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

by Tom Reiss

  Within two years, however, through careful long-distance management, Maulde had the plantation on its way back to a profitable crop. He had also settled with some of Charles’s creditors and begun making plans for the sale of the Bielleville château to pay off the rest. The Pailleterie brothers had left destruction in their wake, but with that generation apparently out of the way, things seemed at last to be looking up for their more respectable heirs.

  THE French military ship the Trésorier dropped anchor in Le Havre, Normandy, in the first week of December 1775. The vessel had sailed from Port-au-Prince, Saint-Domingue, and only one passenger disembarked. He was a rugged man of perhaps sixty, slender yet strapping, with the red-tinged tan of a Viking inured to the sun. He gave his name to the dockside customs official, who duly noted it in his book: “Antoine Delisle.”

  The keeper of the inn where Antoine Delisle stayed that night recalled that, for a stranger, he seemed to know the area remarkably well. Delisle wrote a number of letters from the inn, including one to the Abbé Bourgeois, the priest of the Bielleville estate. The following week he went to meet the Abbé and introduced himself: “I am Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, Father. I have returned from Saint-Domingue.” For proof, he showed the priest his baptismal certificate, inscribed at the little church of Bielleville on February 26, 1714. “You will tell me what has happened and I will give you my instructions. I am the oldest son, the right is mine.”

  The Abbé thought he saw a strong resemblance to the Pailleterie brothers, but he wasn’t sure. A resemblance wasn’t proof, after all. This man could have stolen Alexandre Antoine’s baptismal certificate or acquired it in some other way. But the stranger told him things about Alexandre Antoine’s early life that the Abbé could not imagine anyone else knowing.

  Now convinced the stranger was indeed the rightful heir, the Abbé wrote that night to the Count de Maulde, the man who would be most affected by the prodigal’s return. He was at his family’s estate, in the Champagne region. The Abbé suggested he come at once to Caux.

  The Count de Maulde carefully noted the receipt of the Abbé’s letter, as he did all events, in his family’s account register:

  December 11, 1775, letter from the priest of la Pailleterie, M. Bourgeois, who informs me of the return of M. de la Pailleterie, the eldest brother.

  He crossed out the word “return” and inserted “appearance”—apparition, which in French, as in English, is also used for ghosts and supernatural visions. Maulde promptly replied: he was ready to recognize the return of the eldest Pailleterie brother once he’d met him and seen proof. In the meantime, he would not try to prevent Antoine’s moving into the Bielleville château.

  ANTOINE moved out of the inn and installed himself in the family château in the second week of December 1775. The cold stone building, its many levels united by winding staircases and sloping roofs, must have been a shock after his years in the tropics. It was in poor repair but essentially the same as when he’d left; the primitive sailing boats he and Charles had carved in the stone of their bedroom wall, dreaming of adventures at sea, were still there. The staff was minimal, but the housekeeper, Mademoiselle Marie Retou, a spinster in her early thirties, seemed eager to please. She would take care of him during his first Christmas in France in more than thirty years.

  Antoine’s first official callers were Marie-Anne and Léon de Maulde. He did not treat them graciously. The Mauldes did everything they could to reason with “Uncle Antoine”—they’d sacrificed much to put his deceased brother’s estate in order; they’d been promised a fortune under false pretenses and had since improved the condition of the inheritance—but the businesslike count soon saw the hopelessness of fighting the claims of the resurrected eldest son. He proposed that he and his wife give up all of their previous rights and claims against the estate in exchange for an annuity to help offset their costs. They drafted and signed an agreement with Antoine in March 1776.

  To strengthen his case in any court battles, and perhaps also to satisfy his curiosity, the Count de Maulde decided to investigate Antoine’s mysterious island interlude. Using the connections he’d made while inspecting Charles’s Saint-Domingue properties, Maulde found a retired king’s attorney living in Jérémie, a Monsieur de Chauvinault, to carry out an investigation.

  Chauvinault reported that despite a promising start in the highlands, by the time he left, Antoine’s property was worth little; in fact, the detective identified unpaid debts that Antoine owed on the island worth ten times the value of what he’d owned in Great Cove. Poor Maulde must have marveled at the similarities among the Pailleterie brothers and wondered anew how he could have had the luck to marry into a family of such thoroughgoing scoundrels.

  Unlike his brother’s affairs, however, Antoine’s had not been primarily financial. So Chauvinault concentrated on uncovering and clarifying the prodigal’s sexual relations and his possible offspring. He first reported on Antoine’s relationship with Catin, the slave girl who’d fled with him from Charles’s plantation; Antoine had ended it when he found her too old but, Chauvinault noted, had allowed her to live out her life as a free woman.

  Chauvinault then reported on Antoine’s purchase, in the late 1750s, of a beautiful black woman named Marie Cessette, for whom he’d paid that “exorbitant price,” implying some unusual interest in her. From then onward, in fact, “he had always lived with her [and had with her] four mulatto children.” Before Antoine’s return to France, Chauvinault reported, he had sold three of his children, as well as Marie Cessette herself, to an M. Carron, of Nantes.†

  The detective also brought the interesting news that Antoine’s fourth child, a boy who was said to be his favorite, had not been sold along with the others. This boy was “a young mulatto who, it is said, was sold at Port au Prince,” Chauvinault wrote, “conditionally, with the right of redemption, to Captain Langlois, for 800 livres, which served as the passage of Sir Delisle to France.”

  Arriving at the dock in Port-au-Prince, Antoine might simply have found he needed extra to pay his passage and sold his remaining son to buy it without a second thought. It would have been the final selfish gesture of a man who’d only ever looked out for his pleasures—as if, having sold off his lovers and children one by one, Antoine had kept his favorite mulatto son as one might keep a precious ring in one’s shoe, to be sold in case of emergency. But such an interpretation is belied by the crucial detail in Chauvinault’s description: The sale of the boy had been carried out “conditionally, with the right of redemption.”

  Antoine may have sold the rest of his family outright, but he had pawned his son Thomas-Alexandre. Restored to his title and property in France, he could now redeem the pledge.

  THOMAS-ALEXANDRE Dumas Davy de la Pailletrie, fourteen, stepped onto the dock in Le Havre on August 30, 1776. He was listed in the ship’s manifest as “the slave Alexandre,” belonging to a “Lieutenant Jacques-Louis Roussel.” This was a necessary ruse, because a young mulatto could not simply walk off a boat into France by himself. Antoine had bought back his son’s freedom from Captain Langlois and paid for his safe passage to Normandy in the company of an “owner.”

  Life in a Norman château must have been astonishing for a young man who had just been a slave in Port-au-Prince. And the new marquis’s dark-skinned son must have equally been a surprise for the mostly blond, blue-eyed villagers of Bielleville. But the first mention I found of Thomas-Alexandre in France—in a badly torn letter from November 1776, from the Abbé Bourgeois to the Count de Maulde—referred to him offhandedly. The Abbé was more concerned with letting Maulde know of Antoine’s apparent love affair with the housekeeper, Mademoiselle Retou, which threatened the estate with a marriage. “Monsieur and dear lord,” the Abbé wrote:

  I want to be the first to tell you that Monsieur your uncle envisages to augment the household with a live-in companion. He seemed to me uncompromising, declaring that he was free to do what he thought fit. Everything he [does] is in the worst
possible taste. M. le Marquis seems determined to marry the girl and will not let anyone joke about it ([Another man] joked a little about that girl the other day—[the Marquis] de la Pailleterie didn’t utter a word).… It is said that young Thomas has reached Le Havre, new inhabitant for Bielleville … (I write all this down for you only because you asked me to, but I hope you will only use it if the occasion requires it because I heard that he is mad at me.) Please burn this letter.

  Having redeemed Thomas-Alexandre, Antoine decided to pawn the family estate.

  He refused to honor the various commitments he had made to the Mauldes, and now the widow of Louis de la Pailleterie took all the parties to court to gain her piece of the pie before Antoine could consume it. Antoine’s nephew-in-law and niece found themselves in the midst of a fierce legal battle with the previous generation.

  Antoine, for his part, had come back from the jungle in a litigious mood. He seemed to relish every battle against the various members of his family. He won the right to call himself the Marquis de la Pailleterie, plus the right to the château and its land—while cleverly keeping most of the estate’s debts at arm’s length. In February 1777, Antoine flipped the main house of the estate, in a complicated deal, for a 10,000-livre annual annuity, to be paid to him by his now furious nephew-in-law, and he forked over the rest—lands, fief, seigneurie, farms, and château—to a Monsieur Bailleul, a neighboring landowner, for a cool 67,000 livres. (The young Count de Maulde lamented his plight to everyone, complaining in one letter, “Never has fortune persecuted anyone as cruelly as me.”)

  Meanwhile, Antoine bought himself and his son new outfits of silk, satin, and brocade and went house hunting. He also took Thomas-Alexandre to a baptism, where the young man signed the witness book—the first existing sample of his handwriting—as “Thomas Retoré, the natural son of Monsieur le Marquis de la Pailleterie who had been living in Saint-Domingue.” It may have been a sign of his disorientation that he used the name “Retoré,” which was perhaps picked up from a neighbor in Jérémie (where the name can be found on official records of the period).

  In the fall of 1778, cash in hand, Antoine and his son moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a small city on the western side of Paris. In some ways like an elegant suburb, Saint-Germain-en-Laye had been an aristocratic enclave in the time of the Sun King, not unlike a satellite Versailles, with its own royal palace. But in the mid-1700s, it had transformed into one of France’s richest and fastest-growing small cities, thanks to an influx of industrious merchants and educated professionals, along with laborers and artisans to serve them. There could hardly have been a more pleasant place to live, with fresh country air, a reasonable coach ride to Paris, and magnificent strolling along the tiered steps of cliffside royal gardens.

  With his son, Antoine brought along one other person from Normandy to his new life of luxury—the housekeeper, Mademoiselle Retou. The unlikely trio rented rooms in a townhouse on the rue de l’Aigle d’Or, “the Street of the Golden Eagle”—a fitting name, because of the golden eagles in the Davy de la Pailleterie coat of arms. The street was a winding, narrow passage of townhouses and shops close to Saint-Germain-en-Laye’s palace and gardens.

  It was also a short walk from the academy of the royal fencing teacher, Nicolas Texier de La Boëssière, where Antoine enrolled his son in his first formal lessons. Along with swordsmanship, the school instructed young men of quality in all facets of their intellectual, physical, and social development, providing the equivalent of a top secondary school education.

  Antoine had legally recognized his son just before their move, so the boy now had the right to call himself Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie. Since Antoine was a marquis, “the slave Alexandre” was now a count.

  Life in the French capital was complicated for a young mulatto aristocrat, and, as Thomas-Alexandre would shortly discover, he was alone neither in his unlikely fortune nor in the risks that increasingly accompanied it. Other mixed-race men were living in the land of the Bourbons. Some had wealth and noble titles; others had neither. Powers around the king had taken note of these persons—who, no matter how powdered or disguised, could not be taken as native Frenchmen—and they were not pleased.

  * Monte Cristo—sometimes spelled “Monte Christo”—included a small port city, a shoreline, a mountain, and a river. It still exists on maps of the area. The island of “Monte Cristo”—which Charles seems to have also used in his smuggling schemes—lay just off the coast, conveniently inside Spanish colonial waters.

  † Future legal documents, notably Thomas-Alexandre’s marriage certificate, contradict the investigator’s conclusion about Marie Cessette. They state that she died “in La Guinodée, close to Jérémie,” in 1772. No cause of death was given, but many died in the devastating hurricanes of 1772, which destroyed countless plantations in Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, and Cuba. The novelist Dumas, in his memoirs, only states that Antoine’s “wife, to whom he had been warmly attached, had died in 1772; and as she managed the estate it deteriorated in value daily after her death.” He implies that Marie Cessette’s death was a cause of Antoine’s decision to return to France. I have scoured every record and found no concrete evidence of her fate. Strikingly Thomas-Alexandre himself never mentioned his mother, at least in no document or letter I could find.

  4

  “NO ONE IS A SLAVE IN FRANCE”

  UNTIL Antoine sold him to buy his passage, Thomas-Alexandre had rarely been away from his father. He was accustomed to Jérémie parish, where mixed-race businesspeople outnumbered whites and his father played the role of a modest, unassuming farmer. Now he found himself in the opposite situation. The man he’d known as a tough, cautious recluse was suddenly rich, titled, and carefree. There is no evidence that Antoine ever thought again about his other children, but he now seemed determined to give his remaining son every advantage, to turn him into a fashionable young count.

  Thomas-Alexandre had missed crucial phases of an aristocrat’s upbringing: early lessons with a governess followed by intensive tutoring and academy study, so as to be, by age ten or eleven, well versed in Latin, Greek, geography, history, grammar, philosophy, literature, and mathematics, along with dancing, a musical instrument, fencing, and riding. The idea was to give a nobleman, by the time he reached manhood at thirteen, all the skills he would ever want to shine both à la ville et à la cour—“in town and at court,” as the expression went. Thomas-Alexandre was nearly sixteen when they moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and he set about making up for lost time.

  Mornings at La Boëssière’s were dedicated to academics, followed by afternoons on horseback at the vast salle du manège, the riding hall in the Tuileries Gardens, and then fencing in the academy’s salle d’armes, the “hall of arms” decorated with antique weapons and heraldic insignia. Thomas-Alexandre was an extraordinarily graceful athlete and excelled at all the physical arts. But he truly shone at the art for which the academy was best known. And it was here that he probably first met the mysterious swordsman, polymath, and fellow mixed-race aristocrat who would introduce him to the world of combat.

  The Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a man of middling height and athletic build, was around thirty-five when Thomas-Alexandre came to La Boëssière’s. Proudly elegant, he dressed in the finest clothing—silk breeches, cape, brocade vest—even when not at court. His skin was light, and made lighter by his habit of powdering it. He wore white wigs and rouged his lips in the high court style of Louis XV.

  This mulatto gentleman could powder and dress as he liked, however, because he was acknowledged to be the greatest swordsman in Europe. Over the previous decade and a half, every white champion had stepped up to try to beat Saint-Georges; except for one Italian, who fought him under exceptional circumstances, they all failed.

  Saint-Georges was born Joseph Boulogne on the small sugar island of Guadeloupe, in 1745, to a wealthy white father, likely a royal finance officer, and a free black mother named Nanon. Like Antoine, Joseph’s father
became a fugitive, in his case after he was accused of murder. He fled the island for France and was condemned to death in absentia. Less than two years later, however, he received a royal pardon, and he returned to Guadeloupe to collect his son. When Joseph was thirteen, his father enrolled him at La Boëssière’s, where his fencing skill immediately announced a prodigy.

  A crack shot and a great equestrian to boot, Saint-Georges had become an honorary member of the king’s guard—allowed to take the title of “chevalier,” essentially a knight—as a result of avenging a racist insult. A decade followed during which he became the heavyweight champion of the blade. But then the Chevalier de Saint-Georges changed course and decided to devote himself to music. Proclaimed almost as great a violin virtuoso as he was a fencer—he’d likely played since he was a boy in Guadeloupe—he turned to composing and conducting and received the patronage of Marie-Antoinette, fierce Austrian music snob that she was, who proclaimed him the only maestro in her adopted land worth listening to.

  The chevalier’s multiple talents were well summed up by John Adams, visiting Paris in 1779: The “mulatto man,” wrote the future American president, “is the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing, music. He will hit a button on the coat or waistcoat of the masters. He will hit a crown piece in the air with a pistoll [sic] ball.” The chevalier eventually hit a racial ceiling. When he was nominated managing director of the new Royal Academy of Music and director of the Paris Opera, three of the Opera’s divas submitted a letter to the queen protesting that their honor would never allow them to be directed by a mulatto.