From Publishers Weekly
Readers unfamiliar with the previous books in Bell's Haitian rebellion trilogy might feel like latecomers to an intense, raucous party in the first hundred pages of this final installment. Multiple characters and backstories form a somewhat opaque context for the events of 1802, when a French army commanded by Napoleon's brother-in-law, Leclerc, landed in Haiti (then called Saint Domingue) in an attempt to overthrow Toussaint's government and gradually restore slavery. The book moves from the burning of the town of Cap Francais—ordered by one of Toussaint's generals, Christophe, in response to Leclerc's demand to submit—to the war in the Haitian countryside, ending with Toussaint's unexpected surrender and his betrayal by Leclerc and Touissant's black generals Dessalines, Christophe and Maurepas. With a panoramic vision of battle reminiscent of Shelby Foote, Bell recreates the devastating counterstrokes the black generals devised against the French at Ravine à Couleuvre and La Crête à Pierrot. Through it all, he retains as a narrative anchor Doctor Hébert, who operates in both the worlds of the blanc and the nèg. Bell intercuts scenes of the war in Haiti with Toussaint's terrible last days in a French jail in the Jura Mountains. This lends an air of unbearable pathos to this tangled, tragic history. In exploring the line between atrocity and liberation, Bell's novel is unexpectedly and powerfully relevant to our times. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
For a couple of shining years -- a benign sliver excised from the slab of 19th-century Western history -- blacks and whites shared civil rights, if not outright equality. By 1801, the Haitian slave revolt of 1791 had evolved from a campaign of brutality and vengeance into a movement that absorbed much of the inclusive, egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution.The bloody uprising of 500,000 black slaves against 60,000 white masters -- a successful rebellion on what was then called Saint Domingue, the western end of the island of Hispaniola -- wiped away the presence of the British and Spanish invaders. The Haitian slave revolt, as it came to be called, also effectively diminished the power of the island's ruling class, the French blancs, who were stripped of land and the wealth (created, as it was, by slaves) wrung from coffee and spice crops. It was French whites whose families had been brutalized as repayment for 100 years of kidnapping and enslavement. And, in one of history's rare moments of genuine irony, it was they whom Toussaint Louverture, leader of the rebellion and then of Saint Domingue, invited back, after the rebellion, to run the plantations and industries that could make the country strong. Motivated by the spirited dispatch of the French ancien regime, the strong leadership of Napoleon, and sheer pragmatism, Toussaint (as he was called) envisioned -- and briefly achieved -- a Saint Domingue with no slavery, with people of many and mixed races, and with a fealty to Napoleon, whom Toussaint admired. But by 1803 -- a mere two years later -- Toussaint and his hope for a liberated, prosperous homeland were gone. Toussaint's faith was also shaken by his traitorous black generals, who, after his capture and imprisonment by the French, won the country's independence by wiping the blancs off the face of the island to prevent them from retaking it. Toussaint would languish and die a prisoner in a fort in France, the victim of a failed military campaign concocted by Napoleon and led by his brother-in-law, LeClerc, to restore slavery and a maximum flow of cash crops from the island to the Continent. Given that the two subsequent centuries of Haitian self-rule have resulted in despotism and the direst poverty in the hemisphere, Toussaint's enlightened plans are ripe for the retelling, as is the story of the only successful slave revolt in the West's malignant history of converting humans into chattel. For the past nine years, Madison Smartt Bell has taken on the task of channeling it all into historical fiction. A chronicler of racial disharmony and disaffected drifters and searchers (Ten Indians, Anything Goes, Save Me, Joe Louis, among others), Bell has carved out a place in American letters by draping flesh and wounds on the myth of Toussaint, while conjuring up a fictional cast that aptly portrays the complex racial and interpersonal issues swirling around those caught up in a maelstrom of change. The Stone That the Builder Refused, the final installment of a trilogy, ends the saga with a whimper of pathos, as Toussaint's dream is overtaken by the brutality that has come to define Haiti. As in his previous two Haiti novels -- All Souls' Rising (published in 1995 and a nominee for the National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards) and Master of the Crossroads (2000) -- Bell's latest book is a long and winding road of intertwined lives, shifting loyalties, battlefield bloodbaths, tropical diseases, forbidden trysts and constantly moving scenery. Bell's immersion in the world he creates -- so complete that he includes a chronology, a glossary of Creole and French terms, genuine correspondence between Toussaint and Napoleon and others (in the original French, no less) and a preface that serves as an historical primer -- has an osmotic effect. His trenchant understanding of Haiti's one-of-a-kind history, the shadowiness of its spirit world, the unspeakable rigors of battle and the strength of those who survive get under one's skin. While hardly a page-turner -- the narrative's breadth and languorous pacing won't allow it to be -- The Stone That the Builder Refused carries us along. Much of that momentum comes from Bell's reprisal of the best characters from the first two books. Besides Toussaint -- a small, pensive man with a surprising strength that can break large armies as well as the wildest of horses -- Bell returns Riau, a black man and occasional narrator who has a penchant for keeping an ear to the ground and his loyalties open. (It's hardly surprising, given his survival instinct, that Riau delivers the book's postscript.) Bell's thoughtful white protagonist, Antoine Hebert, is a physician who offers a faint mirror image of the battle-weary Toussaint and serves as a bridge between the black and white worlds. Hebert faithfully tends to the injured in Toussaint's army yet lives among the plantation owners and white families who head Saint Domingue's society. Like Toussaint, he believes in the equality of men but is powerless to do much more than observe man's inhumanity to man and care for those close to him. Other whites, including Hebert's sister Elise and her friend Isabelle, are drawn skillfully to show how the islanders' shifting views of race can carry dire consequences. Fearing deportation and ostracism because of their dalliances with black men, the two women go to extremes to hide their pregnancies, with scandalous results. The book's one flaw is that the majority of it is given over to the tales of whites. Riau and Toussaint are the only well-developed black characters here, while Hebert, Elise, Isabelle, four French captains and a handful of other whites receive fuller treatment. Nonetheless, Bell compels our interest by straightforwardly examining the spirit of freedom embodied by Toussaint and the blacks and whites who entertained his notion of it. Without the use of literary gimmicks -- he doesn't rely on magical realism or lyrical pyrotechnics wrought from the island's fascination with spirits and fate -- the author artfully takes us to the end of a fascinating journey. Summing it all up, Riau says, "There is more of what we don't see than what we do." But for most of a decade, Bell has dared to show us as much as he can, in often astonishing and brutal detail. It's hard to imagine that anyone could have chronicled Haiti and the travails of Toussaint with an eye more unblinking or with a hand so steady. Reviewed by Michael Anft Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
In two previous books, Bell introduced Toussaint and charted the bloody events that gave birth to a nation. The Stone continues this saga. More than one critic compared the historical novel’s dramatic battle scenes and impressive historical sweep to War and Peace. Though long, the sheer energy and humanity of the characters (both real and fictional), not to mention the novel’s relevance to atrocities today, propel the narrative forward. Appendices, including a chronology of events, Creole glossary, and real correspondence between Toussaint and Napoleon, round out the backstory. You may need some knowledge of Haiti’s violent history to grasp each detail. Still, critics unanimously praise The Stone as "a spectacular achievement" (Miami Herald). Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
"All France has come against me," says Toussaint Louverture when he spies an array of French warships off the coast of Saint Domingue in late 1801. So begins the prodigious, breathtaking final novel in Bell's magnificent trilogy about Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution. Over the course of three novels--All Souls' Rising (1995), The Master of the Crossroads (2000), and this epic tale--Bell has dramatized every facet of the slave revolt in the French colony and strategic and messianic Toussaint's emergence as a brilliant if chimerical leader. As he adroitly fictionalizes Toussaint's final treacherous, brutal battles with the French--confrontations made all the more painful because of his reverence for the credo of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and brotherhood--Bell weaves a great web of covert actions, love affairs, betrayals, massacres, miraculous rescues, and otherworldly interventions. Protean Toussaint seems to be everywhere at once yet nowhere to be found, even as interleaving chapters look ahead to his cruel imprisonment in a frigid cell in the French Alps. Indelible characters both historical and invented who have fought, loved, raged, and prayed their way across the previous novels' equally suspenseful, bloody, lusty, darkly humorous, and gorgeously textured pages return and are joined by new players, most notably Toussaint's sons. Bell's commitment to telling the whole true story of the world's only successful slave revolution is an act of sustained scholarship, empathy, and imagination, and his trilogy will stand as a deeply moving work of art. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Following the widely acclaimed All Souls' Rising and Master of the Crossroads, Madison Smartt Bell gives us the climactic final chapter in the life of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the only successful slave revolution in history.

In 1791, what would become known as the Haitian Revolution began as a rebellion of African slaves against their white masters in the French colony of Saint Domingue. By 1793 Toussaint had emerged as the leader of the revolt, proving himself to be as adept at politics as he was on the battlefield. By 1801 he had succeeded in stabilizing the war-ravaged territory and invited exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return and reclaim their properties. The foundation of a society based on liberty, genuine equality, and brotherhood among whites, blacks, and mulattos seemed in place. But the proclamation of a new constitution that abolished slavery and appointed Toussaint governor for life incited Napoleon to dispatch troops in order to reestablish control over the island.

The Stone That the Builder Refused spans the final phase of Toussaint's career and paints an astonish-ingly detailed and riveting portrait of a new society breaking forth from the chrysalis of a revolution, of the vision that impelled Toussaint to create a society based on principle and idealism, and of the dreadful compromises he was forced to make in order to
preserve it.

A masterly weave of the factual and the imagined, this grand culmination of Bell's landmark Toussaint Louverture trilogy stands alone as a towering achievement of historical fiction.

From the Inside Flap
Following the widely acclaimed All Souls’ Rising and Master of the Crossroads, Madison Smartt Bell gives us the climactic final chapter in the life of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the only successful slave revolution in history.

In 1791, what would become known as the Haitian Revolution began as a rebellion of African slaves against their white masters in the French colony of Saint Domingue. By 1793 Toussaint had emerged as the leader of the revolt, proving himself to be as adept at politics as he was on the battlefield. By 1801 he had succeeded in stabilizing the war-ravaged territory and invited exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return and reclaim their properties. The foundation of a society based on liberty, genuine equality, and brotherhood among whites, blacks, and mulattos seemed in place. But the proclamation of a new constitution that abolished slavery and appointed Toussaint governor for life incited Napoleon to dispatch troops in order to reestablish control over the island.

The Stone That the Builder Refused spans the final phase of Toussaint’s career and paints an astonish-ingly detailed and riveting portrait of a new society breaking forth from the chrysalis of a revolution, of the vision that impelled Toussaint to create a society based on principle and idealism, and of the dreadful compromises he was forced to make in order to
preserve it.

A masterly weave of the factual and the imagined, this grand culmination of Bell’s landmark Toussaint Louverture trilogy stands alone as a towering achievement of historical fiction.

About the Author
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of thirteen previous works of fiction, including Soldier’s Joy and Anything Goes. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

All Souls’ Rising and Master of the Crossroads are available in paperback from Vintage Books

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
James Howarth, captain of the Merry Bell, rolled sideways to the edge of his hospital cot and heaved black bile into the gourd coui which Zabeth held trembling beneath his wide-strained jaws. Doctor Hébert leaned forward to steady her, a hand on her spine. When Captain Howarth had done vomiting and collapsed onto the cot, the doctor took the stinking gourd from his unsteady hands.

“Give him the tea,” he told her, leaning to wipe a thread of the bloody vomit from the patient’s chin. Zabeth rose, her head lowered, and walked out into the hospital courtyard, where the infusion simmered over a charcoal brazier. The doctor watched her with a mild dissatisfaction. Her legs moved jerkily, stiff from fear. Zabeth was an excellent nurse for almost any illness, but not for mal de Siam, the yellow fever.

He carried the gourd out of the hospital enclosure and emptied it into the ravine behind the wall. Used for the dumping of various ordures, the ravine was slightly fetid, especially in this season, when rainfall was thin. Bad air. It was a fault in the location of the hospital, though otherwise the place was good, high on a generally windswept slope at the upper edge of the town of Cap Français. In this still weather, though, the ravine bred mosquitoes. Irritably the doctor pinched one from the hollow of his throat, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together till the blood splotch came away in brownish crumbs.

When he returned to the hospital gate, he saw with relief that Guiaou was just coming in, accompanied by the three women he’d brought to help him through the night. Guiaou had lately been promoted corporal in the honor guard of Governor-General Toussaint Louverture, but he was willing to spend many of his off-duty hours tending the hospital in order to earn something extra for his family. Doctor Hébert had trained him as an assistant on various battlefields of the recent wars and had a perfect confidence in him. There was no disease that gave him pause; Guiaou feared nothing except water.

The doctor glanced once more into the dormitory. Captain Howarth lay quiescent, flanked by three of his crewmen and the second officer of the Merry Bell. They’d all fallen ill the day after the trading packet moored in the Le Cap harbor, following a zigzag voyage up the Windward Islands from the South American continent and the Orinoco River. Two of the crew were barely breathing; the doctor doubted they would last the night.

He beckoned to Zabeth and led her from the hospital. Guiaou appeared to bolt the gate behind them. The doctor reached through the bars and touched the back of Guiaou’s hand; the two of them exchanged a glance and a nod. It was not the first death watch he’d shared with Guiaou, but somehow he was particularly grateful to be relieved of this one.

He walked down the sloping street from the hospital, stealing the odd glance at Zabeth, who came a pace or two behind. Don’t be afraid, he wanted to tell her. He had already told her that. About ten years earlier, when still in her teens, Zabeth had survived a bout of yellow fever, the same that had killed among others the doctor’s brother-in-law Martin Thibodet. Zabeth had nearly died herself—as had the doctor when his turn to take the fever came a couple of years later. But those few who lived would not fall prey to the same disease again; it was not like malaria, which revisited its sufferers often enough. The doctor was sure of that and that alone. It was almost all he understood of la fièvre jaune, but his own experience proved it well enough. He had announced the point to Zabeth several times and explained that her survival and immunity was the exact reason he had chosen her to nurse these men.

The explanation had not reassured her. However, the further they got from the hospital, the more her hips and back and shoulders relaxed, until she had resumed that smoothly flowing, floating gait, so beautiful in the black and colored women of the colony. Glancing back at her, the doctor thought with a slight pang of his own wife. But he had sent her with the children over the mountains to Ennery, the moment he’d recognized these sailors’ fever for what it was.

“M’ap rantré,” Zabeth said. I’m going in. She paused on the corner of the street which led in the direction of the house the doctor was currently sharing with his sister, Elise.

“Tell my sister I will be there within the hour,” Doctor Hébert said. Picking up his pace, he went on down the hill, turning his face into the breeze that blew back from the harbor. He emerged on the waterfront near the customs house, which was just shutting its doors for the night. Beyond the shelter of the buildings the wind was stiff indeed; he took off his hat and held it fluttering in his hand as he walked into the wind down toward the battery of the Carénage. The wind whipped his few remaining strands of hair around his bare sun-freckled crown, and stuffed wisps of his beard, which wanted trimming, into the corners of his mouth. He continued until he came to the fountain at the end of the esplanade, then stopped and turned to face the wide oblong of the harbor.

Black mouths of cannon poked from the embrasures of the Carénage battery, aimed fanwise across the water. The Merry Bell was moored far out, beyond the reef, the colors of the North American Republic just discernible to the naked eye. She had already exchanged her cargo, but would not put to sea without her captain. Doctor Hébert had ordered the ship quarantined as soon as he’d remarked the yellow fever. His close relationship to Toussaint Louverture gave him the power to enforce such measures, though he had no official function in the port.

By irony, the Merry Bell had brought him out of South America a substantial shipment of cinchona bark. At first the doctor had taken it for Providence, when the men from the ship began to fall ill, and had so informed James Howarth. The bitter brew of cinchona bark was almost magically effective against malaria in the early stage. He’d begun the treatment straight away, but a day or so later, when his patients suddenly turned yellow, he’d known it to be useless. Therefore he had substituted herbe à pique, an herb he’d learned long ago from Toussaint to be effective in many fevers. It too was useless against la fièvre jaune but could be harvested locally, unlike the precious cinchona. It was necessary to give the sick men something to shield them from despair.

Then the black vomiting had begun. Such was always the course of the yellow fever. A man would reduce his bulk by half before he died, in three days or two or sometimes one. Or if he lived. The difference lay in the will to live and the grace of God.

Above Fort Picolet, a great frigate bird was wheeling against the rapidly paling sky. The doctor’s spirits lifted when he saw it. It was rare to see one of these huge birds so close to land, and somehow it felt to him like a good omen. Then a huge wave slapped against the pilings, showering him with spray, and he let the dousing chase his frustration with the fever from his mind. Turning his back to the wind, he walked back in the direction he had come, whitecaps hurrying behind him over the water.

When he reached the townhouse he shared with his sister, he found her in the company of her bosom friend, Isabelle Cigny. No surprise, for her own house was just around the corner. Till recently, both he and Elise had used the Cigny residence as their base when in Le Cap. But two months ago, Elise, who enjoyed a considerable inheritance from her late husband Thibodet, had purchased the present house at a very advantageous price; it had been left vacant by the demise of one of the colored gentlemen who had for a season ruled the town, but had then been so unwise as to mount a rebellion against Toussaint Louverture and his overwhelming black armies.

Isabelle turned her bright black eyes on the doctor the moment he walked in. “What news?” she cried, flirting her skirts around her hips as she rose and resettled herself. The doctor smiled on her; he and Isabelle had been friends for most of a decade, but her coquettry was automatic.

“The men from the Merry Bell are like to die, I think, by morning,” he advised her, dropping his weight into a wooden chair in a corner of the half-furnished room. “Except the captain—he may live. I hope so, for I rather liked him.”

“I share your wish, of course,” said Isabelle, and tapped her slippered foot in token of impatience. “But what interests me more is news of the port.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, turning toward Zabeth, who had just entered the room with a tray bearing a concoction of rum, lime juice, and sugar, and a letter from his son Paul at Ennery. He took the drink and smoothed the letter on his knee.

“No news,” he said. “You must not worry.”

“It has been weeks!” Isabelle protested.

“Yes,” Elise put in. “But you know Xavier. His routes are ever indirect.” It was the sort of thing she would normally say with fondness, but tonight there seemed a bitter flavor to it. Isabelle had noticed it too, the doctor thought, for at once she dropped her own subject and began to chatter of fabric for curtains and the possibility of imported paper for the walls.

It was the new prosperity—new security really—that had moved Isabelle to send for her children, who had these last few years been sheltered from the turbulence of Saint Domingue in a boarding school at Philadelphia. But Isabelle’s husband was not free to fetch them, and for some reason she had not elected to make the voyage herself. Xavier Tocquet, who was Elise’s current husband, had volunteered to escort the children. It appeared that he had some business with certain Philadelphia factors, whose nature was not yet precisely known.

The doctor took a long pull at his rum, then broke the seal of his letter and unfolded it. His eldest, Paul, was eight years old. His formal education had been scattershot thus far. Sessions with the village priest at Ennery. There was a regular school here in Le Cap, but his attendance was sporadic since he was often absent in the country. The doctor supervised him intermittently, as he had time. His mother, Nanon, could read reasonably well but her writing ability was negligible. However, it had been her idea that Paul must write and send a weekly letter to his father whenever they were parted.

The boy’s penmanship was passable, his spelling insecure. He conveyed the news in a sufficiently engaging manner. Their trip over the mountains had passed easily. They’d arrived at Ennery with a great supply of cassava and fruit collected along the way. Paul had reconnected with his great friend Caco, a black boy a couple of years older who lived on the plantation at Ennery. But Caco, because of the new work codes lately issued by Toussaint, was obliged to devote part of his time to either the cane fields or the coffee. Paul had followed him for a day or so. He found both occupations disagreeable, the coffee somewhat less so. There was to be a bamboche on Saturday, with pigs killed for the boucan. Paul’s younger twin siblings were well. Likewise his mother and his cousin Sophie, Elise’s child. Paul sent his kisses to his honorable father . . .

“A good report of the twins,” the doctor said, passing the letter to Isabelle, “if not especially detailed.”

Isabelle snapped the letter open on her crossed knee and scanned it rapidly for the mention of François and Gabriel, relaxing percep- tibly when she had found their names. Elise cocked an eyebrow at her, but she did not seem to notice. The doctor sipped his rum. When Isabelle had read the whole letter through, she leaned to give it back to him.

“He writes appealingly, your boy.”

The doctor nodded as he swallowed. “And never mind the spelling.”

Zabeth came in, bearing Elise’s year-old baby, asleep on her full bosom. She passed the infant Mireille to her mother, who accepted the bundle absently. Zabeth turned toward the doctor’s empty glass.

“I’ll just come with you,” he said, standing up to follow her from the room.

Zabeth’s own infant slept in a basket in the pantry at the rear of the house. While Zabeth prepared his second drink, the doctor stooped to peer at him. The child was vigorously healthy, substantially bigger and more robust than his nursing partner. The father was dead, executed by Toussaint the previous fall for some military infraction. Because the two babies were roughly of an age, Elise had turned her own over to Zabeth to wet-nurse. By virtue of Zabeth’s excursions to the hospital, the babies were beginning to be weaned.

“What time is supper?” he inquired, rising to accept the freshened glass.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Zabeth said, mildly flustered. “Madame said she will go out, and perhaps you with her? But I will speak to the cook, what will you take? There is either fish or chicken.”

“Chicken,” the doctor said. When he returned to the parlor, Isabelle was standing to make her farewells. She teased the baby’s chin with a fingernail, exchanged a maternal glance with Elise, kissed the doctor on both cheeks, and then went out.

“Now then,” Elise said, giving him a measuring glance. “Your beard is a bit bedraggled, sir.”

The doctor took a great gulp of his drink. “It’s hardly worth troubling a barber with the few hairs which remain on my head,” he said.

“Perhaps you’re right,” his sister returned. “But just you come with me.”

In her boudoir, Elise laid the baby on the bed and hemmed her in with cushions. Mireille mewed and smacked her lips, but did not wake. Elise motioned the doctor to a chair by the french doors onto the balcony—there was still enough light in the sky to see clearly there.

“Now then.” She extracted a small pair of scissors from an enameled necessary box. “Be still.” For a moment she clipped in silence. Then—“I wish you would excuse Zabeth from the hospital.”

“Well, if you—”

“Don’t talk—I’ll nick you if you wag your jaw.” She flashed the scissors. “Mireille is restless in the daytime when Zabeth is gone. And Zabeth is so fearful of the fever, no matter what you say. You know it upset her terribly when Toussaint ordered Bouquart to shoot himself. Here, turn your head this way. This way . . . Perhaps they ought to go to Ennery with the other children.”

“Oh indeed, if you think it best . . .” the doctor began. This had been his own original suggestion, when the yellow fever first appeared among the crew of the Merry Bell, but Elise had not wanted to be parted from Mireille. “And would you go with them, then?”

Elise drew back to study him, scissors poised. “You are presentable,” she declared. She put the scissors away in the box, and went to her dressing table to light the two candles either side of the mirror, for the room was rapidly growing dim.

“No, I don’t think I will go to Ennery just now,” she said. “Not when I expect my husband hourly into port.” The wry expression accompanying those last words brought out faint wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, which the doctor could see in the reflection. Elise must have noticed them too. She brushed at them with powder.

“You’re going out, I gather.” The doctor touched a fingertip to the shortened hairs of his beard.

“The soirée at Government House,” Elise said, catching his eye in the mirror. “Will you come?”

“No, I think not, not tonight. It has been a weary day at the hospital. They are already stewing me a chicken here.”

Elise had stopped listening. She adjusted her décolletage in the mirror, then returned her attention to her face. Though the flush of her youth was gone, she was certainly still a handsome woman, her natural graces now requiring just the slightest, most subtle assistance of art. The doctor was reluctant to disrupt her concentration. Much as he tried not to think about it, he knew very well she had recently taken a lover.

“Madame ma sœur,” he said hesitantly. “It strikes me that you have chosen a very dangerous divertissement . . . and for so many reasons.”

“Reasons for the danger, you mean?” Elise made another minute adjustment to her bosom before rotating on her stool to face him. It was to preserve that asset that she’d elected not to nurse her second child herself. “Or the reasons for my choice of diversion?”

The doctor, who felt he had already overspoken, said nothing more.

“Well then,” Elise said, snuffing the candles decisively as she rose to leave the room, “don’t let us dwell on it.”

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Madison Smartt Bell gives us the final chapter in the life of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the only successful slave revolution in history." "In 1791, what would become known as the Haitian Revolution began as a rebellion of African slaves against their white masters in the French colony of Saint Domingue. By 1793 Toussaint had emerged as the leader of the revolt, proving himself to be as adept at politics as he was on the battlefield. By 1801 he had succeeded in stabilizing the war-ravaged territory and invited exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return and reclaim their properties. The foundation of a society based on liberty, genuine equality, and brotherhood among whites, blacks, and mulattos seemed in place. But the proclamation of a new constitution that abolished slavery and appointed Toussaint governor for life incited Napoleon to dispatch troops in order to reestablish control over the island." The Stone That the Builder Refused spans the final phase of Toussaint's career and paints a detailed portrait of a new society breaking forth from the chrysalis of a revolution, of the vision that impelled Toussaint to create a society based on principle and idealism, and of the dreadful compromises he was forced to make in order to preserve it.

SYNOPSIS

Following the widely acclaimed All Souls’ Rising and Master of the Crossroads, Madison Smartt Bell gives us the climactic final chapter in the life of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the only successful slave revolution in history.

In 1791, what would become known as the Haitian Revolution began as a rebellion of African slaves against their white masters in the French colony of Saint Domingue. By 1793 Toussaint had emerged as the leader of the revolt, proving himself to be as adept at politics as he was on the battlefield. By 1801 he had succeeded in stabilizing the war-ravaged territory and invited exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return and reclaim their properties. The foundation of a society based on liberty, genuine equality, and brotherhood among whites, blacks, and mulattos seemed in place. But the proclamation of a new constitution that abolished slavery and appointed Toussaint governor for life incited Napoleon to dispatch troops in order to reestablish control over the island.

The Stone That the Builder Refused spans the final phase of Toussaint’s career and paints an astonish-ingly detailed and riveting portrait of a new society breaking forth from the chrysalis of a revolution, of the vision that impelled Toussaint to create a society based on principle and idealism, and of the dreadful compromises he was forced to make in order to
preserve it.

A masterly weave of the factual and the imagined, this grand culmination of Bell’s landmark Toussaint Louverture trilogy stands alone as a towering achievement of historical fiction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michael Pye - The New York Times

The scale alone is extraordinary. But any fool can write 2,000 pages; that just takes time. What is truly impressive is the energy and concentration, right to the very end. Almost every moment is full, like some great narrative painting, alive with the detail that puts you on the road or in the house where some murder or meeting is about to happen. And almost every moment is imagined thoroughly … As fiction, these books do what novels are meant to do: they propose their own vivid and inexorable history.

Michael Anft - The Washington Post

… Bell compels our interest by straightforwardly examining the spirit of freedom embodied by Toussaint and the blacks and whites who entertained his notion of it. Without the use of literary gimmicks -- he doesn't rely on magical realism or lyrical pyrotechnics wrought from the island's fascination with spirits and fate -- the author artfully takes us to the end of a fascinating journey. Summing it all up, Riau says, "There is more of what we don't see than what we do." But for most of a decade, Bell has dared to show us as much as he can, in often astonishing and brutal detail. It's hard to imagine that anyone could have chronicled Haiti and the travails of Toussaint with an eye more unblinking or with a hand so steady.

Publishers Weekly

Readers unfamiliar with the previous books in Bell's Haitian rebellion trilogy might feel like latecomers to an intense, raucous party in the first hundred pages of this final installment. Multiple characters and backstories form a somewhat opaque context for the events of 1802, when a French army commanded by Napoleon's brother-in-law, Leclerc, landed in Haiti (then called Saint Domingue) in an attempt to overthrow Toussaint's government and gradually restore slavery. The book moves from the burning of the town of Cap Francais-ordered by one of Toussaint's generals, Christophe, in response to Leclerc's demand to submit-to the war in the Haitian countryside, ending with Toussaint's unexpected surrender and his betrayal by Leclerc and Touissant's black generals Dessalines, Christophe and Maurepas. With a panoramic vision of battle reminiscent of Shelby Foote, Bell recreates the devastating counterstrokes the black generals devised against the French at Ravine a Couleuvre and La Crete a Pierrot. Through it all, he retains as a narrative anchor Doctor Hebert, who operates in both the worlds of the blanc and the neg. Bell intercuts scenes of the war in Haiti with Toussaint's terrible last days in a French jail in the Jura Mountains. This lends an air of unbearable pathos to this tangled, tragic history. In exploring the line between atrocity and liberation, Bell's novel is unexpectedly and powerfully relevant to our times. Agent, Jane Gelfman. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This massive book succeeds All Souls Rising and Master of the Crossroads to conclude Bell's Toussaint Louverture trilogy. Toussaint, of course, was the Haitian ideolog and general who led history's only successful slave rebellion. The third installment centers on Toussaint's last two years, in which Haiti's war-ravaged economy begins to rebound and a constitution is drafted and sent to France for ratification, only to raise Napoleon's ire. France then reinvaded Haiti, which led to Toussaint's capture and death in prison in 1803. Ultimately, Haitian independence did prevail, though the path was not always smooth. As in the earlier two acclaimed novels, Bell crafts his characters and prose artfully, and the reader is immersed in the book's times and setting. Could anyone else write both smart Baltimore "street" books and sweeping historical fiction ("faction") this well? Obviously, buy this if you have the others; if you don't, strongly consider purchasing the entire trilogy. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/04.]-Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews