1967, April 14–15: (Carnaval for Year Ten: Prince Albert Foucard’s Festivities, Nicole and Marie-Denise, Max Dominique the Tallest Graduate of the Académie M…

1967, April 14–15: (Carnaval for Year Ten: Prince Albert Foucard’s Festivities, Nicole and Marie-Denise, Max Dominique the Tallest Graduate of the Académie Militaire, and the Ice-Cream Cart Bomb in a Vanilla-Strawberry Cloud of Splinters): The Year Ten was to be celebrated with four days of special Carnaval marking Duvalier’s sixtieth birthday on April 14, the impresario being the president’s mulâtre son-in-law Luc Albert Foucard — known as Prince Albert — who had married Nicole. Foucard’s sister, the ambitious Francesca St. Victor, served as Duvalier’s private secretary and was, in the words of the regime’s chroniclers, more than merely a secretary. Duvalier’s other son-in-law, Colonel Max Dominique — at six feet seven the tallest man ever to graduate from the Académie Militaire — was married to Marie-Denise, the old man’s favorite daughter, and was at daggers drawn with the Foucards, a feud in which Mme Duvalier sided against the Foucards with the support of her son, young Jean-Claude. On April 15, while nine beauty queens were being slowly towed past the palace on floats, a heavy detonation shattered the festivities — an ice-cream peddler’s pushcart, where a bomb had been planted, disappeared in a vanilla-strawberry cloud of splinters, killing four people and injuring forty. Soon afterward, an explosive charge detonated under a camionnette carrying musicians playing a Duvalier meringue. The bombs were Max Dominique’s method of dampening the festivities organized by his rival Prince Albert — a dynastic sabotage whose casualty list included beauty queens and ice-cream vendors sacrificed to a succession struggle within the presidential family, the private war of two sons-in-law conducted through explosives in a public carnival, the regime’s internal logic now so thoroughly consuming the nation that even the dictator’s birthday celebrations became a theater of factional violence.