I forgot about you too, Koahu—or rather I did everything I could to erase you from my mind. I put my convictions at the service of my interests. The Law, I told myself, was merely the superstition of a backward people. A crossing would not—could not—bring about the end of the world. The Law was merely the invention of men, men who sought power and control over others. The Law served only to limit our freedoms. I renounced my faith in it and yielded to all the freedoms within my reach, and in so doing became something terrible to behold: a charming persuader who sought only the satisfaction of his basest desires.

I began touring the cities of the American south, promoting myself as France’s finest portraitist, offering the planters, merchants, officers, and other eminences the occasion to have their likeness, and those of their families, their houses, and animals, even their slaves if they so wished, forever memorialized by the application of oil on canvas. Wherever I went, prosperous men would give me foolish amounts of their money to sit in a room with them, their wives, and their daughters for hours and days on end, while in the evenings I would spend their money on women, cards, liquor, and roast meats.

Customarily, a portraitist arrived at the home of his subject with a canvas already painted in all respects save the face. If the subject was female, the canvas would show the figure of a woman in the center, with a large empty space where her face would be. For the standard fee, the background would be an Arcadian scene. For an additional fee, the client might specify the particulars of the portrait. He or she might request a classical or a bucolic scene, or ask that a dog be included in the subject’s lap, or that a particular object—a pair of elegant hands, a jewel, an item of clothing—be displayed. Such things were all subject to negotiation, and every particular represented an additional profit for the portraitist.

This was how I met the woman who would become my wife, Hortense Michaux, only daughter of the widower Desire Michaux, owner of the famous Desire plantation of Louisiana. He sauntered into my rented studio in Lafayette one day and said, “I wish to immortalize my daughter.” She couldn’t travel, he explained, so I would have to displace myself to the Desire plantation, some ninety miles upriver of New Orleans in the Saint James Parish. I would be in want of nothing, he promised, and would be paid twice my usual fee.