His new wife, jealous and vindictive Hortense, makes life unbearable for both Zarité and Maurice, who is sent to school in Boston.

Valmorain relocates to Louisiana, where Eugenia’s brother has purchased him land. In return Valmorain promises to free Zarité, who stays with him, she thinks temporarily, for the children’s sake. When the rebels destroy Valmorain’s plantation, Gambo and Zarité help him escape. Actually Rosette’s father is Gambo, a slave who has joined the rebels and become a lieutenant to the legendary Toussaint Louverture. When Zarité’s daughter is born, Valmorain assumes the child Rosette is his and allows her to remain in the household as Maurice’s playmate. She also submits to sexual relations with Valmorain whenever he wants. Zarité, who is devoted to pathetic Eugenia until her early death, lovingly raises baby Maurice and runs the household with great competence. Eugenia bears Valmorain one legitimate heir before she descends into madness. Barely into puberty, Zarité is raped by Valmorain, who gives the resulting son to Violette and her French army officer husband to raise as their own.

He buys the child Zarité to be his new Spanish wife Eugenia’s maidservant and has her trained by the mulatto courtesan Violette Boisier, whose charisma could carry a book on its own. In 1770, Toulouse Valmorain arrives in Haiti from France to take over his dying father’s plantation. Given recent events, the timing couldn’t be better for this historical fiction from Allende ( The Sum of Our Days, 2008, etc.), which follows a slave/concubine from Haiti during the slave uprisings to New Orleans in time for the Louisiana Purchase.

Island beneath the sea book