It is on this journey through France that the Mandingo learns to be truly grateful for having been born in a civilized country. The unfortunate land in which he now finds himself has at its head a young prince who has robbed his own mother and sent her to prison. Such impious guilt cannot, the African feels, fail to draw down the vengeance of Heaven. Accordingly, when he reaches the capital, he finds the inhabitants engaged in an indiscriminate slaughter of their friends and neighbors. It almost seems to a stranger that the city is built on red clay, so soaked are the principal streets with blood. The traveller meets no one sane enough to give an explanation of this state of things. Nor does he require one. It is plain that this people is afflicted with a judicial madness, sent upon it for the crimes of its chiefs. He finds his way to a street where the work seems completed. All is quiet here, except where some wretch still struggles with his last agony, or where one not yet wounded to death is dragging himself stealthily along the ground towards some covert where he may perhaps live through to a safer time. The stranger stoops compassionately to a child that lies on its dead father; but, as he raises it, he feels that the heaviness is not that of sleep, and lays it back on the breast where it belongs. In a neighboring quarter the work is still at its highest. Where he stands, he hears the yell of fury, the sharp cry of terror, the burst of discordant laughter, rise above the clang of weapons and the clamor of threatening and remonstrance; while, under all, the roar of a great city in movement deepens with curse and prayer and groan. And now a woman rushes from a side-street, looks wildly round for refuge, then runs, shrieking, on, until, stumbling over the dead bodies in her way, she is overtaken and silenced forever.
He has made his way out of France, and is planning new journeys, when he receives, through some travelling merchants, a peremptory summons from his father, who has heard such accounts of the barbarous state of Europe that he regrets having given him leave to go out on this dangerous exploring expedition.
Our Mandingo did not meet the tragic fate of Bemoy, to whom the friendship of the whites proved fatal. He returned in safety to his country.