Armand Aubigny’s mother was French. She and her “easy-going and indulgent” husband raised Armand in Paris, where an interracial marriage was, it seems, socially possible in the first half of the nineteenth century, in part because slavery as it was known in rural Louisiana did not exist in mainland France. And the description of L’Abri, Armand’s house, in the sixth paragraph carries overtones of trouble to come.