The Malmaison meeting comes one day too late to change anything

Vincent, carrying copies of the constitution, stopped in the United States and Spain and only reached Bonaparte at Josephine's house at Malmaison in October. Girard corrects the histories that make this the moment of decision, in which Bonaparte is said to have opted for war almost instantly in a fit of ill humour on hearing of the constitution. Bonaparte had given up on Louverture six months earlier, and he met Vincent one day after instructing the minister of the navy to begin active military preparations. Vincent nonetheless set out the case against invading. Five sixths of the white population had died or left, while Louverture could count on a large army, defensive works at every possible landing site, long experience of the terrain and strong ambush tactics, and his men could go a month without resupply. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard rejects the standard account that Bonaparte decided on war at Malmaison upon learning of the constitution, showing the order to prepare had gone out the previous day.

Sanite Belair, a young free woman from Verrettes, married Charles Belair in 1796 or 1797. He was Toussaint Louverture's nephew and aide de camp. In 1802 he took up arms against the Leclerc expedition from the heights of the Matheux, and held out there for more than two months. Sanite worked at pulling the scattered insurgent forces together and was said by some to be the soul of the conspiracy. Captured in a surprise attack at Corail Mirrault while her husband was away looking for ammunition, she was taken prisoner, and he surrendered rather than leave her. Dessalines, then serving the French, sent the pair to Leclerc with a letter accusing them. The court sentenced Charles to be shot and Sanite, on account of her sex, to be beheaded. On 5 October 1802 she demanded and was granted a soldier's death by firing squad, refused the blindfold, and could not be forced to the block.

Louverture had pressed Roume for months to authorise a takeover of the Spanish half of the island, accusing his neighbours of kidnapping black Dominguians and staging public demonstrations to manufacture outrage. When the Spanish governor investigated and gave assurances, Roume withdrew his earlier decree. Louverture then imprisoned the French agent and invaded anyway, on hearing that Paris was about to forbid it. Girard's finding concerns what did not happen next. The documents Louverture published to justify the invasion say nothing about the fate of Dominican slaves, and the proclamations he issued on the march promised to respect his neighbours' religion, lives and property. During the handover negotiations he complained that Dominican exiles were leaving with their slaves, on the ground that this stripped the territory of workers. He treats the silence of the record as the finding, since a governor eager to be seen abolishing slavery would have said so in print. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard says the record is far from clear that Louverture abolished slavery in Santo Domingo after invading, contradicting the common assertion that he did so at once.

On 2 February 1803 the Morning Post in London published Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint Louverture. Pierrot concedes that it has been read as an early example of British sympathy for the Haitian cause and argues that it carries the same ambivalence found across the period's writing. The sympathy arrives at the moment its object is languishing in a cell at the Fort de Joux, entirely without power. The poem urges the soldier to keep a cheerful brow in bondage and to take comfort in the thought that nature rather than humankind will remember him, and it replaces his troops and his actual friends with abstract emotions and natural elements. The mechanism is a sublime turn away from political nation toward self and race, which designates Toussaint a literary figure and strips him of any connection to a people.