Martinique

Martinique is the remembered home that frames Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s passage into French court life. It is associated with her convent schooling, her family’s practical knowledge, and the limited access to goods and news described in her recollections. The island also connects her to the Marquise de Maintenon, who had likewise come to France from Martinique with nothing. Yet Martinique is more than a point of departure: late in the novel, Marie-Josèphe’s understanding of her family’s past is altered by what Haleed tells her about their shared father and Haleed’s mother.

A place of origin and education

Marie-Josèphe comes to France straight from a convent school on Martinique. At twenty, she is too old to enter the Marquise de Maintenon’s school at Saint-Cyr as a student, but the Marquise gives her a position teaching arithmetic to younger girls. The appointment establishes a practical link between Marie-Josèphe’s prior education and her new life in France: her learning gives her a role, even when the school’s age limits exclude her from its ordinary student body.

The Marquise’s own connection to Martinique makes this welcome more than a formal act of patronage. She speaks to the girls in her care about her experiences in the New World and the hardships she endured there. She presents religious devotion and obedience as the path by which impoverished girls of high birth might receive dowries from the King and leave their circumstances. Marie-Josèphe recognizes a point of likeness in their histories: both women came to France from Martinique with nothing. Their shared origin helps explain why the Marquise had treated her kindly, while the different positions they later occupy show how dramatically their circumstances have changed.

Distance, travel, and scarcity

Martinique remains present in Marie-Josèphe’s conversations after she reaches France. When Yves de la Croix returns from a sea-monster hunt, she tells him she wishes she had accompanied him and seen the creatures in the wild. He recalls the cold, wet misery of the voyage and the hurricanes that nearly sank the ship; on a warship, he says, a woman would have been blamed as readily as the sea monster. Marie-Josèphe rejects the superstition, remembering her own voyage from Martinique as uncomfortable but exhilarating. The exchange sets her desire for discovery against the dangers and gendered restrictions of travel.

The distance between Martinique and the French court is also social and material. Marie-Josèphe describes how those at Fort-de-France waited for each ship entering the harbor to bring news. Officers were of little help, while passengers might report what was fashionable in Paris the previous season. This delayed, fragmentary information stands in contrast to the court’s close attention to fashion and ceremony. It also gives a concrete measure of the remoteness Yves names when he contrasts Martinique with France: news from the center arrives late, and even then only through travelers.

Food supplies another measure of difference. At court, Marie-Josèphe encounters pears and peaches, fruits she had not tasted before coming to France. Apples, pears, and peaches did not grow well in Martinique, and most fields there were given over to sugar cane. The contrast is not simply between unfamiliar and familiar tastes: it points to the crops that shaped the island’s agriculture and to the new abundance she meets at court. Her childhood memories also include molasses distilled by her father into rum. She and Yves tried drinking it once, then used it to preserve specimens; later, Marie-Josèphe distilled it again for Yves’s work. A product of the island’s sugar cultivation thus connects family knowledge to the scientific practices she continues in France.

Belonging and an unsettled family past

Martinique’s emotional pull persists even after Marie-Josèphe becomes part of court life. When Yves asks whether she is glad the King has called her to Versailles and whether she is sorry to leave Fort-de-France, she begins to answer but does not finish. The interrupted reply leaves her attachment unresolved: France offers opportunity and a new place in the world, while the question of leaving her former home remains difficult to settle in a simple declaration.

A later conversation with Haleed gives that attachment a more painful dimension. When Marie-Josèphe fears that Haleed may be forced into a marriage in Turkey, Haleed challenges her comparison with France and asks how the situation differs from Martinique. She then tells Marie-Josèphe that they are sisters: their shared father had owned Haleed’s mother and exercised power over her without regard for her wishes. Marie-Josèphe had not understood this family relationship; the revelation leaves her pale and unable to answer. The scene makes Martinique the setting of a concealed history of enslavement and abuse within the family, not merely the home Marie-Josèphe remembers with longing. Her image of the place must now accommodate both her childhood ties and the harm that shaped Haleed’s life.

Narrative significance

The novel gives Martinique meaning through details Marie-Josèphe carries into new settings: the harbor awaiting ships, the scarcity of familiar fruit, the sugar fields, and the rum made from molasses. These recollections make her movement through the French court legible as a passage between distinct material and social worlds. They also show that adaptation does not erase origin: her knowledge from Martinique remains useful in her work, even as she learns customs and tastes unavailable to her there.

At the same time, Martinique is not presented only through Marie-Josèphe’s homesick memories. The late disclosure to Haleed unsettles the comforting idea of shared origin by revealing the unequal and coercive history beneath their kinship. The place therefore gathers together possibility and deprivation, education and exclusion, family connection and concealed violence. Its significance lies in this doubleness: France may be the scene of Marie-Josèphe’s advancement, but understanding what she has left behind—and what she did not know about it—continues to change how she understands herself.