Haiti's first novel tells the revolution as allegory. Two enslaved half-brothers, Romulus and Remus, one fathered by an African and the other by the Colonist, are driven to revolt by the killing of their mother, Marie the African, an event dated to 1789. Stella is no ordinary character but Liberty in the flesh, the Star of Nations, who with the Spirit of the Nation convinces the brothers they can win only once they stop fighting each other.

Bergeaud wrote from exile, and the editors place him among a generation of Haitian writers who were also politicians and who composed with France watching: the imagery is classical and European, and the few local plants that appear are explained for outsiders.

Their introduction also lays out the history the allegory shadows, from Oge's revolt and the Leclerc expedition to the 1825 indemnity and the long fragmentation under Christophe, Petion and Boyer.