28 July 1915 · Haitian
The crowd takes Guillaume Sam out of the French legation
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A mob surrounded the French legation on 27 July calling for Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Minister Girard held the door. Charles Zamor came in with a machete and a party of soldiers and was stopped by the minister's daughter Alice, eighteen years old, who had fed Zamor through the ten months he had spent in that house as a refugee. He lowered the machete and took his men away. Five more attempts were turned back before dark. The president crawled from room to room and went on all fours past open windows. The funerals of the prison dead were held on the morning of 28 July, and then eighty men in black coats and bowler hats came over a side wall and into the building. Guillaume Sam had hidden in the water closet behind the minister's bed, and the iodoform on his dressing gave him away. He asked them to finish him. They hauled him down the stairs and threw him over the wall to the crowd, which dismembered him and carried the pieces through the city on poles. Caperton's cruiser anchored in the bay that forenoon.
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