The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

by Tom Reiss

  The colony so notorious for its treatment of black slaves was producing a mulatto cultural elite. Beyond the arts and entertainment, it also produced mixed-race businesspeople, plantation owners, lawyers, philosophers, and orators. In the 1780s, one of these men, Julien Raimond, moved to Paris and became a leading advocate for the rights of free blacks of the era, despite being the owner of hundreds of slaves.

  But just as this new, racially complex society was flowering into being, the white colonists decided to fight back in a disturbingly modern way. While colonial racism against slaves was motivated by contempt and fear of rebellion, the backlash against Saint-Domingue’s free people of color was spurred by a different motive: jealousy.

  Since free people of color had come to dominate in fashion, culture, and commerce, racists tried to pass laws forcing them back to modesty, including the following ordinance (from 1779) about fashion: “We expressly forbid [the free people of color] to affect through their clothing, hairstyles, dress or apparel, a reprehensible assimilation of the way in which white men or women attire themselves.… Likewise we forbid them all objects of luxury on their exterior that are incompatible with the simplicity of their condition and origin, on pain of being stripped of them on the spot.”

  In 1773, the colonial court banned nonwhites from using “white” names. Thenceforward, people of mixed blood would have to take African names. The reason for the new law, according to the court, was that “the usurped name of a white race can place the status of persons in doubt, throw the order of successions into confusion, and ultimately destroy this insurmountable barrier between the whites and the people of color that public opinion has set up, and which the Government’s wisdom maintains.”

  Along with this chilling white backlash and the use of mulatto police and soldiers against fugitive slaves, the increasing number of mulatto slaveholders was also driving a violent wedge between the black and the mixed-race communities. After a brief flowering, and despite the utopian predictions of those like Raimond, Saint-Domingue’s multicultural society was producing glimpses of a far darker unraveling around the corner.

  MEANWHILE, Thomas-Alexandre had spent his first decade of life on a farm on a tropical mountainside with his black slave mother, his mysterious Norman father, and three mixed-race siblings. He played in bamboo thickets and creeper trees and chased feral animals like a buccaneer. One day, in another world, he would tell his own son about his life in the tropics and make it sound like a wonderland, and so it must have seemed, in retrospect:

  I remember hearing my father recount that one day, returning home from town when he was ten years old, he saw to his great surprise a sort of tree trunk lying by the sea. He hadn’t noticed it in passing the same place two hours before; so he amused himself by gathering pebbles and throwing them at the log; but all of a sudden, as the pebbles made contact, the log woke up. It was nothing less than a caiman [close cousin of an alligator] sleeping in the sun.

  Caimans, it seems, wake up in a foul mood; the one in question glimpsed my father and took it upon himself to run after him.

  My father, a true child of the colonies, a son of the beaches and savannas, ran well; but it would seem that the caiman ran or rather jumped even better than he did, and this adventure might well have left me in limbo forever if a negro, who was eating sweet potatoes astride a wall, had not seen what was happening and shouted to my father, already out of breath:

  “Serpentine, little sir! Serpentine!”—a style of locomotion altogether contrary to the system of the caiman, which can only run straight ahead, or jump like a lizard.

  Thanks to this advice, my father arrived home safe and sound; but, he arrived, like the Greek from Marathon, panting and breathless, and nearly, like him, never to rise again.

  This race in which the beast was the hunter and the man the hunted, left a profound impression on my father’s mind.

  Island life no doubt honed Thomas-Alexandre’s natural skills. A nineteenth-century military biographer attributed his legendary horsemanship, which would allow him to fight on horseback on the steepest embankments and the narrowest bridges, to the way he first learned to ride—“as one learns in those new countries, where a man is called to tame the animal that he will use, where vigor and agility replace the knowledge that is later acquired in the riding school.”

  But apart from the land and the wild animals, Thomas-Alexandre had his father. Antoine was a rogue, but he was an educated one. Though no great scholar, he knew the literature and history of the Romans and Greeks, and his training as an artillery officer gave him more than a passing knowledge of science and mathematics. Perhaps he took his tall and handsome son to the theater and opera in nearby Jérémie; in just a few short years, Thomas-Alexandre would move easily in Paris society, admired for his grace and polished manners. The ex-soldier could certainly teach his son basic skills in riding and shooting and, most important of all to an eighteenth-century man, defending oneself with a blade.

  Holding his old military saber, Antoine could tell tales of their Norman ancestors and of his own experiences in the wars, and of how the Duke de Richelieu stabbed the Prince de Lixen to death before his eyes. But what must the fair-skinned old man have felt, teaching his half-black son to duel like a young musketeer, darting in and out of the mangrove trees, glimpsing a talent for fighting that the family had not produced before, at least not in living memory? It was a talent that was about to become more significant than either of them could have imagined.

  * The word “buccaneer” originated in a native people’s term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn’t board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.

  † Another paradox: Issued the same year that Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and banished Protestants from France, the Code Noir closely intertwined religious and racial regulations. It said all French slaves must be baptized Roman Catholic; it legislated anti-Semitic measures, ordering colonial officials to “expel all the Jews who have established residences from our isles,” and it banned the public practice of any non-Catholic religion by either masters or slaves.

  ‡ Eventually, the increasing role free people of color played in the fight against fugitive slaves would cause a permanent poisoning of relations between mulattos and blacks; to this day, the port city of Jérémie remains remote and isolated from the rest of the country, not only because of its geography, but because of its strong mulatto and mixed-race heritage, which does not fit neatly into the identity and mythology of modern Haiti.

  § In the 1970s sociologists doing research in Haiti stumbled on a remnant of the eighteenth-century theater culture: though nearly two hundred years had passed, some local voodoo ceremonies showed unmistakable influences of the commedia dell’arte style. The sociologists noted this in the styles of improvisation, use of accents, costumes, and audience participation. When they looked at voodoo ceremonies from regions that had not had European theaters in the eighteenth century, as a control group, they found that these adhered strictly to traditional styles of voodoo still found in Africa. The sociologists wrote up their findings, dissecting the parallels between stock commedia characters and the local voodoo gods used in the ceremonies—Scaramouche and Ogu; prima donna and Ezili; Harlequin and Guède; Pantaloon and Papa Legba.

  3

  NORMAN CONQUEST

  IN the early 1750s, just when his rapidly increasing wealth allowed him to buy his plantation outright, Charles Davy de la Pailleterie was beset by that scourge of eighteenth-century prosperity—gout. His doctors told him the Caribbean climate was worsening the condition and he would be better-off returning to France. So, leaving his plantation and its more than two hundred slaves in the care of administrators, Charles and his wife and teenage daughter, Marie-Anne, sailed for Normandy.

  For a time they moved in with Charles’s parents at the Pailleterie château in Bielleville. The marquis and marquise were gratified at the return of their s
uccessful son, who, after all, had been sending them money. There was nothing better, in eighteenth-century France, than having a planter in the family.

  Charles’s father told him about a recent money squabble over a strongbox full of coins that had been found in the château, hidden inside a straw mattress. The marquis’s widowed sister claimed that she’d hidden the money and that it was hers. The marquis disputed her claim. A notary was brought in to resolve the matter, and when he asked Charles’s aunt if she’d hidden the coins herself, she admitted she had not. But then the elderly lady suddenly threw herself bodily on top of the strongbox, crying and kicking and forcing the notary to struggle with her to regain control of it. As she did, it was recorded, the widow “hit and bit a witness.” This was a vivid illustration of how things might go in the Pailleterie family when issues of inheritance arose.

  After the deaths of the marquis and, a short time later, the marquise, though Antoine was next in line, Charles moved in to assert his claim to be the oldest living Pailleterie brother. As a court document later stated:

  not knowing whether their older brother existed, in which country of the universe he could be if he did, and allowed by a silence of [so many] years to believe he was dead, [the two younger brothers] divided between them the revenues of the estate in accordance with the customs of the region. Charles Edouard then assumed all the advantages that the law accords to the eldest son.

  As the new Marquis Davy de la Pailleterie, Charles settled into the ancestral château and all the property that came with it, while about a quarter of the rents and property went to the youngest brother, Louis. In short order Charles managed to get himself presented at Versailles and befriended powerful aristocrats such as the Marquis de Mirabeau (father of the revolutionary orator). He used his sugar plantation to secure loans and guarantees with which he began buying French real estate, and he borrowed ever larger sums to finance a lavish lifestyle.

  But even as his fortunes rose, Charles knew that the plantation was doing badly. The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War and its English embargo had wreaked havoc on colonial shipping; exports had slowed to the point where he lost tens of thousands of livres’ worth of cane to spoilage. Large quantities of refined sugar were sitting around his storehouse, unable to be shipped. The business was in serious trouble. Yet with powerful new friends and his new title, Charles seems to have felt he was well equipped to fund a venture that promised to relieve his difficulties.

  Whatever else they lacked, men in the Pailleterie—and, later, the Dumas—family never wanted for daring. War might have cut off official traffic between French and British colonies, but it hadn’t reduced Europe’s demand for sugar or the colonies’ demand for slaves. Charles devised a scheme to smuggle “white sugar of the highest quality” out of his plantations in Saint-Domingue to New York. The ships would sail down the Atlantic coast flying British colors but enter Saint-Domingue waters with a set of blank passports from Versailles obtained through Charles’s court connections. Charles formed a partnership with a French shipping magnate and a pair of Dutch brothers, based out of Amsterdam and New York.

  Charles’s smuggling scheme made use of a wharf located on a stretch of coastline just north of his Saint-Domingue plantations, which straddled the border of the French and Spanish colonies and was thus neutral territory. The place was called Monte Cristo.*

  The plan went well at first, and Charles sent at least one load of pure white sugar from Monte Cristo to Amsterdam. But the waters were crawling with English ships, and the journey became fraught with risk. Eventually, the partners grew impatient and soured on the scheme, which had not made them as rich as fast as they had hoped and required them to trust one another with large sums of money over long distances.

  In May 1760, Charles traveled to London—incognito, via Amsterdam, since France and England were still at war—to meet with a British banker from whom he was seeking capital to expand his smuggling business. But then someone suggested to Charles a new venture might bring greater profits than sugar smuggling: slave trading.

  Charles asked his business manager to look into the costs and benefits of buying “pieces of India,” as slaves were known (a term of barter), “from the Gold Coast or Angola” and selling them in Saint-Domingue. Evidently getting a good report, not long afterward Charles formed a partnership with a captain who had been working for the Foäche brothers, Stanislas and Martin, who were among the biggest shipowners in Normandy, having converted nineteen of their ninety-one ships into slavers. The Foäche brothers were the pinnacle of eighteenth-century slave-and-sugar wealth—at one point, they actually lent the king over one million livres for the administration of Saint-Domingue—and it was Charles’s great aspiration to enter their league.

  Charles bought a ship, and in a sign that he had no guilt whatsoever about his new enterprise, he rechristened it in honor of his daughter. The Douce Marianne sailed to British Sierra Leone, carrying, among other things, 225 bottles of champagne and 300 bottles of hard cider, and then picked up “300 captives at the Factory of Miles Barber from Lancaster.” (“Factories” were slave-wholesaling outposts, often on islands near the West African coast.)

  Trading slaves could bring big profits fast but huge losses if something went wrong. And, as had happened to all of Charles’s ventures since he’d begun life as a high aristocrat, something went very wrong. The ship’s supercargo, whom Charles had hired to travel to Sierra Leone to buy the slaves, turned out to be a volatile type; off the African coast, he got into a fight with the captain of the Douce Marianne and helped the crew to mutiny, locking the captain in his cabin. (After a few weeks, they transferred him to a small shed on deck, where they kept him locked up for three months.) Meanwhile the crew turned the ship into a debauched party, drinking and eating much of the supplies and abusing the slave women. They sailed to Martinique, against Charles’s express orders, where they sold some of the slaves for their own profit. Records show that they ended up delivering less than half the original cargo to their destination in Saint-Domingue. Charles’s first slaving venture was a bust.

  One can only imagine the human suffering implied in the ship’s fate. But to Charles it meant only that another business venture had increased his debt rather than his wealth. He tried again, but the second voyage of the Douce Marianne, though mutiny-free, was equally unprofitable. Charles’s slaving operation was considered contemptible even by the low standards of the slaving business: Stanislas Foäche described him and his staff as “demanding, unjust, and ignorant of the business they’re engaged in.” And the magnate added, “His plantations could produce 600 metric tons of white sugar, [but] he’s found the secret to making only 200. His workshops are in a terrible state.” Foäche summed up the problem of working with Charles: “We will lose a lot of blacks.”

  In a perverse sense, it was appropriate that Charles named his slave ship after his daughter, for his most pressing need for cash was to pay back the ridiculous sums of money he had borrowed to cut a figure in society in the buildup to Marie-Anne’s wedding. Her fiancé, a young count named Léon de Maulde, was from a nobler family than the Pailleteries, and he himself believed he was marrying new money that would help him pay off his family’s debts.

  Marie-Anne de la Pailleterie married Count Léon de Maulde in the chapel of Saint-Sulpice on May 4, 1764. As the notices in the Gazette de France make clear, her wedding was a major social affair, with the cream of French society in attendance. Her dowry included diamonds, sumptuous clothes, buildings, and hundreds of thousands in promised cash. The marriage contract was duly signed by the king and all the members of the royal family.

  But Charles’s debts overwhelmed his assets, and some of the great men at the wedding—notably his patron, Mirabeau—would soon become his angriest creditors. Charles returned to slaving in the hope of hitting it big. He staked his daughter’s future—and his own—on the slave ship bearing her name.

  “All your creditors are ready to attack,” his son-in-law, th
e Count de Maulde, wrote from Paris in the spring of 1773. By that point Charles had moved back to Saint-Domingue, hoping to take his properties there in hand. But his plantation was in a dire state, with “houses, stables, and processing equipment” collapsing, one of Charles’s managers wrote. “Forty-five of his negroes are sick and the others are pushed to the limit because they lack food and yet are forced to work. There are many dead for these two reasons.”

  As if ceding to fate, Charles himself collapsed—in a house he had bought in Le Cap to be close to his plantation—and, succumbing to complications of gout, died. Stanislas Foäche, for one, mourned his passing by noting: “M. de la Pailleterie just died, fortunately for his family, because he put his business in the greatest disorder.”

  Three months after Charles’s death, Louis de la Pailleterie, still a soldier, was caught up in a scandal involving selling defective weapons to the French army. His reputation ruined, he spent fifteen days in a military prison and a month later, he, too, dropped dead.

  The novelist Dumas would one day borrow features from both of his uncles, not to mention his grandfather, the acknowledged scoundrel, in fashioning the central villains of The Count of Monte Cristo. Reading court documents detailing the sordid unraveling of Charles’s sham fortune, which would have devastating effects on his daughter and her unsuspecting husband, I couldn’t help thinking that one of the interesting things about Dumas’s villains is that, while greedy and unprincipled themselves, they produce children who can be innocent and decent. This was something that the writer understood very well from his own family.

  With two Pailleterie brothers dead and Antoine missing and presumed dead, the title and property—along with the mountains of debt—passed to Marie-Anne and her husband. All the illustrious folk who’d been at their wedding now came to call as creditors, demanding that the estate pony up; the Marquis de Mirabeau claimed Charles had signed documents that meant he must be “first in line” among the Pailleteries’ creditors. The Count de Maulde estimated that his wife had inherited a quantity of debts that only the sale of her entire estate could match. He arranged for one of Charles’s former agents in Saint-Domingue to assess the plantation, but received a dispiriting report: “[The] possessions are deteriorated, the slave houses fall into ruin, the cane fields are almost abandoned, the slaves are out of serviceable condition. It is a terrible picture.”