Girard uses the manuscript Toussaint Louverture wrote in his own hand at the fort de Joux in 1802, together with his autograph letters and those of his wife Suzanne, to work out how he actually spoke. Because he wrote close to phonetically, his misspellings can be read aloud: dropped syllables, vowels shifted toward i, heavy nasalisation, verbs left in the infinitive, genders mixed, articles fused to nouns. Some of this matches modern Haitian kreyol, some preserves Old Regime French pronunciations, some suggests the south-western accent of the Gascon planters who had owned him. African words are entirely absent. Louverture kept kreyol for addressing field workers and soldiers and used French for proclamations, constitutions and family letters, a choice read here as social ambition. On the origins of kreyol, the text points to French sources, though to regional dialects and the speech of poor whites as much as to standard eighteenth-century French.