Segments 5, 6 Summary

As a young woman, the narrator was truly beautiful. Because of her early family life she is able to become anything anyone wants her to be; this is not merely an act—the narrator believes herself to be what she pretends to be. At the time, she understood colonial life and its inequality. She understood the toll colonial life often took on the wives of the colonial potentates. Their wives would age and be abandoned in the colony. Younger white mistresses would be arranged for in France. Younger colonial mistresses would be arranged for by convenience. The wives would slowly go mad as they waited ditching—the narrator refers to this situation of self-betrayal of women as the law of error. Hélène Lagonelle escaped entirely this law of error.

The narrator never had dresses of her own. Instead, she...