by Tom Reiss
Gradually, Bianchi began offering to provide basic services to Dumas without receiving payment, and even offering to reimburse Dumas for previous outlays. In a letter dated January 8, 1801, in which Bianchi announces that he has decided to reimburse Dumas “7 ducats and 90 grani” for “the room and board of yourself and your officials,” Bianchi asks for a forwarding address to send the payment to: a sign that at this point the jailer knew, at least in principle, that his prisoner’s release was imminent.
On January 22, 1801, Bianchi sent an extraordinary letter to Dumas. In it, he explains that the general’s attack on the Marquis de la Schiava has caused a scandal in court—that the king himself is outraged enough that he has written a memo about it “by his own Royal hand” to the kingdom’s highest-ranking army officer. Bianchi describes King Ferdinand’s condemning Dumas’s “uncooperative and threatening behavior” in choosing to attack the marquis with a cane. The king has demanded that Dumas and Manscourt be placed in solitary confinement, and has complained that the authorities have been too lenient with the French generals. But what made Bianchi’s letter remarkable was that he states all this—and quotes extensively from King Ferdinand’s memo—before revealing that he will ignore the order to place the generals in solitary. He will go “against the Orders of My King,” he says, because he has come to see Dumas and his companion as good men.
Reading this flowery document from the dawn of the nineteenth century, I was reminded of countless World War II movies I saw growing up, where the “good” Luftwaffe commandant decides to behave decently toward his American or British prisoners despite orders from Nazi superiors to mistreat them. Was Bianchi partly motivated by a kind of southern Italian enjoyment of defying authority—of thumbing his nose at his fancy-pants boss from here in his drafty provincial fortress, where he lacked the resources to authorize a batch of kindling without receiving money from divisional headquarters? But why did Bianchi feel free to write the whole thing down—to express his defiance of the king in writing? Was it a deliberate act taken in the hope that it would be read—because Bianchi, knowing of the French invasion, assumed that in a matter of weeks he might well have a French superior officer and a French government to report to, rather than a royal highness in Palermo? Reading his letters, I began to suspect that Giovanni Bianchi was not only anticipating the French conquest of his kingdom but positively hoping for it. Perhaps Dumas’s jailer was a secret Giacobino, who liked the French prisoners because he liked France and the ideals of the Revolution.
IN March 1801, Dumas learned of plans to repatriate him and Manscourt by boat via Ancona, a city on the Adriatic coast, north of Rome. But they remained wary. “We understood,” Dumas wrote, “that they wanted to deliver us to the English or the Barbary pirates.” He asked Bianchi to inform his superiors of the high “imprudence of exposing us on an ocean covered with enemy ships.”
Bianchi attempted to reassure Dumas, in a string of letters that had an almost slapstick obsequiousness, closing with phrases like “I’m always at your disposal for your commands” and “I remain always eager to serve you.” This made Dumas even more suspicious. There was really nothing for the dear general to worry about, Bianchi replied—the boats sail along the coast and, in case of any untoward event, they would easily find mooring. Now he wanted to take the opportunity to send Dumas, for his approval, some “fabric samples” for his new post-prison uniform—would a nice, medium-weight blue wool “suffice for the needs of your officials?” Bianchi inquires. “Please pray let me know what would be to your liking.”
Bianchi wrote his prisoner on the subject of his confiscated property, specifically the general’s weapons and equipment that had been taken in the first months of his imprisonment. But Dumas dismissed all these bureaucratic overtures as the machinations of a cowardly enemy, now squirming in fear at the approach of French justice. Bianchi particularly infuriated Dumas when he wrote to apologize that the general’s “double-barreled rifle … was thrown into the sea.… Nevertheless, I shall do my utmost and, should I succeed in finding it, it shall be my pleasure to have it sent to you.”
In his relentless campaign of flattery, Giovanni Bianchi always returned to his favorite subject—clothes. He regrets deeply that it has been impossible to procure the sort of hat the general prefers, but he can produce another that is both “safer and more comfortable” for sea travel. He assures Dumas that he will send men to show him the alternate hat style “immediately”—for surely Dumas, after surviving eighteen months of mistreatment and poisoning in a dungeon cell, would not want to go another day worrying about his choice of hat styles. Bianchi “begs” the general to “get some air” and to “do it without fear.” In response to Dumas’s one serious sartorial query, Bianchi reassured the republican general that of course he should also feel free “to wear the cockade of your nation” within the fortress walls—“the same way,” Bianchi adds, “that our people wear our cockade.” (Cardinal Ruffo had created a cockade especially for the Holy Faith Army: pure white set in a crucifix.)
At the end of December 1800, with everyone from the Austrian emperor to the pope making peace deals with Napoleon, King Ferdinand of Naples suddenly found himself the lone defender against the resurgent French colossus in Italy. Napoleon sent Dumas’s fellow cavalry general, the flamboyant Murat, to lead an army south against Naples. It did not take Ferdinand long to begin negotiating his surrender in the face of the approaching French forces: his subjects did not call him Il re Gambalesta—loosely, “King Walkaway”—for nothing.
In February 1801, General Murat took pleasure in informing Ferdinand’s emissary that, as part of the terms of surrender, all French prisoners of war held anywhere in the kingdom must be freed immediately. From the letters he had received from Marie-Louise, as well as orders from the minister of war, Murat knew that this last stipulation would deliver his old comrade-in-arms Alex Dumas.
King Ferdinand quickly agreed to this condition, but before Murat could celebrate a successful armistice, Napoleon ordered Murat to renege on those terms. He added a new condition, requiring Ferdinand to accept French occupation of the Gulf of Taranto. Napoleon hoped to use that area as a base from which to launch a new campaign to retake Egypt, then in the midst of falling to the British and the Turks. Ferdinand again quickly agreed, and Murat’s army marched right into Naples without firing a shot. If Dumas had only known this news—that his old comrade was riding into the land of his oppressors!
He must have learned it soon enough. By the end of March, Dumas was on a ship bound for the French base at Ancona, wearing a freshly made light wool waistcoat, new shirt, socks and shoes, and a sharp-looking new hat. Still, at thirty-nine, he must also have been barely recognizable. In his first weeks out of prison, Dumas was partially blind and deaf, and weakened by malnourishment; he walked with a limp from yet another of his medical treatments—blood-letting that had severed a tendon. He was determined to heal himself, but he swore never to forget any detail of his captivity or of “the most barbaric oppression under heaven, driven by unremitting hatred for all those who call themselves Frenchmen.”
THE French commanding officer at Ancona greeted General Dumas warmly and, since there was no formal policy in place for dealing with POWs, gave his battered fellow officer some money out of his own pocket to buy food and basic supplies. On April 13, Dumas wrote to the government: “I have the honor of informing you that we [Manscourt and I] arrived yesterday in this city, with ninety-four [former] prisoners … for the most part blind and maimed.” When he arrived in Florence, Dumas would compose his remarkable account of his captivity relating all the misadventures that occurred from the moment he left Egypt on the Belle Maltaise, the account his son would later draw on for the iconic scenes of human suffering in The Count of Monte Cristo.§ In his letter to the government, Alex Dumas limited his reflections to a brief mention of “the treatment we have endured from the government of Naples [that] dishonors them in the eyes of humanity and all nations.”
Curiously, even after a near shipwreck and two years in captivity he’d somehow managed to hang on to souvenirs for his daughter from the Expédition d’Égypte.
In another letter to Marie-Louise from Florence, written two weeks later, he tells of his joy at having received her letters and one from their now eight-year-old daughter, both of which he “has kissed a thousand times”:
It is with deep gratitude and emotion that I realize with what devotion and care you have overseen her education. Such conduct, conduct so worthy of you, makes you dearer and dearer to me, and I am impatient to give you proof of my feelings.
In none of the letters he writes her on his journey homeward—a journey to revolutionary France, the land of opportunity and fraternity in which he once found success, and which he will find no longer exists—does he choose to tell her the details of his ordeal, because, as he writes, “I don’t want to bring pain to your heart that is wounded enough by its long privations. I hope to bring your rare, precious spirit the healing balm of my consolation within the month.” He closes:
Adieu, my beloved, you will now and forever be so dear to my heart because misfortunes cannot but draw tighter the bonds that hold us fast to one another. Embrace for me my child, our dear parents, and also all our friends.
Yours without reserve,
Alex Dumas, General of Division
* Enemas are one of the most common remedies in history, going back to ancient Egypt. In the seventeenth century Louis XIV, who was known to have received thousands of them, made the procedure an everyday ritual of civilized hygiene. Enema syringes featured prominently in Molière’s comedies, and by the eve of the nineteenth century “every household had an enema stool by the fireside, where it was used with complete openness by everyone in turn.”
† The sperm escaping Dumas’s body at an “abundant and continuous” rate was a classic symptom of fatal disease in the eighteenth century. In the world of humoral medicine, sperm was much more than what we think it to be today, though it was also that. Sperm was believed to be a “nervous fluid” that flowed from head to toe.
‡ Tissot professed that the most surefire way to lose your life force was the obvious one. His 1758 book on sperm conservation—Onanism: A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Masturbation—argued that semen loss via masturbation led to disease and death. Tissot’s revelations about masturbation and illness—especially his “proof” that the act caused blindness—formed mainstream medical opinion on the subject until Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male overturned him in 1948.
§ The novelist would also reproduce a version of the account in his memoir, but he would soften many of the details of his father’s suffering that appear in the original, which I found in the safe, perhaps because they were too difficult or depressing for him to write about. This book is the first to base its recounting of General Dumas’s prison experiences on his original statement, rather than on his son’s bowdlerized version of it.
22
WAIT AND HOPE
“WHAT dark and bloody secrets the future hides from us,” Alexandre Dumas would one day write in his memoir, meditating on his father’s fate. “When they are revealed, men may realize that it is by the good providence of God they were kept in ignorance of them until the appointed time.”
By the time he returned to France, in June of 1801, the Revolution and the nation Alex Dumas loved had declined almost as precipitously as he had. He must have felt like Rip Van Winkle returning from the hills—only Rip Van Winkle had found a king replaced by a revolution, while Dumas found a revolution replaced by a king, of sorts. And it was the same king he had left Egypt to escape. When Dumas arrived on French shores, Napoleon had had over a year to remake France in his image and to turn the gains of the Revolution to his own purposes.
His first step in remaking France had been to make a government. Everything still had to look democratic, because this was the land of the Revolution, and this king still wore red, white, and blue. The idea of “the consuls”—there were three—created the fiction that executive power was still split at the top, as it had been under the Directory and, before that, under the Convention. (Revolutionary France had never tried a simple president or prime minister.) But clothing themselves in the trappings of democracy, dictators may, like drag queens, tend to overdo it, and Napoleon wanted there to be no doubt that his French Republic was more democratic than any before it. Where the Directory had shared power with two legislative bodies, now there would be no fewer than four: the Senate, the Tribunate, the Legislature, and the Council of State. Of course these many checks and balances made the democratic process as dysfunctional as possible. The tribunes were allowed to discuss laws but not to vote on them. The legislators were allowed to vote on laws but not discuss them. The senators were allowed to appoint members to both of those other bodies but could not themselves vote, except that they could vote to annul laws they judged unconstitutional. The Council of State was stacked with Bonaparte’s backers and cronies, and though it was the only body to have some real power, it still functioned, in essence, as his advisory board.
On December 15, 1799, just over a month after the coup, Napoleon and his plotters had published the Constitution of the Year VIII, with the following claim in its preamble: “It is founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty. The powers which it institutes will be strong and stable, as they must be in order to guarantee the rights of the citizens and the interests of the state. Citizens! The Revolution is made fast to the principles which began it; it is finished.”*
At that time, the only people who really knew Napoleon Bonaparte—aside from his mother and siblings, who feared him—were his generals, who held him in differing degrees of fear, awe, contempt, and adulation. Most people outside the army command knew him only as a man who could deliver results. There were civilians who had spent time with Napoleon up close and reported some dark quality that belied all the public adoration. “The terror he inspires is inconceivable,” Madame de Staël wrote to her father after spending a weekend with him at the estate of his older brother, Joseph. “One has the impression of an impetuous wind blowing about one’s ears when one is near that man.”
DURING Dumas’s journey home, Marie-Louise had written him an unusual love letter about the ordeal in the dungeon and how she would overcome it for them both:
I promise to avenge myself by proving to you that I know how to love, and that I have always loved you. You know the price that I still place on the possession of your heart and, because it is with me, you should never doubt my happiness.
They were finally reunited in Paris at the apartment of Dumas’s old friend General Brune. One can only imagine how changed Marie-Louise found her husband, and how hard she must have worked to conceal her reaction. But their mutual happiness and relief can’t be doubted. Soon back at home in Villers-Cotterêts, Dumas basked in the love of his family. Although he didn’t regain his former vigor, he was soon able to ride again. He began to look forward to rejoining the service and taking up his career where he had left it when he got aboard the Belle Maltaise in Egypt.
But Dumas quickly found that there were other obstacles in his way. First of all, he had an urgent need of money. The family had not had an income while he was a prisoner of war, and when he heard that the French government had worked out a reparations deal with the Kingdom of Naples, he assumed his claim would be high on the list. On April 22, 1801, while Dumas was still in Italy, the French ambassador to Naples told Dumas that he was to “receive the sum of 500,000 francs payable by the Court of Naples, as compensation to French citizens who have lost their belongings.” The catch was that the money, so the ambassador said, had gone to Paris,
and Dumas would have to request it there from the minister of foreign affairs. Dumas would try to pursue that claim, but never received a single franc.
Not only did he get no reply regarding the reparations money, he found that all his letters and inquiries met with stony silence. For Dumas, the most important ministers were those of the military; unfortunately, the new minister of war was none other than his old nemesis General Berthier, who informed him that the consuls had decreed that officers like Dumas were due only two months of active-duty pay no matter how long they were imprisoned. Dumas protested, in a September 1801 letter to Napoleon:
I hope … that you will not allow the man who shared your work and your dangers to languish like a beggar when it is within your power to give him a testimony of the generosity of the nation for which you are responsible.
As important to Dumas as getting his back pay was getting reinstated in the army and gaining a new command. In February 1802, he wrote to “Citizen Minister Berthier”: “I have the honor of reminding you of the promise you made to me when I was in Paris, to employ me at something you were working on at the time. I can say, without blushing, that the misfortunes that have so severely tested me must be powerful motives for the government to put me back into active service.”
But in the new climate his appeals went nowhere. In the early 1820s a historian still close to the events observed that Dumas “hardly showed himself at the new court, where his political opinions, and everything about him, down to the color of his skin, was out of favor.”
WHEN Napoleon seized power, it had been nearly eight years since republican France granted full rights and citizenship to free men of color in the colonies and five years since France had ended slavery. Since 1794, both the French constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had applied anywhere in the world where the French flag was flown.† It’s worth repeating that the greatest emancipation in history had been initiated by the country possessing perhaps the world’s most lucrative slave empire.
