The Desire plantation was not one of the biggest in the parish, nor was it one of the smallest. The master’s house had cost Desire Michaux forty-eight thousand dollars, and so he was fond of boasting. It was a two-and-a-half-story building with galleries twenty feet broad all around, supported by fluted columns. The stately apartments were fitted with old oak and rosewood and filled with priceless furniture and antique portraits. Hortense, Desire told me, was determined to turn it into a treasure house of art, statuary, and books. It had a library with the latest tomes she ordered from Europe, a music room with a grand piano made in New York, a wine cellar that stocked only French wine, and a dungeon for the punishment of slaves. The lawns between the house and the river levee were planted with magnolias, orange trees, and large, twisting oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Around the main buildings were an assortment of outbuildings: a kitchen, bachelor apartments, a dovecote, stables, a greenhouse where orchids grew, and a cellar to store the great blocks of ice shipped downriver from Canada in the winter. The Desire plantation, boasted its master, was entirely self-sufficient and wanted for nothing.

A grove of cypress trees separated these buildings from the slave quarters, which were organized in four rows of six two-roomed, open-windowed cabins, each of which was shared by two families. At the center of this slave village was a planting of great sycamores growing around a belltower that rang morning, noon, and night, dividing the day into a routine that with the passage of time became as familiar as one’s own heartbeat. Beyond the slave quarters was the sugar mill; beyond the mill were the sugarcane fields; and beyond those the impenetrable Louisiana bayou.

It was in the drawing room of the master’s house that Hortense and I would meet every morning after breakfast. As I painted, I would tell her stories. I told her stories of a childhood in a family impoverished by the revolution, whereas in fact my father had profited immensely from the turmoil of that generation. I told her stories of my time spent as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp during the Hundred Days, how I was there at Waterloo and had seen the Prussians entering Paris, whereas in fact I had, through well-placed connections and counterfeit illness, avoided the military altogether. She had a weakness for blue blood, so I told her stories of painting the portraits of some of Europe’s most illustrious grandees by day while carousing with some of the continent’s most notorious artists and conspirators by night. All lies. The artists and conspirators with whom I had caroused had labored in near-complete obscurity, penury, and illness. But with her romantic sensibility, Hortense swallowed whole the stories I told her, day after day while I painted, and night after night at the dinner table.