by Tom Reiss
Alexandre Dumas would make one of his most beloved characters, d’Artagnan, a handsome outsider from the south of France, his face “long and brown”; he also arrives in Paris knowing hardly a soul. But Thomas-Alexandre, a century and a half later, came into a far vaster, and louder, city than d’Artagnan did. Everywhere was a noise “so stunning [and] appalling that only the most superhuman voice can pierce it,” Mercier wrote. Fishwives hawked mackerels, herrings, oysters: “Live, live, just arrived!” Other hawkers peddled old clothes, umbrellas, gingerbread, baked apples, liquor from barrels, sweet oranges from the south.
The biggest difference, of course, was that the boy from Saint-Domingue came to the city with his father’s deep purse, even if it would later be revealed to have been filled mostly with IOUs. It’s something of a mystery why Antoine indulged Thomas-Alexandre to the extent he did. “M. le Marquis wasn’t living on his holdings and only had your lifetime payments,” the notary in charge of Antoine’s estate would later inform the benighted Count de Maulde, “having spent all his money paying the debts for a young Dumas (mulatto) [sic] that is said to be the natural son of the deceased.” The notary underlined the point about Thomas-Alexandre’s habits: “This out of wedlock child has cost him enormously.”
But a young gentleman in Paris could be forgiven for burning through cash. A respectable gallant’s party ensemble of embroidered silk, satin, brocade, and velvet might cost 4,000 livres, especially once gold buckles and three-inch bejeweled pumps were figured in. Though Thomas-Alexandre had witnessed dazzling finery among the dandies and hostesses of Jérémie, Paris prices were on a different scale. As Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, supposedly once said, “Fashion is to France what the mines of Peru are to Spain.”
In Paris it wasn’t just what you wore—it was what you rode that told who you were. “A carriage is the grand object of everyone in the scramble for wealth,” wrote Mercier. “At the first fortunate event, a man will set up his one-horse chaise, then a chariot, and afterwards a coach for himself.” However, there was a good reason for this: Paris streets were narrow, crowded, and dirty, and most lacked sidewalks. Mercier devoted pages to the mud of Paris, which “is necessarily filthy, black with grit and metal fragments detached by the eternal traffic, but it is the domestic waste running into it which chiefly accounts for the smell. This, no foreign nose can abide; it is sulphurous, with a tang of nitric acid. A spot of this mud left on a coat will eat away the cloth.” Only those Parisians already covered in muck—the poor, the workers—could afford to walk.
For long-suffering pedestrians who considered themselves gentlemen yet couldn’t afford to replace their bright silk trousers or stockings continually, there was a solution that gave birth to the future of French fashion: all black. An all-black ensemble of fine materials might cost as much as a colorful outfit but, in the long run, was far cheaper to maintain. Meanwhile, women took to defying the mud by wearing all white, “à la bordelaise”—i.e. in the style of the port city of Bordeaux, whence the all-white trend had arrived from the sugar islands. It hit Paris in 1782, when Thomas-Alexandre was twenty. The queen herself pushed the style when she decided on dressing strictly à la bordelaise. She dazzled Versailles in her white gowns and white diamonds, with her white hair and light-blue eyes.
Diamonds. Their sparkling whiteness hung everywhere in those days—from necks, cascading down décolletages, studding practically every surface a woman could find to place them on. Grande dames and demoiselles did not limit their diamonds to necklaces, rings, and bracelets but set them in hatpins, hair bands, bouquets, and snuffboxes. Some matched their necklaces with diamond “stomachers”—panels covering the front bodice of their gowns. Men wore precious stones, too—the masculine hand was even more bejeweled than the feminine one. Not to mention the masculine shoe buckle, sword knot, pistol butt, and pocket watch. Unfortunately for Thomas-Alexandre, the manly diamond bug bit his father hard, and he watched the man who’d lived for thirty years in the hardscrabble hills, who’d taught him to value a good cutlass and a working saddle, make ever more frequent visits to the jeweler.
Antoine’s jeweler was in Rouen, in eastern Normandy, and, according to his records, the lost-and-found man from Saint-Domingue was his best customer. One day the jeweler sent a lackey to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to complete a transaction. Antoine’s lackey led the jeweler’s lackey to the second floor, where he found Antoine lying in bed. The lackey asked him if he was the Marquis de la Pailleterie. Antoine, apparently instinctively, from decades of covering his tracks, replied: “No, no, this is not me. I swear to you that I am not the Marquis de la Pailleterie.” The lackey returned to Rouen to say he’d been unable to locate the client.
Father and son competed in their frivolous spending, but the old man’s jewelry buying probably meant that he won. Antoine had never had as much fun in his life as he was having now, in his years “back from the dead.” With the furor that sometimes accompanies imminent mortality, he seemed determined to spend his way into oblivion. He was soon deeply in debt. And in 1783 the sixty-nine-year-old Marquis de la Pailleterie was not only treating himself to this lifestyle but sharing it with the thirty-year-old Marie Retou, his housekeeper, to whom he had grown very close.
The marquis gave Thomas-Alexandre sufficient funds to go live on his own in the center of Paris.
* Among the French forces fighting for American independence at the Siege of Savannah, Georgia, in 1779: a batallion of free blacks and men of color from Saint-Domingue that included future French legislator and ex-slave Jean-Baptiste Belley, and future king of Haiti, Henri Christophe.
† New England’s patriots had a fair bit in common with the French nobility on the level of tax grievance—both groups felt overtaxed and underrepresented. But when one looks at tax rates in the British Empire of the 1760s and ’70s, one sees that the New England colonists, the fiercest patriots, were actually among the most lightly taxed of all British subjects. They railed against “taxation without representation,” but even that was not quite accurate, because, given the workings of the British parliamentary system, many royal subjects in England were no better “represented” than the colonists, and they paid much higher taxes. A similar paradox existed in France: nobles were taxed at a lower rate than the rest of the population and, because of the parlement courts, were better “represented” than most other French subjects. Yet they were France’s fiercest patriots, doing as much as any single group to bring on the Revolution.
‡ Britain’s only hope was for its navy to raid neutral ships supplying both the Americans and the French with matériel for their fleets. This hope was dashed in 1780, however, when Catherine the Great of Russia created the “League of Armed Neutrality,” which united every major European power in keeping the American and French shipping lanes open; Prussia, Austria, Holland, and Spain, even the Ottoman Empire, joined the anti-British effort.
6
BLACK COUNT IN THE CITY OF LIGHT
IN the spring of 1784, Thomas-Alexandre moved into his new rooms, on the rue Étienne, in the heart of Paris. He left home precisely as the son of an eighteenth-century marquis should—with a hefty allowance and lodgings just behind the Louvre.
Over the past century, Paris had undergone a vast remodeling. Louis XIV, who had deconstructed medieval Paris as he was constructing Versailles, had taken the first steps: he had new tree-lined boulevards built, where people could promenade and shop, and private gardens and palaces were opened to public use; this was how Thomas-Alexandre could practice his horsemanship in the Tuileries Gardens. And his new apartment was three blocks from an unprecedented real-estate development that symbolized the revitalization of the city, a unique complex of buildings and enormous courtyards called the Palais Royal.
“The Palais-Royal was the heart and soul, the center and preferred meeting place of the aristocracy of Paris,” as one visitor of the time put it. It had originally been the palace of Cardinal Richelieu, who in real life spent more ti
me plotting real-estate deals than assassinations. After his death, the Palais Royal went to the Orléans family, as a gift from Louis XIV, but it wasn’t until the 1770s and ’80s that they would invest the capital necessary to transform it from a private palace into the most vital public space in Paris.
Its colonnaded courtyards were now lined with shops, cafés, taverns, hotels, theaters, bookstores, and public baths. Anything might be bought here. “In a single day and without leaving its precincts one can buy as prodigiously much in the way of luxury goods as one would manage in a year in any other locality,” wrote a visiting marquis in 1786. A dense canopy of ancient chestnut trees provided a natural roof over the complex. Poets and scientists alike read from their works, and one could learn to play the harpsichord or watch demonstrations of mesmerism, then all the rage. The year Thomas-Alexandre moved to his new digs, the Swiss anatomist Philippe Curtius and his niece Marie Tussaud opened an offshoot of their wax museum here, displaying likenesses of Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and various French royals.
In those days, most Parisian cafés didn’t spill into the street but served their customers in great interior rooms with marble-topped tables, gilt walls, mirrors, and chandeliers. But in the Palais Royal, with its large, protected courtyards, the cafés could set up outdoor tables where customers could read or talk amid the throng. Nearby were open-air billiard tables, musicians playing bawdy songs, magic-lantern shows, displays of electromagnetism, and political satires of all kinds—often distributed by freethinking agents of the Duke d’Orléans—mocking the king. Men and women crowded into these courtyards day and night; at the tables sat groups of men in intense discussion on the matters of the day.
Anyone could read what they liked here and argue as loudly as they wished about it. The brilliant thing was that since the Palais Royal belonged to the duke, the entire space was off limits to the Paris police. Only the duke’s own guards held sway within these walls, and the family had given strict instructions to allow the public a long leash. Philosophers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, workmen, and aristocrats all bumped up against one another, and many political clubs of the French Revolution began their debates here. (A little over half a century later, Karl Marx would first meet Friedrich Engels at a Palais Royal café, making this birthplace of eighteenth-century revolution that of twentieth-century revolution as well.)
Perhaps more on Thomas-Alexandre’s mind, even in the age of Enlightenment, was the opportunity for admiring some of the loveliest women in the world. “The chairs, which are placed two or three deep all along the walks, hardly suffice to accommodate all these women who are so beautiful to look at in the waning light and who provide such a varied and tempting feast for the eyes,” a German visitor raved. “The most beautiful, or at least the most elegant, saunter, with a natural grace that marks a Parisian woman, past those lined up along the paths.… The 180 lamps that hang from the 180 arches of the arcades surrounding the gardens, as well as the lights of the cafes, restaurants, and shops, bathe this promenade in a soft glow—a sort of twilight that makes the beautiful still more interesting and even improves what is ordinary. The half-light encourages decency but also desire, as its magical effect seems to fill the air with sensuality.”
Thomas-Alexandre would surely have been conscious of his blackness—a black face in a sea of white—but along with stares of curiosity, the twenty-two-year-old found approving looks meeting his own “brown and mellow” eyes. Sexual adventure was trendy in 1784; the novel everyone had been reading was Les liaisons dangereuses, published two years earlier. The Chevalier de Saint-Georges was said to have known intimately as many fine ladies as its rakish protagonist, the Viscount de Valmont; and even if white divas balked at having an “American” order them about onstage, they might not resist being alone with him in a theater box after dark.
Much as the Palais Royal was the center of fashionable life during the day, the theater was the center of nearly everything else at night. At the Comédie-Française—where the aristocracy was then enjoying Le mariage de Figaro, Beaumarchais’s takedown of all things aristocratic, just released from a three-year censor’s ban—the action was on the stage. But for a rendezvous with a lady, it was better to go to Nicolet’s Theater, in the nearby Boulevard du Temple.* At Nicolet’s you would see women of fashion alongside courtesans, soldiers of ancient families alongside lawyers and public accountants. M. Nicolet had made a name for the place with audacious stunts (memorably replacing a sick leading man with a monkey, who turned out to have been the more impressive talent), but the theater’s real draw was that no place was better than its darkened private boxes for an amorous rendezvous.
Thomas-Alexandre sometimes went to Nicolet’s, and in September 1784 he had a fateful encounter there.
NICOLET’S was always packed—four hundred people in a space not much larger than a small restaurant, lit by torches and flickering tallow candles that gave off a distinct, acrid odor. The fashionable crowd had to take care that the torches didn’t set their wigs on fire.
One evening Thomas-Alexandre was attending a performance, seated in a box with a lady in the flickering candlelight. The lady was later described as “a very beautiful Creole who had quite a reputation at the time”—which was not at all unlikely: white women from the islands were popular in Paris, reputed to possess a perfect combination of beauty and hot-bloodedness. Thomas-Alexandre might have felt a transgressive thrill at escorting such a woman—color lines were stricter for Creole women, who had been living in a world of increasing race legislation, than they were for enlightened Parisiennes—and surely he would have enjoyed company from his homeland.
The risks latent in their encounter suddenly materialized in the shape of a colonial naval officer, who approached them along with two armed companions. They closed in around the couple.
“You are quite beautiful; you have a nice figure and a nice bosom,” Thomas-Alexandre later reported the officer saying, addressing the lady as if she were effectively alone. “I would be pleased to get your address, would you accept mine? Madame is a foreigner; would she like me to take her to Versailles?”
Thomas-Alexandre must have wondered how much of this forwardness was actual flirtation and how much was for his benefit. Given the two armed supporters, the officer’s every utterance seemed meant to goad him into some unwise action.
Thomas-Alexandre recognized the officer, though he may not have known his name: it was Jean-Pierre Titon de Saint-Lamain, an ex-captain from an elite cadre in Martinique. Such men were known to hang around Versailles hoping to move up in the naval hierarchy while boasting of their exotic, dangerous commands, which in truth were often glorified slave-catching operations. But Titon had been a member of an elite grenadier unit, and by the look of him he was trouble.
Did the lady “like Americans?” he asked sneeringly.
In the sworn statement he later gave the police, Thomas-Alexandre said the officer made “a thousand other indecent proposals” to the lady, all the while acting as though Thomas-Alexandre himself were invisible.
As would soon become clear in his letters and his conduct, Thomas-Alexandre did not believe in race as a determinant of character. Moreover, half his family was white—he lived among whites, he had a white father, white friends, white lovers; except for Saint-Georges, his teachers were all white men. There would have been nothing so contemptible to him as this sort of colonial flunky. Since their status and livelihood depended on domination over blacks, all free blacks and mulattos posed a threat to them.
When the lady answered that she did like Americans, the officer congratulated her, his voice dripping sarcasm, and proceeded to make jokes about her choice of escort. At that point Thomas-Alexandre addressed Titon directly.
“Madame is respectable, please leave us alone,” he said. He turned to his date and advised her to ignore the man.
Titon burst into loud, vicious laughter.
“Madame!” he said. “I thought you were with one of your lackey
s!”
Thomas-Alexandre must have ached to reach for his sword. He had been training six hours a day for just such an insult.
“But, my friend, we know what a mulatto is,” Titon said, addressing him directly for the first time. “In your country they put chains on your feet and on your hands. If you dare to say a word, I will have you arrested by the guard and taken to prison. You know who I am.”
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.
