1914, October 29–30: (The Gold in the Dominican Flag: Mme Zamor’s Departure and the Pillage of the Palace): Charles Zamor, hoping for a more orderly wind-up …

1914, October 29–30: (The Gold in the Dominican Flag: Mme Zamor’s Departure and the Pillage of the Palace): Charles Zamor, hoping for a more orderly wind-up of the regime, later in the day debarked from the Prins Willem V to find the National Palace looted and his sister-in-law and children in refuge with the Dominican minister. Making hasty arrangements with the latter and with the French minister, whose hospitality he quickly accepted, Charles joined colleagues of the fallen cabinet at the French legation while General Polynice again shaped up a Committee of Public Safety. On the 30th, as the Prins Willem V raised steam, the French and Dominican ministers loaded Mme Zamor, the children, and baggage into two carriages for the journey to the wharf — the mob made no attempt to molest them, but there was a great deal of howling and personal abuse directed at Mme Zamor. As Mme Zamor and children were being put on board, the maid — who was the last person in the party — was surrounded by the mob and a package she was carrying, said to have contained $4,000 in gold and wrapped in a Dominican flag, was snatched from her and its contents scattered over the pier, a part going overboard and the rest taken by the mob. Oreste Zamor, who according to British Minister Kohan was in a state of abject terror, never left the ship while Cacos of the town paraded the streets, pillaging shops and firing in all directions, awaiting the advent of Davilmar Théodore. The scene on the pier — the gold coins scattering from the Dominican flag, the maid surrounded, the mob howling at a woman and children, the deposed president cowering belowdecks — distilled into a single tableau the structural truth that Livingston had identified: the revolution was made for money and nothing but money, and when the money ran out, the revolution consumed its own, the Dominican flag serving not as an emblem of sovereignty but as a moneybag, the gold it concealed the only substance behind the juridical fiction of the state itself.