Bellhouse reads French prints and paintings from Coypel's exoticised page boy of the 1680s through the plates of Diderot's Encyclopedia, where sugar mills appear without the hands they cost and delicate white hands float free as emblems of the human. Runaways are shown hamstrung or missing a leg, the punishment the Code Noir prescribed, and abolitionist imagery settles into a kneeling black man before a standing white one. After 1791 the pattern breaks. Atrocity prints of the Saint-Domingue rising gesture at rape without depicting it, and Girodet paints the deputy Belley as a dignified citizen-soldier while making sure the viewer notices his genitals. The hinge is a comparison of two sets of illustrations that Moreau le Jeune engraved for the same words of Voltaire, one in 1787 and one in 1803. In the later set the monkeys chasing naked girls turn dark, muscled and menacing, and metaphor performs what the taboo forbade.