Having arrived in Marseille, I found the port no less squalid than when I’d last passed through, as Joubert, more than two decades earlier. And so within days of our arrival in Marseille, with Louis as our chaperone, we traveled upriver by steamer to Lyon. We farewelled Louis there and continued by diligence to Paris, a journey of a little over a week. Although we’d bought tickets for inside the coach, several of our fellow passengers objected to traveling in such close proximity to us, and my mother and I were thus forced to travel on the roof, beside the driver. Everywhere I went, I found myself an object of curiosity. I could attract a crowd solely on the basis of my skin color and my freedom, for slavery had yet to be abolished in the kingdom.

It was no different in Paris, where I could silence entire rooms simply by entering them. The Paris we encountered was not the modern city of wide boulevards, train stations, and gas lighting but a dark, damp, gothic place. This was the old Paris, the Paris of the last King of the French, a more intimate Paris, where the poor lived above the rich, where barefoot children thronged at every corner, where rats roamed the streets, and where rivulets of sewage trickled down twisting alleys. Nights were lit by candles and the stars and moon above. Misery was on constant public display and opulence hid behind the high walls of hôtels particuliers. When it rained, the streets would flood and Parisians would retreat into the arcades to inspect the shop windows. On Sundays after church, all over the city, people would gather around a guitar to sing and dance. At such times I was happy, for I remembered how, at the Desire plantation, my people would gather around a banjo on Sunday afternoons, singing and dancing to their own songs, and I felt connected to them, even though so far away.

I was a beautiful young woman of sixteen, and I immediately found myself beset by men. The most gifted among them—ambitious dreamers and schemers, professional and amateur plotters, devourers of words and ideas—had grown up on tales of Napoleonic adventure only to enter, in their maturity, a society that discouraged novelty. Their nostalgia for imperial glories extended to a fashion for dark-skinned beauties. They did not wish to marry me, but considered me an ideal mistress to share among themselves. My admirers helped us find lodgings in a respectable rooming house, paid for my visits to couturiers, milliners, and bootmakers, and for lessons in deportment, singing, and acting. I made progress in every art but one: I could never learn to read or write. These were skills that did not cross from one body to the next. No matter how hard I tried, those black marks dancing upon the page never stilled long enough to allow me to interpret them.