Leonora Sansay went to Saint-Domingue in 1802 with her husband, a planter attempting to recover the estate he had abandoned, and published her letters to Aaron Burr six years later as an epistolary novel. Accilien reads that book as a record of how a Western outsider tried to make sense of a revolution for which, as Trouillot put it, European thought had no frame of reference.

The reading attends closely to the machinery of the form. Sansay divides herself between a narrator, Mary, who writes the letters, and a protagonist, Clara, whose story they tell — a distance that lets the account pass as mere observation. What emerges is a picture of how whites, free people of color and the enslaved stood toward one another in the colony's last months, and of French complacency as the war closed in. Accilien ends on Sansay's nostalgia and her unresolved position on slavery.