Saint-Domingue
In Saint-Domingue, the news from abroad that the “whites of La France had risen up and killed their masters,” spread among the black slaves of the island. “The rebellion was extremely violent…the rich plain of the North was reduced to ruins and ashes…”[90] After months of arson and murder, Toussaint Louverture, a black military genius, took charge of the slave revolt. In the Spring of 1796, a commission with 15,000 troops and tons of arms sailed for Saint-Domingue to abolish slavery. Second to Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, leader of the commission, was Julien Raimond, the founder of Saint-Georges’ Légion.
According to Louise Fusil, Saint Georges and his friend Lamothe had been absent from Paris for nearly two years. “I since learned that they had left for Saint-Domingue, then in full revolt; it was rumored they had been hung in a mutiny. I gave them up for dead and mourned them with all my heart, when one day, as I sat in the Palais Royal with a friend absorbed in a magazine… I looked up and screamed, thinking I saw ghosts. They were Lamothe and Saint Georges who, clowning, sang to me ‘At last there you are! You thought we’ve been hung /For almost two years what became of you?’ ‘No, I was not sure that you were hung, but I did take you for ghosts, come back to haunt me!’ ‘We nearly are [ghosts] they answered, for we come from very far indeed.’”[91]
It stands to reason that Julien Raimond would want to take St. Georges, an experienced officer, with him to Saint-Domingue, then in the throes of a bloody civil war. While we lack concrete evidence that St. Georges was aboard the convoy of the commission, the fact that we find Captain Colin, and Lamotte (Lamothe) on the payroll of a ship of the convoy to Saint-Domingue, confirms Louise Fusil’s account. So does Lionel de la Laurencie’s statement: “The expedition to Saint-Domingue was Saint-Georges’ last voyage,” adding that “Disenchantment and melancholy resulting from his experiences during that voyage must have weighed heavily on his aging shoulders”[92] In the end, disheartened by the savagery of the strife between blacks and mulattoes, St. Georges and Lamothe were fortunate to escape from the island with their lives.
Within a fortnight of returning from that harrowing journey, St. Georges was again building a symphony orchestra. Like his last ensemble, Le Cercle de l’Harmonie was also part of a Masonic lodge performing in what was formerly the Palais Royal. The founders of the newLoge, a group of nouveau riche gentlemen bent on recreating the elegance of the old Loge Olympique, were delighted to find St. Georges back in Paris. According to Le Mercure Français, “The concerts…under the direction of the famous Saint Georges, left nothing to be desired as to the choice of pieces or the superiority of their execution.”[93] Though a number of his biographers maintain that at the end of his life, St. Georges lived in abject poverty, the Cercle was not exactly the lower depths. Rejected by the army, St. Georges, at age 51, found solace in his music. Sounding like any veteran performer proud of his longevity, he said : “Towards the end of my life, I was particularly devoted to my violin,” adding “never before did I play it so well!”[94]
In the late spring of 1799, there came bad news from Saint-Domingue: Generals Hédouville and Roume, the Directoire’semissaries, reverting to the discredited policy of stirring up trouble between blacks and mulattoes, succeeded in starting a war between pro-French André Rigaud’s mulattoes, and separatist Toussaint Louverture’s blacks. It was so savage that it became known as the “War of the Knives.” Hearing of it affected St. Georges, already suffering from a painful condition which he refused to acknowledge. Two of his contemporary obituaries reveal the course of his illness and death.
La Boëssière fils: “Saint-Georges felt the onset of a disease of the bladder and, given his usual negligence, paid it little attention; he even kept secret an ulcer, source of his illness; gangrene set in and he succumbed on June 12, 1799.[95]
J. S. A. Cuvelier in his NECROLOGY: “…For some time he had been tormented by a violent fever…his vigorous nature had repeatedly fought off this cruel illness; [but] after a month of suffering, the end came on 21 Prairial [June 9] at five o’clock in the evening. Some time before the end, St. Georges stayed with a friend [Captain Duhamel] in the rue Boucherat. His death was marked by the calm of the wise and the dignity of the strong.”[96]
Saint-Georges’s death certificate was lost in a fire; what remains is only a report by the men who removed his body: “St. Georges Bologne, Joseph, rue Boucherat No. 13, Bachelor, 22 Prairial year 7, Nicholas Duhamel, Ex-officer, same house, former domicile rue de Chartres, taken away by Chagneau.” Over the name “Joseph” someone, no doubt the “receiver”, scribbled “60 years”, merely an estimate which, mistaken for a death certificate, added to the confusion about Saint-Georges’s birth-year. Since he was born in December 1745, he was only 53.[97]
Nicholas Duhamel, the ex-officer mentioned in the report of the “receivers,” a Captain in St. Georges’ Legion, was his loyal friend until his death. Concerned about his old colonel’s condition, he stopped by his apartment on rue de Chartres in the Palais Royal and, having found him dying, took him to his flat in rue Boucherat where he took care of him until the end.
(SOURCE: Wikipedia)
VIOLIN CONCERTOS