Wherever he had been in the previous twelve months, by the spring of 1644 the child’s father was back in Paris, soliciting the Compagnie des îles d’Amérique for some honourable and lucrative post on an island of the distant Caribbean. The company, arrogating this power to itself, had granted him the governorship of any one of the islands that he could claim for France. Once installed, he intended to turn planter and make a late fortune for himself in bananas or indigo. At sixty years of age, the irrepressible Constant had decided to try his luck in America—already the land of opportunity.
Since Columbus’s great voyages of discovery 150 years before, hundreds of fleets had set out from Europe for the promising New World, not only to the vast continental regions of North and South America, but also to the trail of little islands in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, the latter known to the French as les Camercanes. All of these islands, and indeed half of America, were still semi-officially in Spanish possession, though of this the Spaniards themselves had been unable to take full advantage. Eager above all to exploit the gold and silver of the southern continent, they had made only desultory efforts to colonize the less immediately profitable Caribbean islands. This had left the islands and the local sea routes open to the depradations of other Europeans, state-sponsored or otherwise.
Constant owed his present opportunity, suitably enough, given his temperament, to the efforts of one Pierre d’Esnambuc, a flibustier—one of the original pirates of the Caribbean. In 1626, d’Esnambuc had obtained Cardinal Richelieu’s support for the establishment of a “Gentlemen’s Association for the Colonization of the American Islands,” more generally known as the Compagnie des îles d’Amerique. Pocketing a unilateral declaration of his own governorship of the island of Saint-Christophe (St. Kitts), he had promptly sailed off to found France’s first Caribbean colony and, as he hoped, to enjoy a life of easy wealth. Now, nineteen years later, it was Constant’s turn. The Compagnie was hopeful, and Constant, no doubt, ebulliently optimistic: some previously unwanted patch of land, four thousand miles away, was bound to provide a good living and a good life from now on for the whole d’Aubigné family.
The reaction of the family itself to this news is unknown, but it can be imagined. For the younger children, it must have presented itself as a tremendous adventure. For their brother, it was most probably a source of deep anxiety, if indeed he was not already past caring where he went or what became of him. Jeanne’s feelings are likely to have been mixed. It was not an altogether wild idea; fortunes were indeed being made in the islands, and the family did not need a fortune, after all; any decent living would do, after what they had already endured. There were risks, of course—but then, what were the risks? As it was, they had nothing to lose, no money, no home, no position, no prospects. The sea voyage had its dangers, that was true; the climate in the islands might be injurious to their health; but poverty and the cold northern winters were not likely to help any of them on that count. On balance, Jeanne’s attitude was probably one of cautious agreement.
One way or other, the journey was arranged. It was Jeanne herself who paid, on April 19, 1644, 330 livres “in good silver écus” for the passage of the five d’Aubignés, plus two servants and one engagé, an indentured labourer, on the Isabelle de la Tremblade, to the island of “Gadarbeloupe.” Payment for the labourer’s passage had in fact not yet been made: for this Jeanne was to buy for the captain “six hundred [pounds]” of tobacco on arrival in the islands. How she had raised the initial money is uncertain: the Ursuline nuns at Niort, presumably thinking more of a Catholic d’Aubigné future than the Protestant d’Aubigné past, had lent her eighty-three livres; perhaps something was still remaining from Agrippa’s widow’s bequest; perhaps Louise and Benjamin helped. In any case, at the beginning of September they set sail from the port city of La Rochelle, the old safe town where years before the Huguenots had battled in vain against Richelieu’s besieging Catholic forces.
The family and their servants were quartered between decks on the Isabelle, with the engagé further below in the squalid cargo hold with sixteen of his fellows. The ship was overcrowded, even for those, like the d’Aubignés, who were permitted up on deck, and even there, passengers and crew were obliged to share what space there was with livestock squealing and clucking night and day. Those with the foresight to bring along a supply of “roots or leaves of angelica, cloves, or rosemary” were able “to counteract”—somewhat—“the evil smells of the boat.”
Though they themselves had had to borrow to pay their passage, the d’Aubigné family were still better off than almost everyone else on board. There were a few other “gentlemen” in more or less the same position as Constant; at La Rochelle he had already made friends with three of them: Jean Friz de Bonnefon, “squire and lord” of Cardeluz; Michel de Jacquières, lord of Herville, recently married, his wife apparently left behind in France; and the engagingly named Merry Rolle, lord of Gourselles. Like Constant, it seems, not a man of them had an acre of land to his name, but together they made a quartet of goodfellows, one for all and all for one, at least while the going was good. They had come to some agreement about proceedings once they reached the islands, and intended to throw in their lots together.
The d’Aubignés’ servants, possibly a married couple, were to work for the family as valet and maid. Their engagé was one of many on board, all “thirty-six-monthers,” whose passage had been paid by a future “master” for whom they were to work for three unwaged years. Though the duration of his servitude was limited, on a day-to-day basis the thirty-six-monther was not much better off than a slave. His master effectively owned him, and could flog him, rent him out, or sell him as he pleased. “Some of the engagés go native,” recorded Maurile de Saint-Michel, a priest dedicated to “the difficult and dangerous undertaking of converting the savages,” who was on his way to the islands at the same time. “They hide in the forests, and live from the forest fruits, and they only come out at night to steal things. I know several of them who’ve chosen that life rather than live like slaves with those who’ve paid their passage out.” There were even a few women among the engagés, but most of the Isabelle’s women passengers were simply poor girls, newly released from the workhouses, some of them former prostitutes, making a sad way as colonial brides to be married off to some lonely settler, as yet unknown, on an equally unknown island.
The food, apart from the freshly slaughtered animals, was mainly salted cod and dry biscuits. Though it was not unknown for ships to carry their own boxed gardens with them, making fresh vegetables available at least some of the time, the Isabelle apparently did not do so, since many of her passengers were quickly stricken with scurvy. As the first cases appeared only days out from port, this may have reflected the poverty of their usual diet on land as much as any deficiency at sea, but in any case it cannot have added to the captain’s popularity, given that the ship’s provisioner was his own godfather. Being on a French ship, the passengers were at least spared the “detestable pudding” dished up as standard on contemporary English vessels, “a composition of pounded biscuit or flour, lard, raisins, salt and pepper…tied up in a cloth and cooked in the same pot as the soup…then served [with] old cheese grated over it, which produces a most intolerable stench.” If they went without pudding, the d’Aubignés sometimes went without drinking water as well. Too little of it had been stowed, and what there was was soon brackish and dirty. Fortunately, Constant had thought to include with the family’s provisions a thirty-pint barrel of brandy; perhaps it was this that kept them going.
“Most of our passengers were sick,” wrote Père Maurile. “Some of them had the fever, and the rest were paying their painful tribute to Neptune…giving up the food from their own stomachs to feed the fish.” No doubt one or two seasick d’Aubignés also spent days lying, like Rabelais’s antihero Panurge, “all of a heap on Deck, utterly cast down and metagrobolised.”
Françoise, in fact, only barely survived the journey. She
fell ill with one of the many fevers that beset her contemporaries on land and sea. She became worse; she seemed to be dying; eventually it appeared that she was dead. Her stiff little body was wrapped in a sheet and placed on the gangplank to be tipped over the side into the deep. A few prayers were muttered, and Jeanne approached, apparently to place a final kiss upon her daughter’s forehead. The kiss was never given, for Jeanne detected a sudden sign of life, some warmth perhaps, an opening of eyelids or a faint pulse—enough, in any case, for a cry and a few shouts to announce an emergency on board. Françoise was retrieved, the sheet cast off and her body rubbed frantically with warming alcohol, and she revived. “One doesn’t return from that far for nothing,” a flattering bishop was to remark on hearing the story decades later.
In early November 1644, the Isabelle anchored at Fort Royal on the island of Martinique, where a handful of French soldiers manned a stout little fort. A few days later she pushed on for the settlement of Pointe-Allègre on Guadeloupe, a hundred miles to the north; here, nine years before, a small colony of French cotton and tobacco planters had been established.
Given Constant’s position as prospective governor of one of the islands, the family was met at the harbour by Guadeloupe’s governor, Charles Houël, who conveyed them to his official residence, a good place, very probably, since the island could already boast a number of spacious planters’ houses. Constant might have enjoyed a sojourn with Houël, who was something of an adventurer himself—in years to come, he would appoint himself director of Guadeloupe’s fabulously lucrative sugar industry and buy the island outright. But Constant did not stop now to trade daydreams with him. Leaving his family behind, he set off with Merry Rolle and Bonnefon and Jacquières, and their engagés, for the tiny neighbouring island of Marie-Galante. Named by Columbus himself in 1493, for his ship the Maria Galanda, it was more of an islet than an island proper, measuring less than ten miles across. As yet uncolonized by any of the great powers, Marie-Galante was reputedly inhabited only by “Irois,” Carib Indians armed with nothing more menacing than a few bows and arrows. These, it was assumed, could be easily disposed of by a few good men from the garrison on Martinique; it was even possible that, as elsewhere in the islands, the natives might prove cooperative. In the governor’s residence on Guadeloupe, Jeanne and the children waited.
It was late in the rainy season, hot and humid. Everyone, except for Charles, was miserable. Ten years old, extroverted, adventurous, and above all a boy, he had quickly made himself at home in the exotic surroundings. With a freedom denied his sister, he wandered off every day to amuse himself with new friends, other boys from planters’ families, “black Caribs” of mixed blood, and even some slave boys. There were probably no Indians among his friends; new diseases and outright violence had starkly reduced their numbers. Only twenty-five years before, French sailors arriving on the island had been greeted by “naked savages painted red and armed with bows and arrows,” but by the time of the d’Aubignés’ arrival, there were few Indians to be seen in Pointe-Allègre or any of the other coastal settlements. Between African and European, however, it was a freer time than Guadeloupe was later to know. In these years before the island’s first sugar plantations, the slaves were still marginally outnumbered by the French, and relations between the two were not yet rigidly regulated, as they were later to be. Charles’s little society was no doubt as irrepressible as any other group of ten-year-old boys, going where they pleased, climbing trees and shooting birds in the dense tropical bush, bragging and scuffling and getting into mischief in the dusty streets of the town. In the heat and disorder of colonial Guadeloupe, Charles, in his father’s image, was putting his best efforts into enjoying himself.
His elder brother might have done the same, but Constant, now aged fifteen, spent his days instead indoors with his mother. Jeanne did not press him to any activity, and could hardly have succeeded if she had done. She simply watched as he slipped from listlessness and melancholy into a debilitating depression. With her husband away, with Constant beyond help and Charles out of the house all day, she turned her unwelcome attention to nine-year-old Françoise. On the pretext of protecting the girl from unspecified “dangers,” Jeanne forbade her to set foot outside the door, even to stand in the coolness of the garden. Françoise spent the weeks shut up in the suffocating house, set to reading pious books and writing letters home to relatives—only those whom her mother nominated, however, and only those with money to spare. Charles was officially writing letters, too, but in practice his sister wrote his for him, an exchange, fair or not, for the forbidden fruit that he picked for her from the orange trees just outside the door. “I loved oranges,” said Françoise, “and so abundantly did they grow that they had to be swept off the paths before one could stroll along them.”
Constant père returned to Guadeloupe after a month or so, with unusually bright news. The tiny island of Marie-Galante was perfect for a plantation; he had already procured, though not necessarily paid for, a substantial piece of land, and had even bought a few slaves. They were going to grow tobacco and bananas and indigo, and he was going to grow rich. Only one detail remained to be attended to: the Irois who lived on the island had turned out to be not Indians after all, but “thirty-six-monthers” of the English-speaking kind, indentured Irish labourers escaped from the British West Indian islands. They were opposed—indeed, aggressively opposed—to the idea of French plantations on the island they had come to regard as their own.
A lesser, or perhaps a wiser, man would have abandoned the enterprise altogether, but Constant transplanted his family to the tiny island regardless. With them went Merry Rolle and Jacquières and Bonnefon, and their various engagés and servants. There was of course no settlement on Marie-Galante, or at least no French settlement; presumably some arrangement had been made with the Irish, permitting them to stay. Constant remained just two or three weeks with his family there, and though he made no progress in providing for them materially, the simple fact of his being present gave them some respite, real or imagined, from their habitual insecurity. Jeanne, in particular, relaxed, and even began addressing Françoise, with an affection that was not to last, as “petite d’Aubigné” or “Bignette.” Constant himself for once had time and inclination to spare for his daughter. Intelligent beyond her nine years, she was now, apparently for the first time, an object of some interest to him. He chatted with her and teased her about her Catholicism, demanding to know “how a clever girl like you can believe all those things they teach you from the catechism.” “They” was of course the child’s own mother, who evidently had made some progress in retrieving Françoise from the erroneous Protestant path.
Soon after the new year of 1645, Constant set sail for La Rochelle. The Irish setback on Marie-Galante had in no way discouraged him; by the end of March he was in Paris, soliciting formal governorship of the island from the Compagnie des îles d’Amérique. What he told the company’s commissioners is unknown, though he seems to have played down the “Irois” question; the document granting his request is in any case revealing of the near-dictatorial powers of a colonial governor of the day:
Assured of your loyalty, courage, good conduct, and experience, we commit and depute to you…the governorship of the said isle of Marigalante…to undertake on the said isle all that you shall judge useful for the service of the King and the progress of our affairs, and to maintain union and concord among the people and ensure that justice is properly done among them…We require all captains, officers and soldiers and other inhabitants of the said isles to obey you in everything pertaining to this charge.
The business accomplished, Constant set about arranging the further advancement of his own interests. He took ship for England, en route adopting the Protestant faith yet again, to make preliminary enquiries about the value of Marie-Galante to the English crown. A journey back across the Channel, with an abjuration to Catholicism on landing, allowed him to pursue further negotiations with the Compagnie and other int
erested parties in France. Back to England he sailed, then back to France, each time purchasing religious conversion with his passage. The to-ing and fro-ing continued for nine months. It is surprising that one or other of the two sides did not grow tired of dealing with him, since it is unlikely that he could have kept all his travels secret. Perhaps in Constant they simply recognized one of their own kind: a born opportunist, long on persuasiveness and short on principles, ready to see the good in anything that turned to his own financial advantage. And after all, if they were paying him a little for his pains, it was nothing they could not afford to lose. Risk was part of the colonial game. And if in the end he delivered them nothing, they had had at least the pleasure of the gamble.
In December 1645 Constant finally set sail back to the Caribbean, carrying with him an agreement to deliver to the English both Marie-Galante and the French-held northern and southern coasts of Saint-Christophe, whose centre was already in English hands. To the French themselves he was to deliver either Marie-Galante or, if this proved impossible, any other island he pleased. Incorrigibly optimistic, he was probably expecting to make a clean sweep of all three islands, making both parties happy and himself very rich. He was too gregarious a man to keep his plans entirely to himself, and he can be readily imagined on his journey back to the Indies, sitting on the grubby deck, brandy bottle in hand, entertaining fellow passengers with tales of future wealth and glory. If younger men shook their heads at the sixty-year-old’s daydreams, one or two at least must have listened with sly admiration for the old man’s unquenchably youthful sense of possibility.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 4