Before we had nearly concluded our pleasant meal, while Champagne was being handed round, and the toasts were beginning, a slave came running up in hot haste to announce the approach of Prince Rakoto. We rose hastily from table, but had little time to go and meet the prince, for, in his impatience to see Mr. Lambert, he had followed close at the slave’s heels. The two men held each other in a long embrace, but for some time neither of them could find a word to express his joy. It was easy to see that a deep and true friendship existed between them, and we who stood round could not view the scene without feelings of pleasurable emotion.
Prince Rakoto, or, to call him by his full name, Rako-dond-Radama, is a young man twenty-seven years of age. Contrary to my expectation, his appearance was far from disagreeable. He is short and slim in stature, and his face does not betray a likeness, in form or color, to any of the four races who inhabit Madagascar. His features have quite the type of the Moldavian Greeks. His black hair is curly, but not woolly; he has dark eyes, full of life and fire; a well-shaped mouth, and handsome teeth. His features wear an expression of such childlike goodness that one feels drawn toward him from the first moment of seeing him. He often goes about in European costume.
The prince is honored and beloved alike by high and low; and I was assured by Mr. Laborde that he fully deserved all this affection and honor. The son is, in fact, as kind-hearted as the mother is cruel; he is just as averse to the shedding of blood as his mother is addicted to it, and his chief efforts are directed toward mitigating the severe punishments the queen is continually inflicting, and obtaining a reversal of the sentences of death which she is always too ready to pronounce upon her subjects.
He is always ready to listen to the unfortunate, and to help them; and has strictly forbidden his slaves to turn any applicant away on the score that he is sleeping or engaged at his meals. Well aware of this, people often come in the middle of the night and wake the prince from his sleep, with petitions for their relations who are to be executed early next morning. If he can not obtain a pardon from his mother, he manages to pass as if by accident along the road by which the poor culprits are led, bound with cords, to meet their fate. Then he cuts their bonds asunder, and either tells them to flee, or to go quietly home, according as their offenses have been grave or venial. When the queen is informed of what her son has done, she never makes any remark, but only tries to keep the next sentences she pronounces as secret as possible, and to hasten their execution. Condemnation and punishment thus often succeed each other so rapidly, that if the prince is absent from the town when sentence is passed, the application to him for assistance is almost sure to come too late.