3 
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 successful 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, the 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.”
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.