Istwa Nou

That night a peasant came to the gate of the French legation with something wrapped in burlap. It was the head of the president. He said in Creole that it was for Madame Vilbrun Guillaume. One part of the body had been run the length of the Grand'Rue and another through Turgeau and Bois-Verna. What could be collected was buried without a priest in a shallow grave outside the east gate of the cemetery, a place Girard later called the most desolate he had ever seen. A second story attached itself to the same day. Haitian tradition holds that one soldier, named in some tellings Joseph Pierre and in others Pierre Sully, resisted the marines at Fort National and was killed there. No American report of the landing mentions him. Jean Brierre made him the subject of Le Petit Soldat. He stands for the proposition that the republic was overpowered on that day and did not consent to anything, and that is a distinction Haitians have had reason to keep.