Marie-Josèphe frees Halide

Marie-Josèphe frees Haleed by turning a private promise into a direct challenge to the ownership of a person: first in her own understanding of Haleed’s wishes, then in the face of Yves de la Croix’s claim that Haleed is family property. The emancipation is not a clean legal resolution. Its decisive change is personal and moral: Marie-Josèphe calls Haleed free and her sister, and refuses to let Yves’s refusal to sign papers undo that declaration.

The promise after Chartres

The conflict begins in the aftermath of the Duke of Chartres’s assault on Haleed. Rather than welcome Marie-Josèphe’s intervention, Haleed pushes her away and grieves for the future she believes has been taken from her. She had imagined that Chartres might make her pregnant, acknowledge the child, buy her, free her, and take her home. In her understanding, becoming his wife offered a route out of enslavement and toward Turkey; the fact that Chartres was already married did not, she says, matter in Haleed’s world as it did in Marie-Josèphe’s.

Marie-Josèphe responds that Chartres would not acknowledge Haleed or take her to Constantinople. She also admits the limits of her own power: if Chartres appealed to the King and the King banished Haleed, she could not prevent it. The reassurance she can offer instead is a promise to free her. This is a reversal in what the two women understand the immediate crisis to be. Marie-Josèphe has acted to stop Chartres; Haleed sees that intervention as having blocked the means by which she hoped to escape her enslaved status.

What Marie-Josèphe had misunderstood

Haleed explains that the mother superior had told her Marie-Josèphe would never grant her freedom and had refused to give her up. Marie-Josèphe is astonished but believes her. She recognizes that the sisters had presented slave-owning as a sin while intending that she sell Haleed and give the money to the convent. Marie-Josèphe had resisted selling her, but had not known what Haleed wanted: the sisters had not let her speak with Haleed, and she had feared that life elsewhere might be worse.

Haleed corrects that assumption. Life at the convent, she says, was not dreadful to her; she would rather embroider the nuns’ linen than wash Yves’s stockings. The contrast exposes how little Marie-Josèphe’s protective intentions had told her about Haleed’s experience. Marie-Josèphe’s tears carry several causes at once: shock at Chartres’s actions, relief at Haleed’s disclosure, and the painful recognition that her own experience of the convent had been terrible. Their histories are not interchangeable, even though Marie-Josèphe had used her own fears to imagine what Haleed might endure.

Haleed says she should not be a slave and will never be one except to Marie-Josèphe. Marie-Josèphe rejects even that qualification: Haleed will be a slave to no one, and the two will be sisters. The distinction matters to the scene’s resolution. Haleed’s attachment does not erase the unequal status between them; Marie-Josèphe’s answer makes freedom, rather than affectionate ownership, the basis of their bond.

Freedom contested

Marie-Josèphe does not treat her declaration as the end of the practical dispute. Having realized that she had trusted the Duke of Chartres, she hesitates over her judgment and decides to ask Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, how to proceed and what papers Haleed needs. Yet she insists that Haleed is free from that moment, before the paperwork is settled. The scene thus distinguishes the freedom Marie-Josèphe recognizes from the documents that might formally establish it.

Yves de la Croix’s arrival makes that distinction contentious. Haleed is composed enough to answer his question about where he will sit by telling him he can bring himself a chair. When he demands his place because he is hungry, she tells him her name is Haleed, not Odelette. He laughs at the name and suggests that she will next claim to have become a Muslim; she confirms that she has. Marie-Josèphe then tells him that she has freed Haleed and adopted her as their sister.

Yves objects that Haleed is their only possession of value and dismisses the emancipation as a whim. Marie-Josèphe answers that Haleed belonged to her and that she can free her if she wishes. Yves counters that Marie-Josèphe must wait five years, until she is of age. She refuses to withdraw the promise she has already given. He, in turn, says he will sign no papers and insists that they cannot live at court without a servant. His objections expose the practical resistance behind the family language: he treats Haleed’s labor and status as matters for the household to retain control over, while Marie-Josèphe treats her word to Haleed as binding.

Haleed’s self-emancipation

The confrontation continues over Haleed’s religious choice. Yves tells her to return to God; she refuses to take the veil. Then Haleed flings down a handful of louis d’or. The coins roll and bounce across the carpet, clatter onto the planks, and come to rest in a corner. Wearing a new, grand habit of midnight-blue silk, she declares that she will buy herself and can obtain more money if the coins are not enough. Her gesture answers Yves’s refusal in the terms of purchase he has invoked, but it also asserts that she will act for herself rather than wait for his permission.

Yves gathers up the coins and says he will consider her plea only after she corrects her religious errors. Marie-Josèphe snatches the money back and presses it into Haleed’s hands, identifying both the coins and Haleed’s freedom as hers. Yves storms out. The exchange does not show him signing the papers or accepting the decision; it shows Marie-Josèphe refusing to let his obstruction reverse it. Haleed’s liberation remains entangled with household authority and unresolved documentation, but its immediate outcome is clear: Marie-Josèphe keeps her promise, returns Haleed’s money to her, and recognizes her as a sister rather than a possession.