by Tom Reiss
The manner in which he addressed Thomas-Alexandre showed the likely true purpose of his visit: not competition for a lady but to put the fancy colored man—a gallant about town with sword and fine waistcoat—in his place.
Thomas-Alexandre replied that he felt contempt for everything the officer was saying, and that he knew “what” he was: a clerk in the war office at Versailles, according to what he had heard. Titon lost his temper. One of his men raised his cane to strike Thomas-Alexandre and shouted to a theater guard to have the mulatto arrested. Thomas-Alexandre tried to leave with his companion, but the officer blocked their path.
Then the man’s confederates grabbed Thomas-Alexandre and, in a move that must have burned in his memory, tried to force him to kneel before his attacker and beg for his freedom. This was to be the consummation of their taunting: to make the man of color beg for pardon on his knees, with the white woman looking on. Titon called on the guards of the theater to help “arrest this mulatto,” and the guards asked him if he wanted Thomas-Alexandre taken away.
According to his own written account, Thomas-Alexandre broke free of the guards and Titon and his men and returned to his box. Thomas-Alexandre writes that the lady fled the scene. Without his audience, Titon told the guards to release Thomas-Alexandre. But he was not quite finished with his game.
“You are free! I give you pardon and you may go!” he called loudly, in a parody of manumission.
At that point, a police marshal finally approached to take both men into custody for disturbing the peace.
The details survive in both of their sworn statements, given to the Paris police the following day on parchments dated September 15, 1784. Thomas-Alexandre’s, written in his own hand, as was the custom then, and in first person, recounted the events with surprising candor, while Titon’s is written in the third person with a haughty chill. “Sir Titon de St. Lamain, formerly commander of the battalion at the fort St. Pierre Martinique where he owns a residence, and is currently attached to the infantry in France, is honored to explain that he was yesterday at the show of Mr. Nicolet with two of his friends, and that he noticed a demoiselle sitting in the box next to the bench he was sitting on. Which gave him the opportunity to strike up a conversation with her and after a few ordinary compliments Sir Titon was exchanging with the said demoiselle, a mulatto sitting next to her started getting involved.” “Sir Titon” records that he was forced to call the guard because of the mulatto’s “impertinence”—but, being a magnanimous type, he then forgave him.
The novelist Dumas was obsessed with the encounter at Nicolet’s throughout his life, and his father certainly never forgot it; he must have told his future wife the story, and probably his intimate friends knew of it. I had first read about the incident many years ago, in my childhood copy of Alexandre Dumas’s memoirs. Until now that was the only version that was known, and it ended completely differently from the police documents I found.
The novelist’s version begins to depart from the police statements when Dumas has the grenadier officer say, “Oh, I beg your pardon, I took monsieur for your lackey.” From there it goes on:
This bit of insolence was no sooner uttered than the impertinent musketeer launched, as if from a catapult, and crashed into the middle of the orchestra pit.
This unexpected descent produced a great tumult in the crowd.
It was a matter of interest not only to the falling man but to those onto whom he fell.
In those days the orchestra was standing room only, consequently there was no need to get up; the section turned towards the box from which the musketeer had been hurled.
My father, who was awaiting the consequences that such an affair would naturally have, left the box at that instant to wait for his adversary in the corridor. But instead he found a police officer.
Dumas not only makes his father triumph handily; he also makes the incident comic by having the bad guy land in the crowd.
I had always liked this scene, as terse and satisfying as a page from a picaresque novel. But, having read the police dossier—along with thousands of other documents relating to the society in which Thomas-Alexandre lived—I would now say that this action-hero account is perhaps the most misleading thing Dumas ever wrote about his father.
But beyond the memoir, Dumas would use the story’s basic dynamic over and over. His novel Georges directly addressed a mixed-race man’s lifelong struggle in the aftermath of a similar slight: its hero receives training very similar to Thomas-Alexandre’s at La Boëssière’s with the sole idea of returning to confront the white colonials who long ago insulted him and his family. The Count of Monte Cristo describes Edmond Dantès’s planning, in his dungeon cell, to avenge himself against not one but many persecuting villains. And, of course, the character of the hotheaded d’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers draws on Thomas-Alexandre’s youthful dishonoring at Nicolet’s. Like him, d’Artagnan is from country nobility and he is certainly an outsider in Paris. Even so, he is a white man and thus, no matter how poor or provincial, can fight for his honor with abandon, deliriously.
In Dumas’s memoir of the Nicolet incident, the novelist omits all reference to his father’s race. And by dropping the fact that his assailant was a colonial officer he buries the racial aspect still deeper.† The slight becomes the same slight the provincial d’Artagnan constantly encounters—because of his clothes or his manner, mistaken for someone of a lower social rank. Slights can be so subtle, in fact, that, as the novel has it, the proud young Gascon considers “every smile an insult, and every glance as a provocation.”
But what made Thomas-Alexandre an outsider was anything but subtle; despite liberty unimaginable outside France and despite the Parisian frivolity and license, he still lived in invisible shackles. Miraculously, within a decade, his shackles would be broken, in a France transformed by the orgy of emancipation that was the French Revolution. From his late twenties on, he would never again need to brook an insult from a white man without reaching for his sword.
THOMAS-ALEXANDRE signed his police statement “Dumas Davy,” that fusion of mother’s and father’s names which he hadn’t used since his first year in France. The incident was officially put to rest; the marshals wrote out a declaration certifying their acceptance of both his statement and Titon’s and, along with a bit of legalese directed at preventing any possible future duels between the parties, were content to let the matter drop. The blessed inefficiency of the kingdom ensured that the man of color was not charged with violating the Police des Noirs and remanded to the naval police, technically in charge of such violations, for lacking proper registration. Given Sir Titon’s extensive connections in the Naval Ministry, he could have made good his threat to have Thomas-Alexandre arrested, perhaps even sent to a depot and deported, but Titon chose not to persecute his victim further. Instead Thomas-Alexandre walked out a free man.
Still, the first record we have of his voice is in a police report.
* The Boulevard du Temple served as a raucous, downmarket extension of the Palais Royal. It was named not after a house of worship but a cavernous fortress that had once been the original European headquarters of the Knights Templar. In the 1790s, at the height of the Terror, the fortress would be turned into a prison, where Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and their family would endure abusive treatment while awaiting execution—and where the lost boy-king, the unfortunate Louis XVII, would meet his mysterious end.
† It was an odd late-eighteenth-century radicalizing trope that the class consciousness of future French revolutionaries was often awakened by being insulted at the theater. It happened to both Robespierre, founder of the Jacobins, and Brissot, founder of the Girondins, the leading competing group. Both were involved as young men in altercations in theaters with arrogant aristocrats—though more simply, in fights over seating, not involving women.
7
A QUEEN’S DRAGOON
ON February 13, 1786, a contract of marriage was signed between Thomas-Alexandre’s
father—“Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, knight, former lord and owner of the parish of Bielleville [and other fiefdoms], gentleman in the former chamber of the Prince de Conti,” and so forth—and his housekeeper, Marie Retou, who was, as the contract stated, the daughter of a vintner. The wedding took place on Valentine’s Day.
Thomas-Alexandre appears not to have attended the wedding—he did not witness the marriage contract—and all indications are that he did not appreciate his father’s newfound happiness. The novelist Dumas writes that the “marriage caused a cooling-off between father and son. The result of this estrangement was that the father tied his purse strings tighter … and the son discovered one fine morning that Paris life without money was a sorry life.” Antoine had always supported his son generously, but his new wife was from a frugal lower-middle-class background, and perhaps she lacked the proper respect for a fashionable young man’s expenditures. She had known Thomas-Alexandre since he’d arrived in Le Havre nearly ten years earlier, and she had watched him grow into a dashing Parisian rake with neither a trade nor obvious aspirations to one.
At twenty-four, Thomas-Alexandre was conversant with Caesar and Plutarch, well versed in contemporary theater and in Palais Royal gossip, and, of course, an expert horseman and fencer. But he had not worked a day since stepping off the ship. There was only one profession really suited to a man of his style, skills, and temperament. In France, as a contemporary visiting English nobleman observed, “it is very dishonorable for any gentleman not to be in the army, or in the king’s service as they call it.”
Less than two weeks after his father’s marriage, Thomas-Alexandre made up his mind to enlist.
ALTHOUGH there could be no more traditional career move for a young man of his station, Thomas-Alexandre’s entrance into the military was fundamentally different from his peers’: he enlisted not as an officer but as a common soldier.
The Queen’s Dragoons, the regiment he picked, had flashy uniforms and a rugged, even reckless reputation. But, for the son of a marquis to enlist without a commission—as a private!—was unheard-of. The novelist recounts a conversation between his father and his grandfather:
[My father] told him that he had made a resolution.
“What is it?” asked the marquis.
“To enlist.”
“As what?”
“As a common soldier.”
“Where are you going to do that?”
“In the first regiment I come across.”
“Marvelous,” replied my grandfather, “but as I’m called the Marquis de la Pailleterie, am a colonel and commissioner general of artillery, I don’t intend for you to drag my name through the lowest ranks of the army.”
“Then you oppose my enlistment?”
“No; but you must enlist under a nom de guerre.”
“That’s fair,” replied my father. “I will enlist under the name of Dumas.”
“Very well.”
And the marquis, who had never been a very tender father, turned his back on his son and left him free to do what he pleased.
The novelist Dumas got paid by the line, and so was always making up dialogue when he could. But whether or not this exchange took place as written, it conveys Thomas-Alexandre’s insolence toward his father at that point.
ON June 2, 1786, Thomas-Alexandre signed the enlistment rolls of the Sixth Regiment of the Queen’s Dragoons. The document still exists, and it is the first record of the name “Dumas, Alexandre.”
Whatever combination of anger, pride, and determination caused him to give this name instead of any of the others he had been using since he came to France—“Thomas Retoré,” “Thomas-Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie,” “Thomas Retoré (called Dumas-Davy)”—the young “American” had found his identity. Rather, he had invented it. Beneath that invention came another: “son of Antoine and Cecette Dumas.”
Alexandre—he never again used the name “Thomas”—had with the stroke of a pen inverted his family’s racial history: instead of the son of the Marquis de la Pailleterie and his black slave Cessette, he was now the son of Cessette Dumas and her husband, Antoine. He had made his father into a Dumas. It may have been expedient, but it was also a kind of poetic revenge. And it was the only concrete memorial he would leave his mother: to take her name. Next to his new name and family data was a description of Alexandre Dumas:
Native of Jemerie [sic] in Martinique, 24 years old, 6 feet tall, with frizzy black hair and eyebrows … oval face, and brown skinned, small mouth, thick lips.
The enlistment officer mistook “Jemerie” to be in Martinique rather than Saint-Domingue; future records of the Sixth Dragoons would often simply state that their unusual recruit was “from Jeremie, in America.”
Enlisting as a private in the dragoons was a bad place to start one’s career: from that rank, Thomas-Alexandre was unlikely to ever rise above the rank of sergeant-major, the cavalry regiment’s senior noncommissioned rank at the time.
A 1781 rule decreed that to qualify for an army commission, a candidate must “show proof of four generations of nobility on his father’s side,” certified by the royal genealogist. Thomas-Alexandre had such lineage—the Davy de la Pailleterie family tree went back to the 1500s—but the recently passed race laws made it hard for a man of mixed race to claim his rightful title or noble status. Infuriated as Thomas-Alexandre must have been to be held back by such restrictions, he must have felt relief to jettison the name of the man who had owned and sold him—and join up under a new name that was both his own invention and an homage to the slave mother he’d so thoroughly left behind.
Thirteen days later, on June 15, Antoine died. It was only four months after the old rogue’s wedding. He was buried in the cemetery at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Antoine’s death certificate states that mass was sung and lists the witnesses: Alexandre Dumas was not among them. It was lucky that the son was living the life of a soldier by then and did not need his father’s support, because the “fortune”—which had in fact been merely glorified support payments from the Mauldes in accordance with their arrangement regarding the Pailleterie estate—was revealed to be an illusion. A letter to the Count de Maulde written on the widow’s behalf by a lawyer a few months later indicates the severity of the want:
The death of M. le Marquis frees you of the life annuity … you were obligated to pay him I believe; please accept, sir, my compliments, but permit me to place before you the unhappy situation of an honest woman whom he had just married about 4 months ago, who had no possessions and on whom he meant to play a trick. In fact, the marriage contract … gave all the Marquis’s possessions and all his movable and immovable property to his wife, who recognizes today that M. le Marquis wasn’t living in his holdings and had only your lifetime payments, having spent all his money paying the debts for a young Mister Dumas (mulatto) who is said to be the illegitimate son of the deceased. This illegitimate child has cost him enormously, and he just ended up enlisting in the military as a dragoon. The poor widow has instructed me to make you aware of her sad state; she finds herself without bread; she relies on your bounty to assure a small pension for the rest of her days. Someone advertised your charitable sentiments and the small amount of resources you could give her would allow her to avoid hiring herself as a servant; it would not look good for the family of the Marquis to have a titled widow forced to become a servant.
The Count de Maulde refused. That summer he sold off the Bielleville estate, definitively ending its four-century-long connection to the Davy family, along with eighteen other properties that had somehow belonged to the family. Maulde did not do this lightly. It was an indication of how much his association with Antoine had cost him that he was selling all the lands and buildings that, in recent years, he had gone to great pains to buy back after Antoine summarily sold them to a neighbor. Maulde had tried to bring a measure of respectability to a family that did not want it. He used the money from the current sale—a serious sum, 350,000 livres—to pay off the
marquis’s creditors and those of his widow, as well as his own.
MEANWHILE, after presumably putting his silks and velvet waistcoats in storage, Alexandre Dumas threw himself into the life of an armed man on horseback. Dragoons were light cavalry, used mostly for reconnaissance, skirmishing, and raiding. They got their name from their short carbine muskets, which were known as dragons because they spat fire.
The first regular dragoon regiments had served Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu in the previous century. They were introduced at the same time as the musketeers, who specialized in assignments in and around the capital. Like them, the dragoons were organized specifically to provide elite military opportunities to the sons of minor noble families or of those who had fallen on hard times. (The musketeers were phased out by Louis XVI in 1776 for budgetary reasons.)
For the government, a big virtue of the dragoons was that they were expendable. They got poorer horses and cheaper weapons than the elite heavy-cavalry or royal-guard units. Dragoons did the toughest and dirtiest jobs. In offensive warfare, they went in ahead of other troops, scouted enemy positions, secured bridges, took out enemy snipers, defused traps; and during retreats they held bridges and walls until the regular troops had gotten through. In peacetime, the dragoons took on highwaymen and secured the roads for the king and other dignitaries during their travels. The dragoons also battled smugglers, fighting the Crown’s constantly simmering war against dealers in illegal salt, which was then one of the most heavily taxed essential commodities in the kingdom.
Alexandre Dumas took to this rough-and-ready life, discovering a side of himself that the Palais Royal gallant would not have recognized. He trained hard on the northeast frontier of France’s so-called iron belt of fortresses. “The liberty that he had known in the colonies had developed his skill and strength in a remarkable way,” his son would write. “[H]e was a veritable American horseman, a cowboy. With his rifle or pistol in hand, he accomplished marvels that made St. Georges jealous.… And his muscular strength became legendary in the army.”
