rned their
assembly to the 25th, when they were to meet at Cap Francais. It was
desirable to hold their very important session in the most important
place in the colony, the centre of intelligence, the focus of news from
Europe, and the spot where they had first sympathised with the
ungrateful government at home, by hoisting, with their own white hands,
the cap of liberty, and shouting, so that the world might hear, "Liberty
and Equality!" "Down with Tyranny!"

By the 20th, the deputies were congregated at Cap Francais; and daily
till the great 25th were they seen to confer together in coteries in the
shady piazzas, or in the Jesuits' Walk, in the morning, and to dine
together in parties in the afternoon, admitting friends and well-wishers
to these tavern dinners. Each day till the 25th was to be a fete-day in
the town and neighbourhood; and of these days the hot 22nd was one.

Among these friends and well-wishers were the whites upon all the
plantations in the neighbourhood of the town. There was scarcely an
estate in the Plaine du Nord, or on the mountain steeps which overlooked
the cape, town, and bay, on all sides but the north, which did not
furnish guests to these dinners. The proprietors, their bailiffs, the
clergy, the magistrates, might all be seen along the roads, in the cool
of the morning; and there was a holiday air about the estates they left
behind. The negroes were left for this week to do their work pretty
much as they liked, or to do none at all. There was little time to
think of them, and of ordinary business, when there were the mulattoes
to be ostentatiously insulted, and the mother-country to be defied. So
the negroes slept at noon, and danced at night, during these few August
days, and even had leave to visit one another to as great an extent as
was ever allowed. Perhaps they also transacted other affairs of which
their masters had little suspicion.

All that ever was allowed was permitted to the slaves on the Breda
estate, in the plain, a few miles from Cap Francais. The attorney, or
bailiff of the estate, Monsieur Bayou de Libertas, was a kind-hearted
man, who, while insisting very peremptorily on his political and social
rights, and vehemently denouncing all abstract enmity to them, liked
that people actually about him should have their own way. While
ransacking his brain for terms of abuse to vent on Lafayette and
Condorcet, he rarely found anything harsh to utter when Caton got d