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Montbard had to make a couple of drawings on the day I have mentioned, and it so happened that, whilst we were going about with M. de la Ferriere, the chamberlain on duty, Napoleon III suddenly appeared before us. He asked me also how long I had been in France, and where I had learnt the language.
Well, if we are right in thinking that a naval base is what these fellows are after, it is sure that they would need a hinterland of country behind it. The Mole St. Nicholas, as I remember, is at the end of a peninsula formed by a range of mountains, the key to which is La Ferrière. So, to make themselves safe, they would need to control both at the same time.
Before the doctor and an excellent old smiling priest it was passed over into my hands with a very clear statement of the disposer's wishes; immediately after which, though the witnesses remained behind to draw up and sign a joint note of the transaction, Monsieur de Kéroual dismissed me to my own room, La Ferrière following with the invaluable box.
La Ferriere was a fastness of the kind of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny of the strong man over men. Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of the strong machine.... "Science is either slave or master. These people I mean the German people and militarist people generally have no real mastery over the scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride.
But, as he came out from the murk of those chambers with their rotting floors, many of them undermined by oubliettes and dungeons, he felt a chill of fear. Even the occasional bursts of sunshine through the cloud-fog which perpetually sweeps over La Ferrière did not hearten him.
In cracks and corners, fungi of poisonous hues adds another touch of wickedness. Manuel shivered with repulsion. Probably not in all the world, certainly not in the Western Hemisphere, is there a ruin of such historic terror as the Citadel of the Black Emperor on the summit of La Ferrière. A gleam of sun revealed the extraordinary impregnability of the place.
In regard to Montbard there was some little trouble, as M. de la Ferriere did not like the appearance of his "revolutionary-looking beard," the sight of which, said he, might greatly alarm the Empress.
Passing a curious roadside cross which bears the date 1741 and a long Latin inscription splashed over with lichen, one arrives at La Ferriere aux Etangs, a quaint village with a narrow and steep street containing one conspicuously old, timber-framed house.
The bodies were hanged on gibbets, at the river's mouth, and order reigned at Fort Caroline. While the mutiny was brewing, one La Roche Ferriere had been sent out as an agent or emissary among the more distant tribes. Sagacious, bold, and restless, he pushed his way from town to town, and pretended to have reached the mysterious mountains of Appalache.
"It was through him that I was first advised of this plot to seize the northern peninsula of Haiti, from the Citadel of La Ferrière to the Mole St. Nicholas, to make of this stretch a small republic as was done at Panama, and to sell the Mole St. Nicholas, as a naval base, to a certain European power which is seeking to regain its lost prestige.
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