Haiti/The Start of It
Chateau de Joux in the Jura Mountains on the border between France and Switzerland. Part two of my grand adventure in the Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté region of France in 2004: How I learned about the fate of Toussaint L'Ouverture, liberator of Haiti. I am standing with several fellow journalists in the courtyard of a nearly 1,000-year-old fortress called Chateau de Joux and looking at two tiny windows in it. The chateau is more than 3,000 feet above sea level near the French town of Pontarlier in the Jura Mountains, a range that forms a 125-mile natural border between France and Switzerland. Built in the eleventh century as a Burgundian fortification, the original wooden structure was replaced with one of stone two centuries later. A true castle fortress, with its massive medieval towers, dry moats (there wasn't enough water for a wet moat up on the mountain), and drawbridge, the chateau was reinforced and expanded several times. Sometime in the eighteenth c