6 
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 time 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 lackeys!”
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.
According to his own written account, Thomas-Alexandre broke free of the guards and Titon and his men and returned to his box. Thomas-Alexandre writes that the lady fled the scene. Without his audience, Titon told the guards to release Thomas-Alexandre. But he was not quite finished with his game.
“You are free! I give you pardon and you may go!” he called loudly, in a parody of manumission.
At that point, a police marshal finally approached to take both men into custody for disturbing the peace.
The details survive in both of their sworn statements, given to the Paris police the following day on parchments dated September 15, 1784. Thomas-Alexandre’s, written in his own hand, as was the custom then, and in first person, recounted the events with surprising candor, while Titon’s is written in the third person with a haughty chill. “Sir Titon de St. Lamain, formerly commander of the battalion at the fort St. Pierre Martinique where he owns a residence, and is currently attached to the infantry in France, is honored to explain that he was yesterday at the show of Mr. Nicolet with two of his friends, and that he noticed a demoiselle sitting in the box next to the bench he was sitting on. Which gave him the opportunity to strike up a conversation with her and after a few ordinary compliments Sir Titon was exchanging with the said demoiselle, a mulatto sitting next to her started getting involved.” “Sir Titon” records that he was forced to call the guard because of the mulatto’s “impertinence”—but, being a magnanimous type, he then forgave him.
The novelist Dumas was obsessed with the encounter at Nicolet’s throughout his life, and his father certainly never forgot it; he must have told his future wife the story, and probably his intimate friends knew of it. I had first read about the incident many years ago, in my childhood copy of Alexandre Dumas’s memoirs. Until now that was the only version that was known, and it ended completely differently from the police documents I found.
The novelist’s version begins to depart from the police statements when Dumas has the grenadier officer say, “Oh, I beg your pardon, I took monsieur for your lackey.” From there it goes on:
This bit of insolence was no sooner uttered than the impertinent musketeer launched, as if from a catapult, and crashed into the middle of the orchestra pit.
This unexpected descent produced a great tumult in the crowd.
It was a matter of interest not only to the falling man but to those onto whom he fell.
In those days the orchestra was standing room only, consequently there was no need to get up; the section turned towards the box from which the musketeer had been hurled.
My father, who was awaiting the consequences that such an affair would naturally have, left the box at that instant to wait for his adversary in the corridor. But instead he found a police officer.
Dumas not only makes his father triumph handily; he also makes the incident comic by having the bad guy land in the crowd.
I had always liked this scene, as terse and satisfying as a page from a picaresque novel. But, having read the police dossier—along with thousands of other documents relating to the society in which Thomas-Alexandre lived—I would now say that this action-hero account is perhaps the most misleading thing Dumas ever wrote about his father.
But beyond the memoir, Dumas would use the story’s basic dynamic over and over. His novel Georges directly addressed a mixed-race man’s lifelong struggle in the aftermath of a similar slight: its hero receives training very similar to Thomas-Alexandre’s at La Boëssière’s with the sole idea of returning to confront the white colonials who long ago insulted him and his family. The Count of Monte Cristo describes Edmond Dantès’s planning, in his dungeon cell, to avenge himself against not one but many persecuting villains. And, of course, the character of the hotheaded d’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers draws on Thomas-Alexandre’s youthful dishonoring at Nicolet’s. Like him, d’Artagnan is from country nobility and he is certainly an outsider in Paris. Even so, he is a white man and thus, no matter how poor or provincial, can fight for his honor with abandon, deliriously.
In Dumas’s memoir of the Nicolet incident, the novelist omits all reference to his father’s race. And by dropping the fact that his assailant was a colonial officer he buries the racial aspect still deeper.† The slight becomes the same slight the provincial d’Artagnan constantly encounters—because of his clothes or his manner, mistaken for someone of a lower social rank. Slights can be so subtle, in fact, that, as the novel has it, the proud young Gascon considers “every smile an insult, and every glance as a provocation.”
But what made Thomas-Alexandre an outsider was anything but subtle; despite liberty unimaginable outside France and despite the Parisian frivolity and license, he still lived in invisible shackles. Miraculously, within a decade, his shackles would be broken, in a France transformed by the orgy of emancipation that was the French Revolution. From his late twenties on, he would never again need to brook an insult from a white man without reaching for his sword.
THOMAS-ALEXANDRE signed his police statement “Dumas Davy,” that fusion of mother’s and father’s names which he hadn’t used since his first year in France. The incident was officially put to rest; the marshals wrote out a declaration certifying their acceptance of both his statement and Titon’s and, along with a bit of legalese directed at preventing any possible future duels between the parties, were content to let the matter drop. The blessed inefficiency of the kingdom ensured that the man of color was not charged with violating the Police des Noirs and remanded to the naval police, technically in charge of such violations, for lacking proper registration. Given Sir Titon’s extensive connections in the Naval Ministry, he could have made good his threat to have Thomas-Alexandre arrested, perhaps even sent to a depot and deported, but Titon chose not to persecute his victim further. Instead Thomas-Alexandre walked out a free man.
Still, the first record we have of his voice is in a police report.
* The Boulevard du Temple served as a raucous, downmarket extension of the Palais Royal. It was named not after a house of worship but a cavernous fortress that had once been the original European headquarters of the Knights Templar. In the 1790s, at the height of the Terror, the fortress would be turned into a prison, where Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and their family would endure abusive treatment while awaiting execution—and where the lost boy-king, the unfortunate Louis XVII, would meet his mysterious end.
† It was an odd late-eighteenth-century radicalizing trope that the class consciousness of future French revolutionaries was often awakened by being insulted at the theater. It happened to both Robespierre, founder of the Jacobins, and Brissot, founder of the Girondins, the leading competing group. Both were involved as young men in altercations in theaters with arrogant aristocrats—though more simply, in fights over seating, not involving women.