ls while the other hung on to it with her teeth. At their feet
a number of little blacks were ransacking a broken trunk from which the
dress had been taken.

The rest was incredible to see and impossible to describe. It was a
crowd, a mob, a masquerade, a revel, a hell, a terrible buffoonery.
Negroes, negresses and mulattoes, in every posture, in all manner of
disguises, displayed all sorts of costumes, and what was worse, their
nudity.

Here was a pot-bellied, ugly mulatto, of furious mien, attired like
the planters, in a waistcoat and trousers of white material, but with a
bishop's mitre on his head and a crosier in his hand. Elsewhere three or
four negroes with three-cornered hats stuck on their heads and wearing
red or blue military coats with the shoulder belts crossed upon their
black skin, were harassing an unfortunate militiaman they had captured,
and who, with his hands tied behind his back, was being dragged through
the town. With loud bursts of laughter they slapped his powdered hair
and pulled his long pigtail. Now and then they would stop and force the
prisoner to kneel and by signs give him to understand that they were
going to shoot him there. Then prodding him with the butts of their
rifles they would make him get up again, and go through the same
performance further on.

A number of old mulattresses had formed a ring and were skipping round
in the midst of the mob. They were dressed in the nattiest costumes
of our youngest and prettiest white women, and in dancing raised their
skirts so as to show their lean, shrivelled legs and yellow thighs.
Nothing queerer could be imagined than all these charming fashions and
finery of the frivolous century of Louis XV., these Watteau shepherdess
costumes, furbelows, plumes and laces, upon these black, ugly-faced,
flat-nosed, woolly-headed, frightful people. Thus decked out they were
no longer even negroes and negresses; they were apes and monkeys.

Add to all this a deafening uproar. Every mouth that was not making a
contortion was emitting yells.

I have not finished; you must accept the picture complete to its
minutest detail.

Twenty paces from me was an inn, a frightful hovel, whose sign was a
wreath of dried herbs hung upon a pickaxe. Nothing but a roof window
and three-legged tables. A low ale-house, rickety tables. Negroes and
mulattoes were drinking there, intoxicating and besotting themselves,
and fraternising. One has to have seen these things to d