saw that the Lanzerac widow had been watching.

With Solange out of the way, Hugues’ pursuit of Eugénie became more concentrated, and although he could not reasonably expect her to move into his quarters, he did apply ingenious pressures to make her consider an alliance: “Madame Lanzerac, we need a new apothecary in the town, so it becomes inevitable that you must leave your home to others who will put it to better use.”

When she asked: “Where shall I live?” he replied hesitantly: “There’s always room in your old home,” but she professed not to understand what he was proposing.

Once, in extreme irritation, he reminded her: “You remember, of course, that on the night of our arrival you were sentenced to death? Spared only by my generosity. That sentence still hangs over you.”

But still she repelled his suggestion, not masking the fact that she considered it odious. So he adopted harsher methods. One morning as she returned from her marketing at the far end of the square facing the ocean, she was greeted by a screaming woman: “Eugénie! They’ve stolen your boy!” and when she rushed to the room in which she had left him, she saw that he was gone.

In the anguished days that followed she received a bombardment of bewildering rumors, orchestrated by Hugues but never voiced by him, for he intended to step forward later as her savior: “The boy Jean-Baptiste was found dead!” and “The little Lanzerac boy was found in a marketplace near Basse-Terre.” In this cruel broth he would let Eugénie stew until she became, in his words, “ready for my closer attention.”

No longer having any woman friend to give her support, and with all the young Royalist men who might otherwise have helped executed, Eugénie had, in her almost paralyzing grief, no one to whom she could turn; even the priests who would have aided her had been guillotined in those first terrible days. She could, of course, do what
many young women like her had done, seek assistance from generous-hearted slave women who now possessed power, but Mme. Vauclain was dead and Eugénie knew no one like her, so she huddled alone in her empty house and wondered when she would be dispossessed and forced to accept Hugues’ hospitality.

The closer this eventuality came, the more certain she was that within a week of such a move, she would murder this dictator, even if she herself was guillotined the next morning: He must not be allowed to live, wallowing in his crimes, and this curious phrase became her shibboleth, the rubric that defined her. She would allow him to possess her over the dead bodies of her husband and son, but in achieving this triumph, he would be signing his death warrant. She, unlike Solange, would not let him see her coming at him with a knife. She would murder him as he lay beside her in his sleep.

But Hugues, more or less guessing her thoughts, confused the situation by sharing with her astonishing news: “You know, Eugénie,” he said in the street one day, “if you shared my quarters, there might be some way of finding your son.”

She did not raise her voice or charge him with being an inhuman monster for using a child, supposed to be dead, in this way, for she did not wish anyone to see her anger and remind Hugues of the perilous game he was playing. Instead, she asked quietly: “Commissioner, are you intimating that my son is alive?” and he said, with a carefully composed smile: “What I meant was, that under proper circumstances I could direct my men to search more closely.”

As he left her to consider this persuasive offer, she remained in the square, staring after him as he entered her House of Lace, and each item of his ugly appearance she found more repulsive than the others: That grisly hair. That slouching walk. Those ridiculous pipestem legs, the shoes that look too big. Those long arms like in the pictures of monkeys, and the hands covered with blood. Comparing him with her memories of Paul, she felt faint to think that one so ill-favored should live and that Paul should be dead.

She was more determined than ever that Hugues must die, but the possibility that her son might be alive, and recoverable, forestalled her, and for some days she wandered Point-à-Pitre trying to resolve her dilemma. There was no solution. If Jean-Baptiste was alive, she too must stay alive to rear him, which meant that she must tolerate the only man who could restore her son, the unspeakable Hugues.

Resigning herself to the prospect of a life with Hugues that must
end in murder, she went to him voluntarily: “Commissioner, I live only for my son. If your men can find him …”