Alice is a vagrant who was initially named Alice Tarleton. She was abducted by the Indians as a little kid and safeguarded by Gaspard Roussillon, the informal city hall leader of Vincennes, who with his better half has brought her up to be free, mentally inquisitive, and anxious to carry on with life completely. In 1779 the "northwest" as it was then called, was a Francophone, Roman Catholic world inhabited for the most part by trackers and hide brokers. Vincennes was lucky to be a settled town with a congregation and old Father Beret, a Roman Catholic cleric from France with a strange past.

Alice is old buddies with Father Beret, who has helped her how to fence and who attempts to direct her perusing toward Montaigne and other incredible French authors. Alice favors Scarron, Scudery, and Prevost, whose sentiments she understands when Mme Roussillon isn't watching. In spite of the fact that Father Beret gives a valiant effort to make a Roman Catholic of her, Alice enigmatically recollects her mom showing her the Lord's Prayer and she holds immovably to her to some degree ignorant Protestantism. She actually has a memento her mom gave her that is engraved with the Tarleton family peak.