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Updated: May 7, 2025
Rigault excusing himself on the ground of his infirmity, did little during three-quarters of an hour but keep his eyes upon M. de La Trappe, and at the end went into a room where materials were already provided for him, and covered his canvas with the images and the ideas he had filled himself with.
He is having everything of value, like jewels, silver, and his precious bric-a-brac, carried down to the cellar, where there is an iron vault, and has showed us all how to open it in case of a disaster. May 21st. May 22d. Rigault wrote the order himself. It does not bear any of the fantastic seals they are so fond of, and of which they have an incredible quantity.
At almost every street intersection stands a statue of some one who bore a hand in the conquest of the country, from the cassocked figure of Pigneau de Behaine, Bishop of Adran, the first French missionary to Indo-China, to the effigy of the dashing Admiral Rigault de Genouilly, flanked by charging marines, who took Saigon for France. The most characteristic feature of Saigon is its café life.
Some prisoners were transported to New Caledonia; Cayenne had been given up as too unhealthy, and this lonely island in the far Pacific Ocean had been fixed upon as the Botany Bay for political offenders. Some of the leaders in the Council of the Commune were shot in the streets. Raoul Rigault was of this number.
Rigault admitted to me that he had worked so hard to produce it from memory, that for several months afterwards he had been unable to do anything to his other portraits. Notwithstanding the thousand crowns I had paid him, he broke the engagement he had made by showing the portrait before giving it up to me.
I went therefore to Rigault, then the first portrait-painter in Europe. In consideration of a sum of a thousand crowns, and all his expenses paid, he agreed to accompany me to La Trappe, and to make a portrait of him from memory. The whole affair was to be kept a profound secret, and only one copy of the picture was to be made, and that for the artist himself.
Rigault admitted to me that he had worked so hard to produce it from memory, that for several months afterwards he had been unable to do anything to his other portraits. Notwithstanding the thousand crowns I had paid him, he broke the engagement he had made by showing the portrait before giving it up to me.
"Captain Alphonse thereupon, seeing the coast clear, sang out for Housi, his second officer, and the boatswain, who he thought were away forward, to come up aft and join us, so that we might all be together, but instead of these men, Cato, my own black servant ran up the poop-ladder and told us in much trepidation that Monsieur Housi, with the boatswain Rigault and one of the French sailors, were imprisoned in the forepeak, while the two white sailors and the steward were hard and fast in the main hold, whither they had descended to get some provisions, the mutineers slipping on the hatchway cover over them, on the `marquis, that devil, giving the signal!"
I was escorted from room to room, each door guarded by an uncouth soldier, and shut promptly as I passed. I must have gone through at least seven rooms before I reached the sanctuary in which Monsieur Raoul Rigault held his audience. At this moment Rigault has more power than any one else in Paris.
I looked about me and noticed that the room had very little furniture; there was only the table at which the Prefect sat and two or three plain chairs. Just such a chamber as Robespierre might have occupied during his Republique. I approached the table, waiting like a culprit for the all-powerful Rigault to look up and notice me. But he did not; he continued to be occupied with what he was doing.
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