Having followed De Wimpffen to this point, the reader is entitled to hear his parting epigrams. "The more I know," he said, of the inhabitants of Saint Domingo, "the more I felicitate myself on quitting it. I came hither with the _noble_ ambition of occupying myself solely in acquiring a fortune; but destined to become a master, and consequently to possess slaves, I saw, in the necessity of living with them, that of studying them with attention to know them, and I depart with much less esteem for the one, and pity for the other. When a person is what the greater part of the planters are, he is made to have slaves; when he is what the greater part of the slaves are, he is made to have a master." Whether Jean Audubon's long experience would have confirmed all that has just been said is doubtful, for he was primarily a merchant or dealer and thus belonged to the favored class. But what especially interests us now is that both he and De Wimpffen were owners of plantations in the southern province of Santo Domingo at the same time. The one who wished to retain a valuable property followed the custom of the time by confiding the management of his affairs to an agent, either at a fixed salary or on a profit-sharing basis; while the other, who stayed long enough to discern the trend of events, was glad to sell his land and his slaves and shake the dust of the island from his feet forever.[34] Before resuming the intimate details of our narrative, we must follow the whirlwind of political events already set in motion in the island colony. In the spring of 1789 the white colonists of Santo Domingo took administrative matters into their own hands, and without vestige of legal authority, elected and dispatched eighteen deputies to the States-General, then sitting in France. These men reached Versailles in June, a month after that body had declared itself the National Assembly, but only six were ever admitted to its counsels. For a long time opposition to the planters had been fomented in Paris by the "Friends of the Blacks," the abolition society to which we have referred; stories of cruelty to the slaves, colored and intensified in passing from mouth to mouth, as invariably happens when atrocity tales are used as partisan weapons, added to the arrogance and extravagant habits of many planters when resident in the mother country, did not tend to soften the prejudice of the public towards their class. The planters could get no consideration at home, and, as we have seen, the Declaration of Rights followed promptly in August, while a legislative Assembly was ordered in September. Meantime the mulattoes on the island were clamoring for the political rights which the decree had promised them, and, to make matters worse, some of the influential whites espoused their cause, even preaching the enfranchisement of the blacks, from whom up to this time little had been heard. In short, the whites were divided as effectually as were blacks and mulattoes.