Massacre of the French at Port-au-Prince

BONNE-FOI. On the day after the massacre of the French at Port au Prince, [17 March 1804, Dessalines went through the town, whose galleries and public squares were stained with blood. When he reached the rue Bonne-Foi, opposite the Boisblanc house, now Théagène Lahens’s, some Haitians presented to him a French watchmaker for whom they asked mercy. Jean Jacques Dessalines seized his watch and smashed it against the paving stones of the gutter, exclaiming and raising his eyes to heaven: “What need have we of his craft? When the sun is directly above our heads, we shall know that it is noon.” The white man was immediately cut down with the sabre before his eyes.

Rouzier tells this under the entry BONNEAU.