When a Frenchman undertakes to be cruel, he acts with great _esprit_. There is spectacular ingenuity in the atrocities which he invents, and even his ungovernable bursts of rage instinctively aim a _coup de théâtre_ at his victim. The negro is sometimes bloodthirsty, and when he is excited he will quaff at the opened vein; but he never saves up a man for deliberate enjoyment of his sufferings. When the wild orgy becomes sated, and the cause of it has been once liquidated, there is no further danger from this disposition. But a French colonist, whether smiling or sombre, was always disposed to be tormenting. The ownership of slaves unmasked this tendency of a race which at home, in the streets of Paris and the court-yard of the Abbaye and La Force, proved its ferocity and simple thirst for blood. The story of the Princess Lamballe's death and disfiguration shows the broad Gallic fancy which the sight of blood can pique into action. But the every-day life of many plantations surpassed, in minuteness and striking refinement of tormenting, all that the _sans-culotte_ ever dared or the savage ever dreamed. Let a few cases be found sufficient to enlighten the reader upon this point. They are specimens from a list of horrors which eye-witnesses, inhabitants of the island, have preserved; and many of them, being found in more than one authority, French as well as colored, are to be regarded as current and unquestionable facts. The ordinary brutalities of slaveholding were rendered more acute by this Creole temper. Whippings were carried to the point of death, for the slave-vessel was always at the wharf to furnish short lives upon long credit; starving was a common cure for obstinacy, brine and red-pepper were liberally sprinkled upon quivering backs. Economy was never a virtue of this profuse island. Lives were _sauce piquante_ to luxury.