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music—but then, she did come from an exotic island. The family knew she was a real musician, wrote serious music.
    For years she lived quietly by herself, earning her living in a variety of ways. She copied music and even, on request, composed pieces for special occasions. She sang at the more respectable public feasts or festivals, always careful to refuse an invitation that might lower her status as a respectable woman. She drew and painted, in pastels and water colours, the picturesque scenes she lived among, and made studies of birds and animals. These pictures were sold from a printer’s shop in the town. She was never well off, but she was not poor either. Several times her journalsrecorded timely gifts of money from the Rostands, presumably at Rémy’s request.
    She was alone? Yes, always. She was not able to forget Rémy, and he did not forget her. Occasionally they wrote long letters. Three years after he was banished into the army in French Equatorial Africa, he came on leave, and visited her, but they were both so affected they decided never to meet again. He was already engaged to marry a girl from a suitable family.
    This romantic story, the reader has probably long ago decided, is hardly unusual. Beautiful young women without family support, and disadvantaged—in this case doubly, being both illegitimate and coloured—have this kind of history. In the rich parts of the world. In the poor countries of the Third World most particularly. Even in the Second World (but where is that?), poor and pretty girls match dreams to expectations, but with their hearts, not their heads.
    Julie’s head was far from weaker than her heart. As her journals show. And her self-portraits. And, not least, her music. While her unfortunately not unusual story unfolded itself, her mind remained—bad luck for her—above it all, as if Jane Austen were rewriting Jane Eyre , or Stendhal a novel by George Sand. An uncomfortable business, reading her journals, because one has to feel that it is bad enough she had to suffer all that pain and loneliness, without having to endure her own severe view of herself. She might have adored her lover Paul, and more than adored Rémy, but she often described these passions as if a busy physician were making notes about calamitous illnesses. Not that she dismissed these calamities as worthless or meaningless: on the contrary, she gave them all the weight and meaning they did have in her life.
    Five years after the loss of her lover Rémy, she was asked in marriage by a man of fifty, Philippe Angers, the master of the printing works where she sold her pictures. He was well-off, a widower with grown-up children. She liked him. She wrote that talking with him was the best thing in her life, after her music. He visited her in herown house, openly, his horse and sometimes his carriage left standing under the pines and turkey oaks where the cart track ended. She walked with him in a public garden at Belles Rivières. They spent the day together at a fête in Nice. This was his way of telling the world that he approved of Julie and her way of life, and proposed to take her on regardless of public opinion. But by now people were pleased that this vagabond and disturber of minds should be made harmless at last.
    She was writing, I like him so much, and everything about this proposition is sensible. Why then does it lack conviction ? She mused that the word conviction was an interesting one in this context. Paul had been convincing, and Rémy most certainly was. What did she mean by it, though?
    For a long sober year Julie and the master printer planned their marriage. His children met her and presumably approved. One of them was a farmer, Robert. She describes how Robert joined the printer and herself for a meal. I could love that one , she remarks. And he certainly could love me. When we looked at each other we knew it. That would have conviction, all right! But it doesn’t matter. He lives with his wife