5 
THOUGH Thomas-Alexandre was dark-skinned and clearly of African descent, his looks were not disparaged by his contemporaries; rather, they were admired and celebrated. “One of the handsomest men you could ever meet,” a 1797 profile would declare, whose “interesting physiognomy is accompanied by a gentle and gracious manner.” His “dark—very dark” looks and non-European features were taken not as signs of primitive inferiority—as they would be in nearly every time and place over the next two hundred years—but rather as echoes of antiquity, when the great civilizations had been the melting pots of the ancient world. “His frizzy hair recalls the curls of the Greeks and Romans,” the 1797 profile announced. In this period of neoclassicism, no compliment was higher.
His proportions were those of a Greek hero as well: wide shoulders, a slim waist, and powerful, well-shaped legs. He was “well built at a time when it was an advantage to be well built,” his son would write. “At the time of his marriage … his leg was the same width as my mother’s waist.” (In a reversal of later eras, well-proportioned legs were then far more important for men, who went around in tights or breeches, than for women, whose legs were hidden beneath floor-length gowns.) Thomas-Alexandre was tall—nearly six foot one when the average height was around five and a half feet—and his strength would be compared to Hercules’s, though his hands and feet were said to be as delicate as those of the ladies he escorted about town.
Thomas-Alexandre’s looks were the perfect calling card for an age that regarded a man’s physique as a sign of virtue as well as vigor, and when even a city man spent much of his time on horseback and might dance the evening away with a grace that can today be seen only onstage. His natural gifts allowed him to do all these things as well as or better than youths who had been born to the life.
“In the midst of the elegant youth of that period,” his son would write, “among the Fayettes, the Lameths, the Dillons, the Lauzuns, who were all his companions, my father lived as a true gentleman’s son.” In addition to all the new skills he was picking up, many of the things he’d done as a boy in the Great Cove highlands now stood him in good stead. Though the animals and the terrain were different, the hunt was the favored sport of French gentlemen, being viewed as the best means of staying fit for battle. (It was Louis XVI’s favorite activity, along with tinkering with clocks and door locks.) After a hunt there might be feasting at a neighbor’s château, or even at a palace, where the menu could include a dozen hors d’oeuvres along with as many dishes of fish, fowl, and game and, of course, wines, soups, desserts, dessert soups, and more wines. The setting might be enhanced by waterfalls, topiary gardens, artificial lakes, fireworks, and outdoor theater, with the most beautiful music seeming to rise out of the earth itself, owing to the fashion for concealing orchestras in dug-out pits (the opposite of modern gatherings, where live music adds prestige).
Thomas-Alexandre was living a life that earlier Davys could only have dreamed of. When Antoine was his age, he—like his brothers—had learned swordsmanship not at a fencing academy but at war. None of his own father’s generation had had an income that did any more than maintain the property in Caux.
Antoine fully supported his son’s lavish lifestyle, perhaps in vicarious wish fulfillment. He may also have relished scandalizing his niece’s stuffy husband, the Count de Maulde, whose former fortune Antoine and Thomas-Alexandre were now disposing of as quickly as possible. They had made it to Paris, the capital of the empire, of the world—of everything! Here they drank Dominguan coffee with Dominguan sugar out of cups plated with Peruvian silver and Guinea gold. Here was where all the products of the empire ended up, and here they’d ended up, too.
Thomas-Alexandre could enrapture his hosts with tales of the colonial frontier, of facing down alligators and pirates. Beyond his looks, his grace, and his charm, what may have made him most attractive in this rarefied world was that he was “an American.”
In late-eighteenth-century France, the term “American” was usually used synonymously with “man of color.” He was from the American sugar islands, and was thus a former slave or the son of a slave. Thomas-Alexandre was newly arrived, while the Chevalier de Saint-Georges had left the islands over a quarter century before, but it made no difference: both would always be “Americans” in Paris. The term was laden with implications, of adulation or contempt, but always denoted much more than a birthplace. From 1778 onward, it had a new meaning: “comrade-in-arms.”
A handful of white British colonists living in Paris were also “Americans” (though going strictly by the French definition they were Creoles), and in early February 1778 France entered into a formal alliance with them to help them win their independence from England. The alliance was negotiated by Benjamin Franklin, whom Parisians affectionately nicknamed the “electrical ambassador,” and signed by young King Louis XVI, who thus became, with irony too delicious for anyone to mention, the world’s prime sponsor of antimonarchist insurgency and revolution.
Louis XVI’s government supported the Americans to get back at England for France’s humiliating defeat in the Seven Years’ War—for the loss of French North America and humiliation in French India. To the ministers in Versailles, the American War of Independence was the latest battle in the global war for trade and colonial power that the two countries had been fighting for a century. England had knocked France out of the Americas in 1763. France hoped to return the favor in 1778.
But the aristocratic French officers who volunteered for the American cause—the Marquis de Lafayette being only the most prominent of many—had more personal reasons than geopolitics. There was a certain restlessness, since over a decade of peace had meant few chances to prove one’s mettle; all that training at La Boëssière’s wasn’t meant merely for garden duels. The war in America might be their sole chance for the thrill of battle. Still deeper than their desire for combat was this generation’s desire to experience the exciting political concept the Americans had practically made their own: patriotism.*
To be a “patriot” was all the rage in Paris. And no one admired the American patriots more than the liberal members of the French aristocracy, who saw the proud colonists as standing up to the despotism of George III. The French nobles particularly identified with the American colonists’ “antitax” message.† Like slavery, the American cause had become a metaphor for what Frenchmen felt about their own condition, another proxy for the struggle of the enlightened nobility against the backward monarchy. (This also marked the beginning of the French love/hate relationship with America.)
Suddenly Paris fashion—that bellwether for the French mind—had to be à l’Amérique: tailors manufactured “insurgent coats” and “lightning-conductor dresses” (in honor of Ben Franklin, with two wires hanging to the ground). Hairdressers created coiffures à la Boston and à la Philadelphie. The queen’s milliner created a hat à la John Paul Jones—it featured the kind of showy plume the queen had declared she wanted to stick in the cap of the American naval hero—as well as one that was a fully armed sailing ship, perfect down to the rigging, masts, and cannon, in honor of a recent naval battle with the British. It was a small but telling sign of the growing cognitive dissonance when, by year’s end, the Paris police forbade the name of the newest hairdo—aux insurgents—though not the coiffure itself. This only made the style more popular.
But while Versailles tried to suppress the mere word “insurgent” at home, in its support of insurgency abroad it never looked back. Only the full tonnage and firepower of the French navy made the American Revolution more than a glorious pipedream. While Americans view the Revolutionary War as a conflict fought from Maine to Florida, France actually forced Britain to fight the Revolution as a world war, defending its outposts in India, Jamaica, and Africa. The British had to divert most of their celebrated navy from the American coast to defend against French attacks elsewhere.‡
Thomas-Alexandre and La Boëssière’s other students could follow news of the adventures of France’s finest on the battlefields of Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, and Virginia as the French navy terrorized the British from the West Indies to the Bay of Bengal. And when the young Viscount Louis-Marie de Noailles, a neighbor from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, was given a role by General Washington in negotiating the British surrender at Yorktown (alongside an American negotiator), it was a final emblem of the importance of French aid in winning the American Revolution.
Thus the oldest great monarchy in the West assured the establishment of the first great republic since ancient times. In the process, Versailles bankrupted itself. In 1781 alone, the Crown spent 227 million livres, a huge portion of its budget, on the American cause; its naval costs alone were five times their normal peacetime levels. No one has ever determined exactly how Louis XVI’s government came up with the money, but clearly it involved borrowing on a massive scale.
The peace deal that ended the Revolutionary War was negotiated in Paris, but France got little more for its decisive help than Britain’s return of Senegal. (Owing to some bizarre diplomacy, Spain received far more territory in the New World.) “France retained glory and ruin” from its American adventure, wrote the historian Michelet. The French monarchy’s reputation was never higher than during the celebrations of the Anglo-American treaty in Paris in 1783.
President George Washington hung a full-length portrait of Louis XVI on his wall at Mount Vernon, and American patriotic commemorations featured toasts to the French king as “the protector of the rights of mankind,” as well as to “the Count de Rochambeau and French army.” For some years, the French king’s birthday was even celebrated as one of the United States’ first national holidays.
But there was something fundamentally off kilter about the most powerful monarchy in Europe being feted as the champion of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It was not, as we now say, a sustainable situation.
The musket-toting patriot was the new chivalric knight, tilting at tyrannical redcoats. Fashionable Paris gentlemen joined Le Club de Boston ou des Américains, founded by the Duke d’Orléans, returning from a trip to England in a mood of revolutionary insouciance.
Yet, while the American Revolution would later come to be seen as a model of decorum—mainly because of its contrast with the bloody French Revolution that followed it—men like Lafayette worried that their countrymen would go wrong in revolution not by being too violent but by being too meek. “French affairs are harder to resolve because the people of this country seem in no way ready to turn to extreme measures,” he wrote to Washington. “ ‘Liberty or death’ is not a fashionable motto on this side of the Atlantic.”
Eighteenth-century French intellectuals embraced the American Revolution in much the way twentieth-century French intellectuals would embrace the Russian Revolution and its offshoots—wholeheartedly. Just as their modern counterparts would talk away the oppressions of Communist regimes, so did eighteenth-century French intellectuals defend the new United States against charges—loudest from England, of course—of hypocrisy on the issue of slavery. What did it mean to declare all men free and equal if the patriots continued to keep slaves? Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.
AS Thomas-Alexandre grew up, he spent ever more time in Paris, only a three-hour coach ride away. The City of Light must have offered many temptations after nightfall on its newly lit streets; in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, there were no streetlights at all, whereas Paris sported candlelit lamps and even brand-new oil lamps to defy the dark—even if the idea still outstripped the technology. At a distance the streetlamps “dazzle, but close to give little light, and standing underneath you can hardly see your hand before you,” wrote the memoirist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who recorded his observations throughout the 1780s. Where streetlights failed, there were lanternmen. The lanternmen—numbered, so the police could keep track of them—waited around the doors of townhouses in Paris whenever an entertainment was going on inside, and, for a few coins, one of them would accompany a reveler home, lighting his way even up the stairs and into his room. But, of course, any young gentleman like Thomas-Alexandre had a lackey to do this.
Every Frenchman of any quality had a lackey—a servant who accompanied him everywhere, attending to life’s quotidian details. Dinner guests in the great houses were expected to bring their own lackeys to serve them. Ten guests meant ten lackeys, each pouring wine, ladling soup, and choosing hors d’oeuvres according to his master’s preferences. This custom would not change with the Revolution, and behind even the loftiest French revolutionary was a devoted lackey. Thomas-Alexandre, though he would face every danger fighting for liberty, equality, and fraternity, would never again be without a lackey to take care of the mundane tasks. (When, years later and by then a war hero, he lost his lackey in a storm at sea, he would find himself in a true predicament: facing enemy attack was one thing; arranging his own clothes was quite another.)
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.