Georges

by Alexandre Dumas

  “If I may ask,” said Lord Murray, “is there some particular quarrel between you and Monsieur Henri de Malmédie?”

  “Not yet,” said Georges, with a faint smile, “but it is very likely that there soon will be.”

  “Perhaps I am mistaken, but it seems to me that your enmity with that family is not new,” observed Lord Murray.

  “Childhood grudges, milord, which have grown into very adult feelings of hatred. Needle pricks, but ones that have festered into deep wounds.”

  “And is there no way of settling this quarrel peacefully?”

  “I did hope so, milord. I thought fourteen years under English rule might have killed the prejudice I have come back to fight, but I was wrong. Now it remains only for the athlete to anoint himself with oil, and to step into the arena.”

  “My dear Don Quixote! Are you not encountering more windmills than giants?”

  “Judge for yourself,” said Georges, smiling again. “Yesterday I saved the life of Mademoiselle Sara de Malmédie. Do you know how her cousin thanked me tonight? By forbidding her to dance with me, that’s how.”

  “What? Impossible!”

  Georges shook his head. “It’s quite true, milord.”

  “Why, in heaven’s name?”

  “Because I am mulatto.”

  “Well, what is your plan?”

  “Plan, milord?”

  Lord Murray grinned. “Come now, we are old friends! Tell me what you plan to do, and I’ll tell you whether I approve.”

  Georges smiled again. “I admit, I do have a plan—one that came to me this very night.”

  “And what is it?”

  “It is that, within three months, I am going to make Mademoiselle Sara de Malmédie my bride.”

  With that, Georges saluted his friend and departed. His servant waited at the door with his two magnificent horses. Georges swung into Antrim’s saddle and took off at a gallop down the Moka road. Upon arriving at the plantation, he asked after his father—only to be told that the elder Munier had gone out at seven o’clock that evening, and had not yet returned home.

  XIII

  THE SLAVE SHIP

  The next morning Pierre Munier knocked on his son’s door. Since his return to île de France, Georges had paid a great deal of attention to his father’s magnificent estate, and his knowledge of European industry had inspired him with several ideas for expansion. Pierre Munier, with his practical mind, was all for the project, but it required more manpower than they currently possessed, and since the abolition of public slave trading, Negroes had become so much more expensive that the Muniers did not have the means to buy the fifty or sixty blacks they needed without enormous sacrifice.

  Consequently, on the night of the ball Pierre Munier had been happy to learn that a slave ship was in view just off the coast, and he had, in accordance with the habits of colonists and dealers in black flesh, gone down to the shore to exchange signals with the ship indicating his desire to do business. The slaver had responded favorably, and the elder Munier was eager to give Georges the good tidings. The father and son decided that they would go at around nine o’clock that evening to Pointe-aux-Caves, below Petit-Malabar. Pierre Munier then left for his daily inspection of the estate, while Georges took his rifle and sought the peace and solitude of the woods.

  Georges paced among the trees, lost in thought. What he had said to Lord Murray the night before had been no joke, but a firm resolution. All his life the young mulatto had been preparing for what was to come. He had always excelled at anything he attempted; his achievements, added to his wealth, assured him a distinguished position in French or English society; he had the money to live comfortably in Paris or London—but he was not satisfied with this. Eager to fight for his beliefs, he had always known he must come home to île de France and conquer the prejudices that reigned there. He had remained incognito as long as possible, in order to study his enemy from the safety of anonymity; he had kept himself ready to seize the opportunity to fight, whenever it might come. He was poised to begin the struggle in which either the man or the idea would end by perishing.

  Upon setting foot in Port Louis and seeing again the same men he had always seen before his departure, Georges realized a truth he had often doubted while in Europe: Everything was exactly the same as it always had been in his homeland—despite the fourteen years that had passed; despite the fact that the island was now English instead of French; and despite its being called Mauritius now, rather than île de France. From that day onward he had been on guard, always prepared for the moral duel he had come to fight, just as another man might prepare for a physical duel. Sword in hand, he had waited for the time when he would be able to face his adversary and strike the first blow.

  However, like Cesare Borgia, who had readied himself for the conquest of Italy on his father’s death, and who had then died himself, Georges now found himself involved in a situation he had not anticipated—and at the worst possible moment. On the very day of his arrival in Port Louis, he had met a beautiful girl—and thoughts of her had haunted him ever since. Then Providence had placed him just where he needed to be to save the life of the girl he had been dreaming of, and finally Fate had reunited them the previous evening. One look into her eyes had told him that she loved him, just as he loved her. From then on, Georges knew he must fight not only for pride, but for love as well. There was only one problem: His coolness and self-possession had deserted him. Now he burned with a passion that threatened to overwhelm him.

  If a heart as well protected as Georges’s had been so smitten by the mere sight of Sara, imagine how much stronger the effect of his handsome face and the circumstances in which she had encountered him had been on the juvenile existence and virginal soul of Sara! Orphaned young and raised in the home of M. de Malmédie, destined to double her fortune when she reached her majority, Sara had grown up assuming that she would one day be the wife of his son, Henri. It had not been an unpleasant prospect; after all, Henri was a handsome fellow, and one of the richest men on the island. None of his friends had ever tempted her; she had grown up with them, and these young hunters and dancers were so much like brothers to her that it would never have occurred to her to distinguish one from another. She had been perfectly content when she met Georges—but in any young girl’s life, the appearance of a handsome young stranger, distinguished and elegant of form, would be an event indeed—even more so, as you may imagine, in île de France.

  The young stranger’s bearing, the timbre of his voice, the words he uttered—all had remained in Sara’s memory without her understanding exactly why, like a song one hears only once, and then repeats again and again in the mind. If she had met him under ordinary circumstances, she would probably have forgotten him within a few days; even after a second encounter, she might have wished him farther away rather than closer. But this was not to be. God had decided that Georges and Sara would see each other again at a supreme moment, and thus the scene at the rivière Noire had taken place. To the curiosity Sara had felt at their first encounter was joined the poetry and recognition of the second. In an instant Georges had been transformed in the young woman’s eyes from a stranger into a liberating angel. He had saved her from a painful death, saved her from being denied the happy future of a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Nor could Sara help comparing the conduct of Henri, who was to be her husband, with that of Georges, of whom she knew nothing. On the very day she had first encountered Georges, Henri’s crude jokes about the stranger had made her feel defensive and uncomfortable. His eagerness to rush away and bring down the stag so soon after her brush with death had wounded her to the quick, and his arrogance on the night of Lord Murray’s ball had dealt a blow to her pride. Indeed, he had asked her to insult Georges in a way she would not have done to any man. That night, which might have held so much happiness—but which Henri had made solitary and sad—had caused her to face her true feelings, perhaps for the first time. She had known, then, that she did not love her co
usin—that she loved another man instead.

  As so often happens, one revelation led to another. She thought about her uncle: Would he have cared for her, an orphaned child, so tenderly if she had not been the heiress to a million and a half francs—more than twice as rich as Henri in her own right? She saw him then, clearly, for what he was—a single-minded and calculating father, seeking an advantageous marriage for his son. The adoption had not, she realized, been based on love. Her trust and affection crumbled, and the gratitude she had always felt toward M. de Malmédie vanished, leaving only pain, harsh judgment, and anger in its wake, as is often the case when the heart is wounded.

  Georges had foreseen all of this; indeed, he had counted on it to help him best his rival for Sara’s affections. Now, though he told himself to do nothing that day, deep in his heart he felt unbearably impatient to see Sara. He had his rifle on his shoulder, hoping for a good hunt—his favorite pastime, and a distraction that would help occupy him for the rest of the day—but he could not deny himself. His love for Sara was already stronger than any other feeling. So around four o’clock, unable to resist his desire any longer—not to see the young girl, for he could never present himself at her house, but simply to be near her—he saddled Antrim and, holding the Arabian steed’s reins lightly, rode to the island’s capital in less than an hour.

  He had come to Port Louis with a single hope, but as I have said, that hope was entirely dependent on chance. Unfortunately, chance was not in his favor today. He rode all the streets surrounding the Malmédie house; he crossed the jardin de la Compagnie, which was the usual haunt of the city’s inhabitants, no less than twice. He rounded champ de Mars, where everything was being prepared for the upcoming races, three times. But nowhere, even in the far distance, did he see anyone who resembled the girl he was searching for.

  By seven o’clock he had lost all hope. Heavyhearted and exhausted, he took to the Grande-Rivière road—but this time he held tight to his horse’s reins as he went farther away from Sara, who doubtless had no idea that Georges had passed through the rue de la Comédie and the rue du Gouvernement ten times; or that he had been barely one hundred steps away from her. As he and his horse, who was puzzled by the unaccustomed restraint, passed by the free Negro camp just outside Port Louis, a man darted from one of the wooden huts lining the road and grabbed his hand. It was Miko-Miko, the Chinese merchant who had sold Sara the carved-ivory fan. An idea came into Georges’s head almost at once. This peddler, whose trade permitted him to enter any house on the island and whose ignorance of French protected him from suspicion, might be of great use to him. He dismounted and accompanied Miko-Miko into his shop. The Chinese man insisted on showing him everything in the place, gratitude evident in every gesture. Miko-Miko was lonely; the only others in île de France who spoke Chinese were two or three rival merchants, so he never talked with them. He begged Georges for some way, any way, to be of service to him.

  There was something he could do, said Georges; a mere trifle, really. He needed a plan of the inside of M. de Malmédie’s town house—specifically, he wanted to know the exact location of Sara’s rooms. Miko-Miko understood immediately—as I have said, the Chinese were the Jews of île de France. Georges then wrote, on the back of one of his calling cards, the prices of various items he knew would be most likely to tempt the girl. No one must see this card, he told Miko-Miko, except Sara herself. Giving the Chinese man a few coins, he told him to come to the Munier plantation in Moka at three o’clock the next day. Miko-Miko promised he would be there, and that he would do everything Georges had asked.

  It was now eight o’clock, and Georges had agreed to meet his father and the servant Télémaque at Pointe-aux-Caves at nine. He remounted his horse with a lighter heart, as it takes little to change the color of the horizon when one is in love, and took the road to the Petite-Rivière, reaching the rendezvous point at dusk. Pierre Munier, with his habitual punctuality, had been there for ten minutes. At nine thirty the moon rose large and bright in the sky; it was the moment they had been waiting for. Looking at a spot halfway between île Bourbon and île de Sable, they saw a light flash once—twice—three times; it was moonlight, glancing off a mirror. At this well-known signal, Télémaque built a small bonfire on the sand and let it burn for precisely five minutes before extinguishing it.

  Half an hour passed. Then Georges and his father saw a faint black shape appear upon the waves, growing more distinct as it neared the shore. It proved to be a large galley, its oars dipping noiselessly into the water. Finally the ship’s keel grated on the sandy beach, and as the Muniers approached it a man stepped ashore, followed by a dozen sailors armed with muskets and hatchets who set about unloading the galley’s cargo of blacks. There were about thirty of them, and more were on the way aboard a second ship.

  The man who had first disembarked, the ship’s captain, now came up to Pierre Munier and his son and spoke a few words that revealed him to be extremely knowledgeable about his trade. He seemed strangely familiar to both of them; he was around thirty years of age, tall and broad-shouldered. His hair was curly and very black, and he had a bushy mustache and beard of the same hue. His face and hands were bronzed by the tropical sun so that he looked like an Indian from Timor or Pégu, and he was dressed in a vest and trousers of blue linen and a broad-brimmed straw hat. A rifle was slung casually over one shoulder, and a saber that was like the Arabian ones, but larger, with a hilt like a Scottish claymore, hung from a scabbard at his belt.

  If the slaver’s captain had been the object of close scrutiny by the two men from Moka, they, no less, had been carefully observed by him. The slave trader’s eyes went from one man to the other with equal curiosity; indeed, it seemed as if he could not tear his eyes away. Georges and his father, though, were unaware of the examination to which they were being subjected. They began inspecting the blacks one by one; almost all of them were from far-distant Senegambia and Guinea on the east coast of Africa, which was a desirable quality since, unlike slaves from Madagascar, Mozambique, or the Plains of Cafres, they were too far from home to harbor any hope of returning there, and thus almost never tried to escape. Despite the value of his wares, the captain named prices that were quite reasonable, and the father and son purchased the first boatload of slaves before the second had even touched shore.

  The second transaction went much like the first; the captain had an admirable assortment of blacks from which to choose, and seemed extremely knowledgeable—indeed, a true connoisseur of the commodity in which he dealt. Île de France had proven a lucky destination for him; it was his first time doing business there, as he had up to that point done business mostly in the Antilles.

  When the sale was completed Télémaque, himself a native of the Congo, approached the newly acquired slaves and spoke to them in their native language about the pleasant conditions of life on the Munier plantation. They were extremely lucky to be owned by messieurs Pierre and Georges, he said, who were the fairest and best masters on the island. They were fortunate they had not been purchased by any of the other planters. The slaves dropped to their knees in the sand and, using Télémaque as an interpreter, pledged themselves to the two mulattoes, promising that they would work faithfully and well.

  Upon hearing the names of Pierre and Georges Munier the slave captain, who had been listening to Télémaque’s speech with an attention that showed he had made an especial study of the different dialects of Africa, gave a great start. He gazed at the two men with even more intensity than before. Still, they seemed to take no notice of this. The moment had come to complete the transaction, and Georges asked whether the captain wished to be paid in gold or bills. They were prepared for either answer; Pierre Munier’s saddlebags were full of gold, and his wallet was stuffed with bills. The captain said that he preferred gold. Georges gave him the 150,000 francs, and the money was loaded onto the second dinghy for immediate transport to the ship. The crew departed next, but to the astonishment of Georges and his father, the captain
did not accompany them. On his orders the galley pushed off, leaving him standing on the shore with the two Muniers.

  The captain watched his ship until it was lost beyond the horizon, then turned toward Georges and Pierre Munier. Stretching out his hands, he said simply: “Hello, Father! Hello, brother!” They stared at him, frozen. “Well now!” he said. “Don’t you remember your Jacques?”

  There were rapturous cries of shock and elation. Jacques embraced first his father, then his brother, and extended his hand to Télémaque, who took it—though not without a slight shiver at touching a man who traded in slaves.

  By a strange coincidence, Fate had reunited the family made up of a man who had spent his entire life suffering from prejudice against color, a man who made his living by exploiting it, and a man who was ready to die fighting it.

  XIV

  THE SLAVE TRADER’S PHILOSOPHY

  It was indeed Jacques Munier, whom his father had not seen in fourteen years, nor his brother in twelve. Let us acquaint ourselves with the tale of his long absence.

  Jacques, as I have said, had shipped out aboard one of those corsairs that, armed with French authorization papers, in that era often swooped suddenly from our ports like eagles to wreak havoc on English ships. It had been a difficult initiation, perhaps, but far easier than what he would have undergone in the Imperial Navy, which at that time was blockaded in our ports and spent as much time at anchor as this “other” navy—lively, carefree, and independent—spent roaming the seas. Every day there was some new combat; not because our privateers actively sought battle with warships but because, fond as they were of Chinese and Indian merchandise, they could not resist pouncing on the heavily laden merchant vessels as they trundled homeward from Calcutta, Buenos Aires, or Veracruz. If these ships were unprotected, it was a simple matter to overtake and despoil them—it usually took only two or three hours, in fact; but if they were themselves armed, escorted by an English frigate or two with fangs and claws, it was a different matter entirely. Great amounts of gunfire would be exchanged, many men and blacks killed, and copious damage done to masts and spars. After bombarding each other from a distance the privateers and frigates would draw near enough to fight broadside-to-broadside and then aboard one ship’s deck, and the merchant ship would flee to the haven of some English port (if it did not, like the fabled donkey, fall prey to another privateer) to be greeted with sighs of relief from the East India Company and promises of a generous reward for the defending frigate’s surviving crew. That was the way of things at the time.