than to protect his remaining property. He was under fire as a prairie guerilla against the northerners. Finally, after peace had been declared, many times a millionaire in spite of his great losses, he returned to Antwerp, dreaming, perhaps of clearing his reputation from the blots and stains of the past.
This was what was known about Béjard and his antecedents, and he himself had avowed it, with an air of boasting, in his moments of good humor.
His ostentation and the magnificent enterprises through which he contributed to the superficial prosperity of his city, opened all doors to him, at least those of the business world, for the aristocracy and the higher patrician bourgeoisie held him in as shabby repute as did the common people.
If the flatterers of success, the admirers of "clever business men," the speculators bowed down before his millions, forgot and buried the past, the most essentially local classes, the stable population, the old families of Antwerp remembered former scandals and cherished an inveterate antipathy for Freddy Béjard.
Thus they had gone as far as to claim that, enraged by the victory of the North, whose abolition movement had cut into his fortune, he had, far from freeing his slaves at the conclusion of the war, sold them to a Spanish slave dealer in the Antilles, and that he had had to leave his adopted country in order to evade the law. Another version had it that, rather than obey the decree by which the slaves were freed, he had slaughtered his down to the very last one.
The business men treated all these stories as old women's tales invented by jealous people and by the political adversaries of the parvenu. Monsieur Dobouziez himself, without exhibiting a fondness for Béjard
