Leonora Sansay's 1808 epistolary novel, written as letters from a lady at Cap Français to Aaron Burr, gives Accilien a vantage point on Saint-Domingue in the months before Haitian independence. Reading the letters alongside Trouillot's argument about unthinkability, she treats Sansay's outsider position, American, white, married into the planter class, as an instrument that registers what the colonial world could not admit. The novel's preoccupation with balls, dress, jealousy and display becomes evidence of a society performing normality while its foundations gave way. Accilien attends to gender and rank, to the rivalry staged between Creole women and free women of colour, and to the decrees regulating what the latter could wear. She also holds the text to account, showing that Sansay admires the courage of the formerly enslaved on one page and recoils from their supposed savagery on the next, never settling whether she believes them fit for freedom.