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So they summoned him to
attend a council; he went, and the moment he entered the room the
officers drew their swords and told him he was a prisoner. They put him
on shipboard and weighed anchor for France. As the island faded from his
sight he turned to the captain and said, "You think you have rooted up
the tree of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so
deep that all France can never root it up."
He was sent to a dungeon twelve feet by twenty, built wholly of stone,
with a narrow window, high up on one side, looking out on the snows of
Switzerland. In this living tomb the child of the sunny tropics was left
to die. But he did not die fast enough. Napoleon ordered the commandant
to go into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him and
stay four days. When he returned, Toussaint was found starved to death.
Napoleon, that imperial assassin, was taken, twelve years later, to his
prison at St. Helena, planned for a tomb, as he had planned that of
Toussaint, and there he whined away his dying hours in pitiful
complaints.


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