I departed New Orleans on a steamboat two days later, in Desire’s company. I quickly realized that, as Feuille, I suffered from an especially vicious form of the landlubber’s affliction: seasickness. It’s a wonder I ever crossed the Atlantic. Desire distracted me from my travails with tales of himself, his primary theme of conversation. He had been born the third in a line of sugarcane planters and married a cousin who died in childbirth. He was a heavy-drinking braggart, unpleasant in every way but one: he loved his only daughter more than anything else in the world.

When I finally met Hortense, on the porch of the master’s house, she was sitting down. I was not struck by her beauty so much as an innate, sincere goodness. The chair she sat in had four small wheels at the ends of its legs and handles sticking out of the back of the frame. She had been struck by polio as a child and was unable to walk. I unrolled the canvas I had earlier prepared, a figure of a faceless woman wearing a silk mother-of-pearl evening gown. Hortense, however, insisted that I paint her wheelchair, as she called it, with a scene of the plantation in the background. When I told Desire this would add several days and several scores of dollars to my fee, he said, “Take your time, boy, take your time,” and clapped me on the shoulder. “Pronay votrah toe,” he added in his mangled Acadian French. He was very proud of his ability to speak French, but just about every time he did I nodded and smiled in reply without understanding a word he had said. It mattered little. On such occasions, a nod and a smile were all that was required of me.