wasting money, squandering men; while Dessalines and Christophe massacred every white being within their reach. To complete Bonaparte's work, from which he wished to turn the world's attention, high among the Jura Mountains, where the ice and snow had not yet relaxed their grip upon the desolate little Fortress and its sunless casemate, in which for months nothing but Toussaint's cough had been heard, Commander Amiot wrote a brief military Report to the Minister of Marine:[1] "On the 17th [April 7], at half-past eleven o'clock of the morning, on taking him his food, I found him dead, seated on his chair near his fire." According to Tavernier, doctor of medicine and chirurgien of Pontarlier, who performed the autopsy, pleuro-pneumonia was the cause of Toussaint's death.
Toussaint never knew that St. Domingo had successfully resisted the whole power of France, and that had he been truer to himself and his color he might have worn the crown that became the plaything of Christophe and Dessalines; but even when shivering in the frosts of the Jura, his last moments would have glowed with gratified revenge, had he known that at the same instant Bonaparte was turning into a path which the negroes of St. Domingo had driven him to take, and which was to lead him to parallel at St. Helena the fate of Toussaint himself at the Château de Joux. In these days of passion,
- ↑ Amiot to Decrès, 19 Germinal, An xi. (April 9, 1803); Archives de la Marine, MSS.
