Toussaint submitted to Laveaux, was made chef de brigade, and abandoned the Spanish banners.

L’Ouverture, after enjoying the title of physician to the armies of Jean-François, after being the first aide-de-camp and principal secretary of Biassou, had long resisted the proposals of peace made to him. But devoured by an immense ambition, which some skill in writing had developed, he suddenly abandoned the Spanish banners, made a horrible massacre of the colonists whom he had until then protected, abolished the slavery that he himself had restored from La Marmelade to the Gonaïves, and submitted to Laveaux on 15 prairial (4 May): he was made *chef de brigade*, and received the command of the localities where he held sway. Like Cromwell, always wrapping himself in the mantle of piety, ceaselessly invoking the holy name of God, praising clemency but practicing it only with a view to personal interests, he was always good and gentle toward all who prostrated themselves at his feet, but irascible and implacable toward all who seemed even to wish to argue with him. Moreover, by the mere fact that he had been a good enslaved man, he was bound to be an inhuman enslaver, if the proverb is to be believed. It is said that on the very day he carried out his defection he had just received the holy host, and that the marquis d’Harmonas, under whose orders he was serving, said on that occasion “that if the good God were to descend upon the earth, he could dwell in no purer soul.” It would thus have been after devoutly hearing mass that the new republican bathed himself in floods of blood, inaugurating in this way the new phase of his life! What an omen!