In his Haïti: ses progrès et son avenir (1862), which would incidentally appear with the same publisher (E. Dentu) as Stella, the nineteenth-century French literary critic Alexandre Bonneau listed Eméric Bergeaud's novel in his bibliography of works about Haiti that his readers might consult for additional information about the country. Bonneau's bibliography, which contained just over 55 works by travel writers, former French colonists, and Europeans as well as Haitian historians and memoirists, comprised in the mind of its author the most ‘essential, important, or interesting’ works on the subject of Haiti. Bonneau explained that this list, in any case, was not meant to be exhaustive, since ‘[t]he bibliography of Haiti would fill an entire volume if we wanted to cite all of the works relating thereto’ (165). While many of Bonneau's entries contain no annotations at all, the brief note he included after mentioning Bergeaud's novel explained that Stella is ‘a historical and political novel about Haiti’ wherein ‘the author personifies the black race [race noire] under the name of Romulus, and the mulatto class [classe de mulâtre] under the name of Rémus’ (172). This description comes in spite of the fact that, as we have seen, Bergeaud never once uses the term ‘mulatto’ or any other “racial” taxonomic marker in his novel of over 300 pages.