30 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO 
friend of their race. Fortune is the boon of youth; 7 
he escaped every danger. Having discovered a good fi 
horse, whenever the blacks issued from their hiding- 
places, one touch of the spear, a wave of the hat, a 
cry: ‘Advanced guard of General Toussaint!’ and this 
was enough. At that formidable name all took to 
flight, and disappeared as if by enchantment. 
“Such was the tenderness of my father’s soul, that 
he did not withdraw his regard from the great man 
who had misunderstood him. When, at a later period, 
he saw him in France, abandoned by everybody, a 
wretched prisoner in a fort of the Jura, where he 
perished of cold and misery,* he alone was faithful to 
him. Despite his errors, despite the deeds of violence 
inseparable from the grand and terrible part which that 
man had played, he revered in him the daring pioneer 
of a race, the creator of a world. He corresponded 
with him until his death, and afterwards with his 
family. 
“A singular chance ordained that my father should 
be engaged in the isle of Elba when the First of the 
Whites, dethroned in his turn, arrived to take posses- 
sion of his miniature kingdom. Heart and imagina- 
tion, my father fell captive to this wonderful romance. 
An American, and imbued with Republican ideas, he 
became on this occasion, and for the second time, the 
courtier of misfortune. He was the most intimate of 
* Napoleon’s treatment of Toussaint L’Ouverture is one of the 
darkest spots on his fame. He flung this son of the Tropics into a 
dungeon among the icy fastnesses of the Alps, where he died, slain by 
cold and undeserved ill-treatment, on the 27th of April 1803.—Zranslator. 
