gnation to the sentence which condemned him to the
lingering and infamous death of the vilest criminals. "What!" he
exclaimed; "do you confound me with criminals because I have desired to
restore to my fellow-creatures the rights and titles of men which I feel
in myself! Well! you have my blood, but an avenger will arise from it!"
He died on the wheel, and his mutilated carcase was left on the highway.
This heroic death reached even to the National Assembly, and gave rise
to various opinions. "He deserved it," said Malouet; "Oge was a criminal
and an assassin." "If Oge be guilty," replied Gregoire, "so are we all;
if he who claimed liberty for his brothers perished justly on the
scaffold, then all Frenchmen who resemble us should mount there also."

XII.

Oge's blood bubbled silently in the hearts of all the mulatto race. They
swore to avenge him. The blacks were an army all ready for the massacre;
the signal was given to them by the men of colour. In one night 60,000
slaves, armed with torches and their working tools, burnt down all their
masters' houses in a circuit of six leagues round the Cape. The whites
were murdered; women, children, old men--nothing escaped the
long-repressed fury of the blacks. It was the annihilation of one race
by the other. The bleeding heads of the whites, carried on the tops of
sugar canes, were the standards which guided these hordes, not to
combat, but to carnage. The outrages of so many centuries, committed by
the whites on the blacks, were avenged in one night. A rivalry of
cruelty seemed to arise between the two colours. The negroes imitated
the tortures so long used upon them, and invented new ones. If certain
noble and faithful slaves placed themselves between their old masters
and death, they were sacrificed together. Gratitude and pity are virtues
which civil war never recognises. Colour was a sentence of death without
exception of persons; the war was between the races, and no longer
between men. The one must perish for the other to live! Since justice
could not make itself understood by them, there was nothing but death
left for them. Every gift of life to a white was a treason which would
cost a black man's life. The negroes had no longer any pity: they were
men no longer, they were no longer a people, but a destroying element
which spread over the land, annihilating every thing.

In a few hours eight hundred habitations, sugar and coffee stores,
representing an immense cap