1846, March 1 – 1847, February 27: (Riché: The Last of the Three Old Men and the Death by Aphrodisiac): Eleven months of Pierrot’s senile vagaries proved eno…

1846, March 1 – 1847, February 27: (Riché: The Last of the Three Old Men and the Death by Aphrodisiac): Eleven months of Pierrot’s senile vagaries proved enough — by carnival time in the spring of 1846, the streets were full of anti-Pierrot masks and jibes, and when the garrison at St. Marc received marching orders for the frontier, the men refused to march, then on February 28 declared Pierrot deposed and sent emissaries to General Riché, who had been awaiting just such an invitation in Port-au-Prince. On March 1, 1846, Jean-Baptiste Riché — a one-eyed ex-affranchi from Grande Rivière du Nord, age seventy — became president after a stormy scene in the Palais National where one of his generals leaned out the palace window and called to an artillery officer below: “Fire a salute and have the troops cry ‘Vive le Président Riché!'” Riché lost no time taking hold: illiterate though he was, his first decree renounced the dictatorship of his predecessors, redesignated the Council of State as the Senate, and summarily restored Pétion’s constitution of 1816. When Acaau — whom Pierrot had restored to command — set the drums throbbing for the armée souffrante to rise again, Riché had foreseen what was happening and boldly entrusted Samedi Télémaque with an army, and on March 12, 1846, hemmed in like Goman before him, Acaau blew out his brains, ending the piquet threat once more. Unhappily for the country, other desires finished Riché: on February 27, 1847, he died from an overdose of the aphrodisiac cantharides, seeking, wrote the historian Dorsainvil, “a vigor incompatible with his advanced age.”