MADAM FOUCHERE
à-Veau. I think that he may be a candidate and he will have the support of the people; he has no white blood."
Fouchère, unlike Dessalines, was a marabout, pure negro but of a royal strain of African blood; a strain from which chiefs were chosen. Marabouts are famed for their physical beauty and preservation into advanced age. He continued, talking rapidly in beautiful Parisian French. "Then there is Calisthéne Fouchard, a mulatto but of good disposition, liberal toward progress and the white races; he is from Jeremie."
Fouchère rattled on volubly, and Dessalines, leaning on the rail, listened with interest if not entirely with belief. Personally he was fond of Fouchère; they had been acquainted from boyhood. Like Dessalines, Fouchere was a native Haytian of pure African blood, and like Dessalines he was the offspring, by placage, of a former president of Hayti. As a boy he had been sent from Hayti, and he and Dessalines had been companions in Paris, where Fouchère was at this time well known and received by many good Parisian families. Fouchere was a man of striking physical beauty—straight, tall, broad of shoulder, small of, waist, with fine, regular features and a skin like black satin. He was a Hermes carved in coal. His hair was almost straight. He was lacking in Dessalines' gorillalike strength, and also lacking in his clean and honest principles, but he was a man of higher polish and more active imagination.
Dessalines listened with pleasure to Fouchère's rapid flow of excellent French; interested, regardless of the curious stares of their white fellow passengers.
"You were in Hayti last October, were you not, Tancrède?" he asked presently.
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