The life of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore provides a striking instance of the congruence of fathers, daughters, and slaves. After having been placed on the stage at age twelve, Desbordes-Valmore accompanied her financially strapped mother to Guadeloupe four years later. There Mme Desbordes either hoped to find work in the French colonial theater or to make contact with wealthy relatives. Marceline was thus abruptly separated from her father and siblings at a young age. The arrival of mother and daughter in Guadeloupe in 1802 coincided with the outbreak of both slave revolts and yellow fever, to which Mme Desbordes succumbed, leaving her bereft and motherless daughter forced to cross the Atlantic alone to rejoin her family. While in the French colonies, Marceline witnessed slavery. That she did so under the traumatic circumstances of slave uprisings undoubtedly explains the sensitivity to the plight of slaves that is evident in her writings. What is more, the early separation from her father, which coincided with her contact with Africans, may explain the association she makes between paternal figures and slaves, also torn away from their families and ancestral homes. although antoine-Félix Desbordes was by all accounts a pretentious and irresponsible man, Marceline loved him. As her biographer Francis Ambrière states, “no one ever felt more deeply than she the force of what in astrology is called the sun of the father”; “Marceline's whole life bears witness to her having nourished a veritable cult for her father”; and in her own words, “I loved my father like God himself.”