Reading Auguste Lussan's 1837 melodrama scene by scene, Leservot shows how a New Orleans stage play turned Saint-Domingue planters into unobjectionable Americans. The Clairville family reaches Louisiana in 1794 having lost a plantation, yet the island survives in the dialogue only as euphemism, a handful of references to misfortunes and to events, and the warmest memories of it are voiced by a French fiance rather than by the refugees. Feeling is reserved for Paris, where father and daughter recover a fortune, are denounced as traitors and escape the guillotine by a hair. Emptied of a slaveholding past and of revolutionary sympathy, they become innocents for whom Louisiana is the only refuge, introduced in a prison cell through Chateaubriand's phrase about a new Eden. Leservot sets these silences against refugees who kept island ties alive until 1825, and against white Creoles narrowing the word Creole as Americanization advanced.