The news sent me into a panic I was at labors to disguise. Instantly I looked in Jeanne’s direction. She did not blink or falter or startle. She betrayed no emotion at all. Desire might have been speaking about some distant stranger. We might just as well have been discussing repairs to the belltower or the price of sugar.

Hortense, by contrast, was delighted. She did not say anything, not wishing to gloat, but all the same she beamed with satisfaction. Finally her triumph was in sight. It had taken her years to persuade her father to sell his half-caste daughter. She now had her wish, and in her mind her responsibility was to accept victory with as good a grace as she could muster. The signs of her happiness were subtle: the liveliness of her eyes, the inflections of her voice, the vivacity of her movements. The pronouncement had been made, and there was to be no more talk of it.

As usual, after the madeira was poured and cigars lit, Hortense picked up the book she had been reading to us nightly. It was a book, she’d assured us, that was much in vogue across Europe. She began reciting, taking it up at the point she had finished the previous night, the scene where Victor Frankenstein climbs the Glacier Montanvert:

“‘Alas!’” she read, “‘why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.’”

She continued:

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.

We rise; one wand’ring thought pollutes the day.

We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh, or weep,

Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same; for, be it joy or sorrow,

The path of its departure still is free.

Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;

Nought may endure but mutability.

Later that evening, as I lumbered past the door of Desire’s apartment, I noticed it was slightly ajar. Hearing the murmur of voices, I peered in discreetly and saw Jeanne’s mother Berthe kneeling at Desire’s lap, beseeching him tearfully not to send Jeanne away. He stroked her hair tenderly. “There, there,” he said, “there, there.”

At dinner the next evening, with Jeanne and Berthe both attending to us, Desire announced that he had decided to sell Berthe as well as Jeanne. Again, the young Jeanne betrayed no emotion, but her mother picked up the hem of her skirt and scurried away, sobbing. Her inconsolable wailing continued for hours thereafter until, in the middle of the night, Desire’s booming voice was heard commanding that she be taken to the dungeon and placed in shackles so that he might sleep in peace.