Whatever the reservations they had made when they formed this pact with the bastard Mulattoes, the whites were now eager to cement the alliance and Roume was overwhelmed by the number of these appeals. Revolution, says Karl Marx, is the locomotive of history. Here was a locomotive that had travelled at remarkable speed, for in April 1792, not yet three years after the fall of the Bastille, the white Patriots in Port-au-Prince were being besieged by a composite army of royalist commandants, white planters, brown-skinned Mulattoes, and black slaves, none of them constrained but all for the time being free and equal partners. No doubt most of the rich were only awaiting the restoration of ‘order’ to put the slaves back in their places again, but the mere fact of the revolutionary association and the temporary equality meant that the old spell was broken and things would never be the same again.