MADAM FOUCHERE
detestable place, New York, the United States! Bah! These Americans …!" He pushed the electric bell. "I loathe that country and its people; they are mad … they all have hysterics! They spent millions of dollars and thousands of lives to liberate their slaves and then sit down and wonder what they are to do with them next! The South fears her former slaves; the North spends money to educate them. They talk of their possibilities, their immortal souls, their rights! Diable! The drollery of talking of the possibilities, the souls, the rights of ten millions of mongrel, half-breed peasants! They take great trouble over this question in the United States of America. They debate it, have conferences over it, write about it, and my dear Aristide, there are many men in the United States to-day who pose as expounders of the policy to be pursued with their negro population whose only knowledge of the negro is of the American peasant, in most cases half white; who have actually never seen our race in any other country or under any other conditions! And while they are theorizing and preaching and declaiming, and varying this with occasional burning of some maniac, there is a constant breeding of mulattoes and thinning of blacks! It is to laugh—ha, ha, ha!"
Dessalines did not laugh; wit could not stir his crude sense of humor. It must be a clownish thing, less subtle than wit, which stirred his risibilities. The humor of Fouchère was that of a Frenchman, whereas Dessalines' was purely negroid. If the waiter, who at that moment responded to the bell, had thrust his head through the door and made a grimace Dessalines would have laughed.
"And what have you been doing to amuse yourself?"
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