I think I agree that Barnabas did not know himself how to react to Angelique when she first came to see him, but it does not make sense to me that he did not know she was the Dupres's maid, particularly when I assume he went to the duPres plantation to conduct business with Andre....
Oh, I think he knew that Angelique was a maid. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no doubt about it, Barnabas would have known.
There were highly distinct class differences in those days. Clothes, accents, manners all helped to place someone in the class hierarchy. That and family, particularly for family. The world was much smaller than and people would look at your surroundings--family, spouse, children, house, etc. to place you.
It would have been impossible for Angelique to pretend to be a lady. Given that Barnabas was apparently staying with the duPres family, I don't see how he could have escaped knowing that.
That is the thing, it does sound like Barnabas kept things in the air with Angelique before he left Martinique, and there is the remark that he and Josette had written and I assume got engaged that way, through correspondence....
Even if Barnabas had left things up in the air with Angelique, given their respective positions in society, the most Angelique could have reasonably hoped for was to be set up as Barnabas' mistress--more likely she would have been expected to continue working as Josette's maid and then to have to sleep with him on the side.
Given what we know about Barnabas and his character (or lack thereof), I agree it's highly likely that he did leave matters very . . . um, open (coward). Probably hoping as many of us have on occasion been wont to do, that the other person would just be obliging and go away,
I mean, just recall what he told her, "I hope we can be friends." Yeah. Is that a cop-out or what? Like they could really be friends even if Angelique didn't have that obsessed determined stalker thing going on.
All that being said, when your boyfriend is a)engaged to someone else, b)obviously in love with that someone else, c)is expressing his feelings to you in the universal language of dumpese, and d)rejecting your generous offer of no-expectation sex, I think most of us would agree that it's time to move on (be bitter, yes; rant, yes; all the standard breakup things, yes;
but move on, already.)
Luciaphil
