A French nun sees a burning heart and Ezili acquires her emblem

Marguerite Marie Alacoque had her visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus between 1673 and 1675. The Jesuits promoted the image and Rome approved the cult in 1765. The heart shape was already circulating in Europe before that, in books of alchemy, on playing cards used for divination as well as for gaming, and in fifteenth century pictures of Venus, while church authorities forbade anatomically accurate hearts as too gory for public view. In Brittany the priest Michel LeNobletz built a whole teaching method out of moralised hearts painted on posters, and trained lay people to explain them to their neighbours. Breton sailors and Breton missionaries carried those images to Saint Domingue. The heart is now the sign of Ezili, the principal female spirit of Haitian Vodou, traced on the ground in cornmeal and sewn in sequins on her banner. The painter Prefete Duffaut, taught at the Breton mission school in Jacmel, put a woman who is at once the Virgin and Ezili standing on such a heart.

The Code Noir of 1685 ordered that every enslaved person in the French islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic religion, and required a planter buying newly arrived Africans to notify the governor within eight days so that instruction and baptism could be arranged. The same text forbade the public exercise of any other religion and directed that offenders be punished as rebels. Marriage of the enslaved was prescribed as well, and the Church pressed it through the following century. The purpose of this apparatus was the quiet reproduction of slavery over a long stretch of time. Masters and administrators watched for anything that might interrupt it: abortion, infanticide, and above all flight from the plantation. Alongside the whip, which had never been sufficient on its own, the colony now had a machine for supervising the few hours of rest a slave was allowed.

Louis XIV of France and William III of England closed their war in 1697 by exchanging territory neither of them had ever seen. The Treaty of Ryswick was a general settlement covering Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and among its terms Spain gave up the western third of Hispaniola to France. Spain had held nominal title to the whole island for two centuries and had governed the western end of it hardly at all, its own settlers having withdrawn eastward long before. France received the piece that turned out to matter. Over the following century Saint-Domingue produced revenue on a scale that is hard to state without sounding careless. By the 1780s the colony was worth more to France, in trade and customs receipts, than the thirteen British colonies of North America were worth to Britain. One third of one Caribbean island out-earned the eastern seaboard of a continent. That is the wealth the enslaved population created, and it is the wealth they carried out of the empire with them.

On 23 January 1745 a court in Orange County, Virginia convicted a woman named Eve of mixing poison into the milk of her owner, Peter Montague, who had languished four months before dying. The record calls the act feloniously and traitorously done, and she was burned at the stake. Virginia treated the killing of a master by a slave as a species of treason, on the model of the English rule under which a wife who killed her husband committed petit treason. Trial records from Virginia counties usually run to a few lines listing the accused, the charge and the outcome, so cases with this much detail are rare. Where a method is named it is almost always something put into food or drink, which is what European ideas about poisoning expected. In four trials between 1763 and 1798 the accused were said to have poisoned their owners while pretending to give them medicine.