At Fort de Joux, Toussaint dictates and corrects his memoir

Girard fixes the composition window precisely. Toussaint arrived at Fort de Joux on 24 August 1802 and asked for writing materials at once; the prison commander Baille supplied them against instructions. Within two months the prisoner wrote eight letters in his own hand, the most intense period of writing in his life. The memoir was produced between his arrival and 17 September, when Caffarelli came from Paris for a series of interviews and took the text away with him. Girard identifies four manuscripts: two secretarial drafts, a copy in Toussaint's own hand of twenty-one pages in small script, and a fair copy signed for the First Consul. Caffarelli's report shows the text was dictated to Jeannin, a clerk of the Pontarlier prefecture, who acted only as a copyist while Toussaint reread and corrected.

A few days before the battle of Crete-a-Pierrot, Dessalines was at Petite-Riviere de l'Artibonite where French residents were being killed in reprisal. Two young Frenchmen ran to Claire Heureuse and begged for their lives. She told them to hide under a bed and went to receive her husband, who came in from the field with Bazelais, Laurette, Lamartiniere and Lafortune. A sneeze from the next room gave the men away. One was cut down at once. Claire Heureuse went on her knees, called on the other officers to help her, and told her husband that the survivor was a doctor who might be useful to him one day. She held on to his tunic and let herself be dragged the length of the room until he gave way. The man was Michel Etienne Descourtilz, who later published his Voyage d'un naturaliste and an eight volume flora of the Antilles, and who admitted in print that he owed his life to her.

Bonaparte persuaded Spain to return Louisiana under the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800, with the transfer taking effect in 1802. Girard insists the purpose was economic rather than strategic. French colonies produced coffee, sugar, cotton and indigo but no wheat, so they bought flour, timber and dried cod from American merchants on terms French officials considered extortionate. General Claude Victor, who was to command the garrison for Louisiana, argued that supplying the colonies without foreign help would be an immense advantage. The result would have been a self sufficient empire running from Louisiana to Guyane. Three expeditions were fitted out in 1802, Leclerc with twenty thousand men for Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo, Richepance with thirty five hundred for Guadeloupe, and Victor with three thousand for Louisiana, though the last sat in Flushing and Dunkirk for want of troops and transports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard reads the Louisiana retrocession as a food supply scheme for the sugar colonies, against readings that make it a strategic threat to the United States.

Citing the nineteenth century historian Thomas Madiou, Le Glaunec fixes the opening of hostilities against the French expedition to the evening of 4 February 1802, when Fort Picolet fired a cannonball at the arriving squadron and by doing so gave the signal that fighting had begun. The same fort closes the story. From its walls the last surviving French soldiers and the fighters of the indigenous army exchanged their final words and looks during the evacuation of the city, which the author dates to eleven days after the Battle of Vertieres. Picolet therefore brackets the whole war of independence in the north, opening it in February 1802 and witnessing its end in late November 1803. The author notes that the Atlantic below the fort is the same water that carried enslaved Africans to the colony in the eighteenth century and then carried Bonaparte's troops.