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.