"I am sure it isn't typhus, Doctor," Maurice mumbled, embarrassed.
"What is it then?" Parmentier smiled.
"Nerves."
"Nerves?" Sancho repeated, highly amused. "The thing old maids suffer?"
"This is something I haven't done since I was a boy, Doctor, but I haven't forgotten, and I suppose you haven't either. Don't you remember Le Cap?"
Parmentier saw the little boy Maurice had been at that time, raging with fever from being harassed by ghosts of the tortured men who walked through his house.
"I hope you're right," said Parmentier. "Your uncle Sancho told me what happened at the ball and the fight you had with your father."
"He insulted Rosette! He spoke of her as if she were a tramp," said Maurice.
"My brother-in-law is very angry, as is logical," Sancho interrupted. "Maurice has it in his head to marry Rosette. He not only means to defy his father but the entire world."
"All we ask is for everyone to leave us in peace, Uncle," said Maurice.
"No one will leave you in peace, because if you go ahead with your plan society will be endangered. Imagine the example you two will set. It would be like a hole in the dike. First a trickle and then a deluge that would destroy everything in its path."
"We would go far away, where no one knows us," Maurice insisted.
"Where? To live with Indians, covered with stinking skins and eating corn? I'd like to know how long love would last under those conditions!"
"You are very young, Maurice, you have your whole life ahead of you," the physician argued weakly.
"My life. Apparently that's the only thing that counts. And Rosette? Maybe her life doesn't count too? I love her, Doctor!"
"I understand you better than anyone, son. My lifetime companion, the mother of my three children, is a mulatta," Parmentier confessed.
"Yes, but she isn't your sister!" Sancho exclaimed.
"That doesn't matter," Maurice replied.
"Explain to him, Doctor, that defective children are born of such unions," Sancho insisted.
"Not always," the doctor murmured, thoughtful.
Maurice's mouth was dry, and again he felt his body burning. He closed his eyes, annoyed with himself for not being able to control his shivers, undoubtedly caused by his accursed imagination. He wasn't listening to his uncle; he had the sound of a roaring waterfall in his ears.
Parmentier interrupted the list of Sancho's arguments. "I think there is a way we can satisfy everyone, and for Maurice and Rosette to be together." He explained that very few people knew they were half siblings, and besides, it would not be the first time that something like that had happened. The masters' promiscuity with their slaves produced every kind of confused relationship, he added. No one knew absolutely what happened in the intimacy of a house, to say nothing of a plantation. The Creoles did not attach too much importance to love affairs among relatives of different races-not only among brother and sister but also father and daughter-as long as it wasn't aired in public. Whites with whites, on the other hand, was intolerable.
"Where are we going with this, Doctor?" asked Maurice.
"Placage. Think about it, son. You would treat Rosette the way you would a wife, and although you did not live with her openly you could visit her whenever you wanted. Rosette would be respected in her circles. Your position would not change, and that way you could protect her much better than if you were a pariah, and poor in addition, as you would be if you persist in marrying her."
"Brilliant, Doctor!" Sancho burst out before Maurice could open his mouth. "All we need is for Toulouse Valmorain to accept it."
In the following days, while Maurice fought what turned out to be typhus, definitively, Sancho tried to convince his brother-in-law of the advantages of placage for Maurice and Rosette. If previously Valmorain had been willing to finance the expenses of a girl he didn't know, there was no reason to refuse it to the only girl Maurice desired. Up to that point, Valmorain listened with lowered head, but attentive.
"Besides, she was brought up in the bosom of your family, and you can be sure that she's decent, refined, and well educated," Sancho added, but the minute he said it, he realized the error of reminding Valmorain that Rosette was his daughter: it was as if he had pinched him.
"I would rather see Maurice dead than keeping that strumpet!" he bellowed.
The Spaniard crossed himself automatically: that was tempting the devil.
"Pay no attention to me, Sancho, that slipped out without my thinking," his brother-in-law mumbled, also shaken by superstitious apprehension.
"Calm down, dear friend. Children always rebel, it's normal, but sooner or later they become reasonable," said Sancho, serving himself a cognac. "Your opposition merely strengthens Maurice's stubbornness. All you will do is drive him away."
"The one who's losing is him."
"Think it over. You are losing too. You aren't young anymore, and your health is failing. Who will look after you in your old age? Who will manage the plantation and your businesses when you can no longer do it? Who will look after Hortense and the girls?"
"You."
"Me?" and a happy laugh burst from Sancho. "I'm a rogue, Toulouse! You can see me becoming the pillar of the family? Not even God would wish that!"
"If Maurice betrays me you will have to help me, Sancho. You are my partner and my only friend."
"Please, don't frighten me."
"I think you're right. I must not fight Maurice face to face but be shrewd. The boy needs to cool down, think of his future, enjoy himself as befitting his age, and meet other women. That little cheat needs to disappear."
"How?" Sancho asked.
"There are ways."
"What ways?"
"For example, offer her a good sum to go away and leave my son alone. Money buys everything, Sancho, but if that doesn't work-well, we would take other measures."
"Don't count on me for anything like that!" said Sancho, alarmed. "Maurice would never forgive you."
"He wouldn't have to know."
"I would tell him. Precisely because I love you like a brother, Toulouse, I'm not going to let you do such an evil thing. You would regret it all your life," Sancho replied.
"Don't fret, my friend. I was joking. You know I'm not capable of killing a fly."
Valmorain's laugh sounded like a bark. Sancho left, worried, while his brother-in-law kept thinking about the placage. It seemed the most logical alternative, but to sponsor such a relationship between brother and sister was very dangerous. If it came to be known, his honor would be irreparably stained, and everyone would turn their backs on the Valmorains. How would they show themselves in public? He had to think about the future of his five daughters, his businesses, and his social position, just as Hortense had pointed out to him. He could not have imagined that Hortense herself had already circulated that news. Put in the position of choosing between saving her family's reputation, every Creole lady's first priority, or ruining her stepson's, Hortense ceded to the temptation of the second. If the matter had been in her hands, she herself would have married Maurice to Rosette, gladly, to destroy him. She didn't like the placage Sancho proposed because once their spirits cooled, as always happened over time, Maurice could exercise his rights as firstborn son without anyone's remembering his slip. People have bad memories. The only practical solution was for her stepson to be forever repudiated by his father. "Marry a quadroon? Perfect. Let him do it and live among blacks, as he deserves," she had commented to her sisters and friends, who in turn made it their business to repeat it.
In Love
Tete and Rosette had left the yellow house on Chartres the day after the embarrassing episode at the Cordon Bleu ball. Violette Boisier's fit of rage had quickly passed, and she forgave Rosette because she was always moved by thwarted love, but nevertheless she felt relieved when Tete announced that she did not want to abuse her hospitality any longer. It was better to put a little distance between them, she thought. Tete took her daughter to the boardinghouse where years ago the tutor Gaspard Severin had lived, while the little house Zacharie had bought two blocks from Adele was being remodeled. She continued to work with Violette as she always had, and started Rosette sewing with Adele, it was time for the girl to earn a living. She was powerless before the hurricane that had been unleashed. She inevitably had compassion for her daughter but could not get close enough to try to help her, Rosette had closed up like a mollusk. Rosette was not talking to anyone. She sewed in a hostile silence, waiting for Maurice with granite hardness, blind to the curiosity of others and deaf to the advice of the women around her: her mother, Violette, Loula, Adele, and a dozen nosy neighbors.