A
powerful wind buffeted the house in gusts that came every few minutes,
producing a noise not dissimilar to howling. Between these blasts, the sound of
the rain was like a hammering, a hammering of thousands of huge, elongated
drops that drove themselves into the wooden shingles of the roof with the force
of a battalion of infantry firing in unison. Lifting some, while sending others
spinning away into the darkness, the enormous drops, driven by powerful
velocity, dislocated garden tiles, smashed through leaves, emptied the dirt out
of plant pots and shattered the glass panes in the upstairs windows. The wind,
upon returning, turned the powerful downpour into a weapon even more dangerous,
driving it to wash the gallery furniture off into the garden to be pounded into
the mud of the devastated flower beds, bending, twisting the huge forest trees
into hideous, alarming caricatures of themselves.
Inside
the darkened lower story, the intermittent flashes of lightning illuminated a
scene suspended in the stillness of time passed. Flowers, weary of their
arrangement, wine bottles, empty of their potential, glasses drained, bouquets
thrown, furniture still placed for, but now deprived of, conversation, confetti
relieved of their gaiety lay about the floor, a dotty carnivalesque pattern
that lead to the bottom of a flight of stairs leading to the bedrooms on the
upper floor.
She
lay as still as one of the embroidered patterns that decorated the quilt which
covered them both, and listened to the thunder rolling away like distant
artillery to be replaced by the scattershot of pelting rain and the mourn of
the wind. The pounding in her head had passed, but the sweet misery in the
secret parts of her body reminded her that this man whose weight dislocated the
bed was her husband, and that this was her wedding night. She was 14 years old,
her name was Rosa de Gannes, now she would be called Madame, Madame Roume.
The
face of the earth turned slowly. The island of Grenada was relieved of the
stare of the eye of hurricane, in those days nameless. The geography of the bed
had changed. The weight removed, the intolerable sweetness lingered. Fun-filled
childishness ended. What had taken place? What had not? Adolescence unvisited,
games unfinished, world ended. World not begun. She reached for her doll. That
too was gone. Outside a stillness, a hiatus, everything will be renewed.
Inside, she felt a profound joy as she straightened her hair, straightened her
night dress, straightened her body. The storm had passed.
Simon
de Gannes de la Chancellerie married three times. From his first marriage there
were two daughters, one of whom was Rosa. From his third marriage he had a son
and a daughter. His son's name was Simon François Louis Chevalier de Gannes de
Falaise. It is from Simon François that the de Gannes of Trinidad descend. The
man that Rosa married at the young age of 14 could have been twenty-five years
her senior. He, unlike his wife, came from the lesser nobility of Burgundy,
France, but had risen in the colonial service and had become a wealthy
plantation and slave owner in Grenada. His name was Laurent Philippe Roume.
From
this marriage came three children. Philippe Rose Roume, who was born on the 13
October, 1743, another son, François, and a daughter. When Laurent Philippe,
her husband, died in 1765, he left Rosa a wealthy woman, owning the prosperous
estates of Belvedere and Paradise in the quarter of Sauterus in the north of
Grenada, and a parcel of land of some 160 quarrées called Mont Saint Laurent.
For
the aristocratic, land-owning society of Grenada of the 1740s and 50s, the
island offered the best of all worlds. Men wore powdered wigs and jabots,
knee-britches and swords with gold-plated hilts. Women stayed in the shade in
preservation of their complexions and devised tiny, often hilarious beauty
marks which they hid upon their persons so as to delight their lovers.
Warehouses were full of goods to export: nutmeg, cloves, tobacco, tonka beans,
cocoa, coffee, peppers, cinnamon, hogsheads brimmed with rum, sugar and
molasses. Exotic fruit soaked silently in demijohns of alcohol, waiting to
become after dinner curiosities for parvenus of the café society of Paris, Bonn
or Basle. Other warehouses were filled to overflowing with all manner of wines,
taffetas, laces, truffles, cheeses, dried fruit, farm machinery, gun powder,
cannon balls and all else that was required to live in style in the tropics.
Slaves
hauled, carried, fetched, worked the fields, the houses, the gardens, the
yards; some were loved, others despised, some were simply worked to death,
while others became the cherished and in secret, ancestors of "pass for
white" beauties who went on to live in ante-bellum mansions in the state
of Louisiana.
There
was good music and bad. There were mask balls where absurd liaisons produced
idiotic children, conceived in alcoholic stupor. There were the religious, the
pagan, the agnostic and the ignorant. There were some who lived in the
splendour of total solitude in enormous wooden mansions deep in the forested
interior of the island, while others loved the winding steeps and steep
twisting streets of St. George's, where fast clippers, elegant barcantines and
royal frigates of the French King's ocean-going fleet turned at anchor in the
most beautiful harbour in the Caribbean.
Rosa
was just past 37 years of age when she met Bertrand de la Laurencie, chevalier
de Charras, a sub-lieutenant in the French Royal Navy. He was fifteen years
younger than Rosa; exactly three months younger than her eldest son. He came of
a noble family from Angonmois, Poitou and Saintouge that had acquired the
attributes of "noble and powerful" and "high and mighty
seigneur" as early as the days when free use of such terms was proof of
the authority that they possessed. She loved him proudly but without defiance
of a society already profligate, where debauchery was an established practice
and for a young gallant to be accepted by the unsurpassed beauty of the city
was considered not merely "ton" or even "bon ton", but in
fact "haut ton".
He
claimed the title "Marquis de Charras" — like his grandfather and
father, who had both been guillotined — and graced her with a coronet of that
order of chivalry. It was said of him that some time before 1770, he sailed
from Grenada and was never heard of again. The sad depredations of the French
revolution and the work of Madame Guillotine was to confirm Rosa's illustrious
title within two decades.
Rosa,
perhaps lugubrious, certainly idle, passed the control of her financial affairs
over to her son Philippe Rose who, hoisted upon the petard of association with
the grande noblesse of the realm, elevated his surname to distinguish the
wooded hillside that had become a part of his paternal inheritance and was to
be known henceforth by history as Roume de Saint Laurent. Things were changing.
In 1763, Grenada passed, after 150 years, from France to Great Britain by the
Treaty of Paris. Philippe's attempts to capitalise on the family fortune proved
disastrous in that he was no match for the agents of the merchants of London in
that island, Messrs. Bosanquet & Fatio. Had it not been for the "noble
and efficient" business reputation and timely intervention of M. François
Besson de Beaumanoir, Rosa's situation might have proved to be untenable.
1777
was a terrible year for Rosa. It was, however, a watershed year for her son.
Philippe Roume came to Trinidad - perhaps it was love at first sight, perhaps
he saw a way to redeem himself and to regain his and Rosa's losses. Suffice to
say that he was possessed of vision. Trinidad was uncultivated, a wilderness,
underpopulated, existing in a perpetual state of potentiality since its
discovery more than 250 years before. Roume set to work and within five years
had in his hand the Cedula of population of 1783, the document that established
a French creole planter society on a Spanish island.
The
creoles arrived by the hundreds. It is of interest to note that the word
"creole" is derived from the Portuguese "criollo", a
derivative of "criar", to breed, to bring up and from the beginning
of the 16th century, it had been used to mean "European born in the West
Indies".
After
the recapture of Grenada by the French in July 1779, Rosa knew that their time
in Grenada was over. Now Madame de Charras, and 50 years old, with resolution she
set about the considerable task of creating a new life for herself in the
strange and primitive environment of Trinidad. On the 18th April, 1779, her son
had bought for her the small estate of San Xavier in Maraval, comprising three
fanegas of land, from Dons Miguel and Francisco Lezama. In 1782, she applied to
the Governor Don Martin de Salavenia for a grant of land adjacent to her modest
holdings in Maraval. Granted were 85 fanegas 5 solares. The title deed
described her as Doña Rosa de Gannes, Marquise de Charras. She went on to
purchase several other small estates in the Maraval valley, eventually owning
it virtually in its entirety, a magnificent domain through which ran a
beautiful river, shaded by enormous bamboo, graced by rolling grasslands, surrounded
by high forest, virgin and extremely valuable. She named the whole "Les
Champs Elysées" and built a large rambling wooden thatched house,
decorated with the cast-iron pillars from her previous Grenadian mansion. These
still stand at the portico of the Trinidad Country Club.
The
date of Rosa's death is uncertain. In his divorce proceedings of January 1799,
Philippe Rose affirmed that his parents were dead. She therefore did not attain
the allotted biblical span of three score and ten. It is said that her grave is
on the grounds of the country club, the exact location is only guessed at.
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