Adele rented a small cottage on Rampart Street, where many free women of color lived, most of them kept by a white protector, according to the traditional system of placage, or "left-handed marriage," which had started in the early times of the colony when it was not easy to convince a young European woman to follow a man to those savage lands. There were nearly two thousand arrangements of that kind in the city. Adele's dwelling was similar to others on her street: small, comfortable, well ventilated, with a back patio with walls covered in bougainvillea. Dr. Parmentier had an apartment a few blocks away, where he had also installed his clinic, but he spent his free hours with his family much more openly than he had in Le Cap or Havana. The only thing strange about this situation was the age of the participants, because a placage was an arrangement between white men and girls about fifteen; Dr. Parmentier was nearly sixty, and Adele could have been the grandmother of any of her neighbors.

Violette and Loula found a larger house on Chartres. It took them only a few turns around the place d'Armes, the dike at the hour of the afternoon strolls, and Pere Antoine's church at midday on Sunday to assess the vanity of the local women. The whites had succeeded in passing a law that forbade women of color to wear a hat, jewels, or showy clothes in public places, under threat of a lashing. The result was that the mulattas adorned themselves in their tignons with such charm that they surpassed the finest hat from Paris, and displayed necklines so tempting that any jewel would have been a distraction; they had such elegant bearing that by comparison the white women looked like washerwomen. Violette and Loula immediately calculated the money they could make with their beauty lotions, especially the snail slime creme and pearls dissolved in lemon juice to clear the skin.

The School in Boston

The whiplash Maurice had dealt Hortense Guizot had not prevented her from attending Marigny's celebrated ball; she masked it under a fine veil that draped to the floor and covered the pins that closed the dress at the back, but the blow left an ugly bruise for several weeks. Using that blemish she had convinced Valmorain to send his son to Boston. She also had another point: she had menstruated only once since the birth of Marie-Hortense. She was pregnant again and had to pamper her nerves; it would be better to send the boy away for a while. Her conception was not a marvel, the rumor she attempted to spread among her friends, but due to the fact that two weeks after giving birth she was frolicking with her husband with the same determination as during her honeymoon. This time it would be a son, she was sure, destined to carry on the family name and the family dynasty. No one dared remind her that a Maurice Valmorain already existed.

Maurice detested the school from the moment he crossed the threshold and the heavy wooden double door closed behind his back. His displeasure lasted unrelieved to the third year, when he had an exceptional teacher. He arrived in Boston in winter beneath an icy mist and found an entirely gray world: overcast sky, squares covered with frost, and skeletal trees with ugly, numbed birds on the naked branches. He had never known true cold. The winter went on forever; he went around with pains in his bones, ears blue with cold, and hands red with chilblains; he did not take off his overcoat even to sleep and lived with one eye on the sky, hoping to see a miserable ray of sun. The dormitory had a coal stove at one end that was lighted only two hours in the evening, so the boys could dry their socks. The sheets were always icy, the walls stained with greenish mold, and to wash in the mornings he had to break a skim of ice on the basins.

The boys, noisy and quarrelsome, in uniforms as gray as the landscape, talked a language Maurice could barely decipher-his tutor Gaspard Severin had had only a smattering of English-and he had to improvise the rest in his classes with the help of a dictionary. Months went by before he could answer his teachers' questions, and a year before he shared in the jokes of his American companions, who called him "the Frenchy" and bedeviled him with ingenious torments. His uncle Sancho's peculiar notions of boxing were useful because they enabled him to defend himself by kicking his enemies' balls, and his practices in dueling served him well to emerge victorious in the tourneys imposed by the school director, who made bets with the teachers and then punished the loser.

The food had the purely didactic purpose of tempering character. Whoever was capable of swallowing boiled liver or chicken necks with bits of feathers still attached, accompanied by cauliflower and burned rice, could confront the hazards of life, including war, for which the Americans were always preparing. Maurice, used to Celestine's refined kitchen, fasted like a fakir for thirteen days without anyone's caring a whit, and finally, when he fainted from hunger, there was no alternative left but to eat what was put on his plate.

Discipline was as iron hard as it was absurd. The unhappy boys had to leap out of bed at dawn, wash off with icy water, run three times around the courtyard, slipping in pools of water, to warm up-if tingling in your hands can be called warm-and study Latin for two hours before a breakfast of hot chocolate, dry bread, and lumpy oatmeal, then endure several hours of classes and sports, at which Maurice was incompetent. At the end of the day, when the victims were swooning with fatigue, they were given a moralizing lecture for one or two hours, depending on the director's inspiration. Their calvary ended in reciting in chorus the Declaration of Independence.

Maurice, who had been spoiled by Tete growing up, submitted to that prison routine without complaint. Following in the footsteps of the other boys and defending himself from the bullies kept him so busy that his nightmares ended, and he did not think anymore of the gallows in Le Cap. He enjoyed learning. At first, he hid his eagerness for books so as not to be perceived as arrogant, but soon he began to help the others with their lessons and that way earned respect. He did not confess to anyone that he knew how to play the piano, dance a quadrille, and write poetry; the other boys would have drawn and quartered him. His companions watched him write letters with the dedication of a medieval monk, but did not openly make fun because he told them they were for his invalid mother. The mother, like the homeland, was not a subject for jokes: she was sacred.

Maurice coughed throughout the winter, but with spring it cleared up. For months he had huddled in his overcoat, with his head sunk between his shoulders, stooping, invisible. When the sun warmed his bones and he could take off his two jackets, his wool underdrawers, the mufflers, the gloves, and the overcoat, and walk erect, he realized his clothing was too tight and too short. He had undergone one of those classic growth spurts typical of pubescent boys, and from being the thinnest in his level had become one of the tallest and strongest. Observing the world from above, with several centimeters' advantage, made him feel safe.

The summer with its warm humidity did not bother Maurice, used to the boiling climate of the Caribbean. The college emptied, the students and most of the teachers left on vacation, and Maurice was left nearly alone, awaiting instructions to return to his family. Those instructions never arrived; instead his father sent Jules Beluche, the same chaperon who had come with him on the long, depressing voyage on the ship from his home in New Orleans, across the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, sailing around the peninsula of Florida, slipping along the Sargasso Sea, and facing the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, to the school in Boston. The chaperon, a remote relative of the Guizot family who'd fallen on bad times, was a middle-aged man who took pity on the boy and tried to make the voyage as agreeable as possible, but in Maurice's memory it would always be associated with his exile from his paternal hearth.