You were made to rule the world.

—Chateaubriand to Mme de Duras

In 1786 the chevalier de Boufflers, then
governor of Senegal, brought back for his aunt, the princesse de Beauvau, a
black girl called Ourika, some two years old, who was going to be put on a
slave ship. He made presents of other small black children, along with
parakeets and monkeys, to various members of the French aristocracy. Mme de Beauvau later claimed to have loved
her protégée as her own daughter, but the girl died when only about sixteen.

On a few facts like these, Mme de Duras
(1777–1828)—one of the prominent influential political figures of the
Bourbon Restoration—constructed her delicate and moving tale, Ourika,
the great bestseller of 1823–24. Goethe much preferred it to the novels
of Sir Walter Scott. Talleyrand told her he
was lost in admiration for
her art. Mme
de Duras moved in the highest aristocratic circles close to
those of Mme de Beauvau. An intimate friend of the author’s, Mme
de La
Tour du Pin (who had been a lady-
in-waiting to Queen Marie-Antoinette
and who in the 1790s was reduced to farming near Albany with slaves)
recalled in her memoirs how as a girl she had disliked having the
original Ourika place “ebony” arms around her own “white” neck to please
Mme de Beauvau.

In Mme de Duras’s story, Ourika,
well-educated and accomplished, at first appears thoroughly at ease. However,
she overhears a conversation