Rosa de Gannes – A fictional account, based on factual elements of her life

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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Roume's Last Moments

A fictionalised version of the death of Roume de St. Laurent, containing factual elements of his life.

His breath came in small, rapid gasps. His once sweetly handsome face now decimated by pain. Sunken cheeks, his lips propped up from beneath by teeth grown large from the shrinking of their foundations. Wisps of consciousness floated in and out like cobweb gently blowing in a shaft of sunlight, sometimes visible, sometimes not. Anchoring memories that had not entirely lost their flavour. He tried not to let the phlegm rattle in his throat, as he knew that that would make her feel that he was going. He was going. He braced himself, assuming in his mind a more dignified way of lying, and tilted up his chin, glancing along his cheek towards where his official uniform was thrown across the back of a chaise longue. Gold brocade, handsome with the dark blue twill, the hilt of his ceremonial sword bringing a regality to it. The emperor's golden eagle shimmered, his eyes were moist. He thought to raise his hand to wipe away a tear. He decided not to, as it would alarm her. The cobwebs of his mind floated upwards and shimmered in the sunlight of recollection.

He saw himself and her and the child boarding the frigate Isle de France, 84 guns, at the dock at Port-au-Prince. They had said good-bye to Toussaint, whom he knew was the only person capable of keeping Haiti for France, if treated well, with reason and intelligence. Before he left, he had written a letter to Napoleon, advising against an expedition. It was ignored.

It was aboard the Isle de France that the first signs of illness had occurred, had occurred to him. A wrenching pain, so sharp, so surprising in its intensity that it made him crouch and grab the gunwale for support as the ship settled in the bosom of a long Atlantic roller to rise up, her bow breaking free. His face was cold with sweat. New York was behind them, France ahead. He had been 22 when he first went to France, a place strange, yet familiar. He loved it, cushioned it with inherited memories, bathed with day dreams, dreamt while lying on the white sand at Grand Anse, the sky just a shade lighter than the sea. St. George's, a medieval skyline in miniature. This land of his forefathers. He was at home in Paris, his father's House on the Rue de la Concorde was modest. They used it in the way that people used townhouses when they really lived in the country or on islands. He was rich. They were well connected. He met a girl in an enchanted circle of gaiety, charm and Mozart. Her name was Francis Wilhelmine. She was the daughter of Sir John Lambert Bart. and his wife Anne Holmes. They married in 1765 and returned to Grenada to a house newly built on a knoll, overlooking great beauty in the parish of Grand Pauvre, where their daughter Elizabeth was born in 1766 and where other babies were born only to die, tiny things to be buried quickly beneath the huge eucalyptus trees, inaugurating the family's graveyard on the estate.

His wife and daughter travelled with him to Trinidad in 1777, after his father's death. His mother had remarried a dandy, a sailor with a lean on a title, just a few months older than he. His adventures into finance had produced reversals. He now adventured to the nearby Spanish island, hardly populated, rich in potential. He would become its colonist with the inauguration of a celebrated cedula. He would become so many things. His marriage to Francis Wilhelmine not so much failed as it withered. His mother thought her extravagant. He knew she was faithless. 22 years later, when she was living in Trinidad, by then a British colony, he cited in his divorce petition in Haiti her liaisons with "two retired lifeguardsmen among others...". By then, his politics had changed; gone was his royalist past. Now he was republican, soon to be imperialist. "She openly professed the most extreme and anti-revolutionary principles. She only associates with the enemies of the French people...". Port of Spain, in spite of being British, was populated by many royalists and noble Frenchmen.

The vision fled, as the opiate faded and the pain returned. He awoke before dawn. She had climbed into bed with him for the warmth. There was almost no money. His daughter died at age 20, in 1786, during his Tobago years when he had served with Arthur Dillon. He as Ordinateur, Count Dillon as governor. He reported directly to the Marechal de Castries. The Parisian street sounds rose up with the melting mists, shouts and whistles. Bells chiming, the thump of a broom on a carpet, the clatter and rattle of horse-drawn traffic. She stirred. He realised that the little one was between them, Rosette, named in memory of his mother, Rose de Gannes, the Marquise de Charras, the Chatelaine of Champs Elysées on the island of Trinidad. His own plantation at Diego Martin. His first wife's estate at Ariapita just west of the town. Such a long, long way away from home. What home? Home in Grenada? Home in Haiti? Home in Tobago? Home in Tobago. He dreamt he had closed his eyes. He saw her plainly, dressed in white, in someone else's clothes, in the style of the previous century. She appeared to be in costume. He had almost laughed out loud. Dillon's glance contained him. A long-legged quadroon, auburn hair, bright blue eyes, her skin the colour of dark honey, young, 16, high-breasted, big-bottomed, her toes splayed apart from walking barefooted all her young life, strode past them without a glance in the market at Port Louis, now called Scarborough.

He made inquiries. She had been born in Grenada, her name Marianne Elizabeth Rochard, the natural daughter of Thomas Daniel Rochard Lepine and of Genevieve Katronice. That night, he and Dillon in court dress paced the front gallery of Government House in anticipation of the arrival of the Marechal. He saw her passing through the garden in the company of a group of young girls, who were ogling the officers as they sat smoking or playing at whist in the gallery. A carriage turned into the drive, two young slaves with torches ran before it, the girls had run away. Not her. The brilliance illuminated her features, enflamed them, he noticed her slightly flaring nostrils, he thought them endearing.

The officers rose to attention. The governor descended to greet the Marechal. Their eyes remained locked as significant events started to unfold. They became lovers at that moment and remained so for the rest of their lives. A daughter was born to them in Scarborough on the 6th July, 1788. Many years later, while acting French agent and commissioner in Spanish Santo Domingo, in a ceremony in Port Republicain, now Port au Prince, in 1799, in the presence of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Divisional General commanding forces in French St. Domingue, Louis Beauvais, Christophe Mornet and Paul L'Ouverture, he divorced Fanny Lambert and married Mlle. Rochard, legitimising their daughter. He was 56 and she 38.

The Spanish crown had granted a Cedula of Population, through his endeavour. This created modern Trinidad. The French crown had appointed him Ordinateur of Tobago, where he and Arthur Count Dillon had been so successful in carrying out the objectives set them by the French government. Under orders from Napoleon Bonaparte, he went to Haiti, then the most valuable colony in the world, providing about two thirds of the overseas trade of France, which had risen in revolt, overthrown its government and defeated the armies sent to subdue it.

He was dispatched to exercise his talents with its leadership to win it back. He gained the friendship and the trust of the island's liberator, Toussaint L'Ouverture. He administered the Spanish half of the island, power passed between his hands, battles unrecorded were fought, won, lost, whatever.

Haiti was a genie that would never return to its bottle. General Leclerc, the emperor's brother-in-law, came with an army in 1803. This ended in complete defeat, Leclerc's death and final victory for the Blacks. Napoleon walked away from the western hemisphere. He even sold Louisiana to the newly made Republic of the United States. The great days of the French were over in the west. Roume's outstanding career was now over, too. The emperor had granted him a pension of 3,500 francs a year on 18 Germinal, an. XI (or 8th April, 1803). This ceased on his death that day in Paris, as he lay in the arms of Marianne; his daughter asleep beside them.

She had great difficulty in obtaining a pittance for herself and the child. She made several appeals to the Navy Ministry. At one point, Napoleon was reminded "Your majesty has refused this application because this woman is coloured". The note however continued "but she dies from hunger and a pension of 400 or 500 francs is recommended". Napoleon ordered that a pension of 600 francs a year be paid to her from the Naval Pensioners' Fund. He initialled the decree himself. Philippe Rose Roume de St. Laurent is hardly remembered by history.