THE MASCARENES 
175 
before. If a Mauritius or Bourbon man came to grief in 
business he used generally to retire from society, and 
would emigrate to Madagascar, where he would frequently 
find a well-to-do Malagasy woman who would become 
his wife and find him at least in curry and rice. I have 
often met unsuccessful men of this class on the east 
coast of Madagascar. 
The Creole has obviously deteriorated in energy by 
his residence in the tropics. When during the last war 
the inhabitants of Reunion supplied a volunteer battalion 
for the subjugation of the Hova, it showed ifself use¬ 
less from the very first. In language, too, this charac¬ 
teristic comes to light. A tolerably pure French is 
spoken everywhere, even when the schools are under 
English management. The pronunciation, however, is 
something like that of a child. The r is regularly omit¬ 
ted, ch and j are replaced by .s*. The Creole does not 
say c est joli^' or but "''cest soli^' se sue'' 
They have no scruple in conjugating an irregular verb 
regularly, and many verbs are used in a wrong sense: 
esperer is constantly used instead of attendre. Expres¬ 
sions such as fh mhne or Comme ga mhne^ which serve 
as affirmations every minute, but which are also used in 
every possible meaning as well, are quite inadmissible 
in Erance. Malagasy, Hindoo, and Arab elements are 
also often introduced into the language, thus the mode 
of salutation is always Salam! 
The coloured population is far in excess of the Euro¬ 
peans in number. 
When slavery, which still existed in Reunion after 
having been done away with in Mauritius ten years ear¬ 
lier, was abolished in 1848, the immigration of Hindoos 
assumed great dimensions, and at present their influence 
is very important. The Hindoo comes for the most 
part from the Malabar Coast, and he engages himself on 
the plantations for a term of years. After the expiration 
