The Dumas Lineage

&emdash, The project to set up a statue in memory of Napoleon’s general, Alexandre Dumas, first of the name, has brought to light the curious account of his family origin written by Dumas the second, the novelist. The latter had the details at first hand from his father, the general, whose recollections in turn went back to his own no less fighting father, the Marquis de la Pailleterie, who married Louise Cessette Dumas, a “ colored lady,” in San Domingo. Such lives gave natural birth to the novel of adventure.

The marquis began his career of arms as first gentleman of the Prince de Conti, He was a comrade, at the siege of Philipsburg in 1738, of the famous Duc de Richelieu, who was the dean of the marshals of France fifty years later, just before the Revolution turned the gentlemen of France into émigrés or dashing soldiers of Bonaparte. The duke, who was fourteen years older than the young marquis, was a simple Vignerod by his father ; but the title which came to him from his great-great-grandmother, the sister of the cardinal, had already allowed him to marry twice into the noblest families of the old régime, first a Noailles, and secondly Mademoiselle deGui.se. The latter alliance connected him with the imperial house of Austria, and made him cousin of the princes of Pont and of Lixen, who were also taking part in the siege. The duke was no drawing-room soldier, and was one day returning, covered with sweat and mud, from working in the trenches, when he met the two princes airing along the highway the insolence of a race centuries older than his own. He saluted as he galloped past, but the Prince of Lixen called after him.

“So it’s you, my cousin. Well, you ’re very dirty. But you ’re a little less so than you were before you married my cousin.”

The duke at once got down from his horse, asked the marquis who was his companion to do the same, and approached the prince ceremoniously.

“ Sir, you have done me the honor of addressing me ? ”

“ Yes, Monsieur le Duc.”

“I have, perhaps, ill understood what you have done me the honor of saying to me. Will you be pleased to repeat the same words without changing a syllable ? ”

The prince bowed and repeated what he had said before. There was but one thing to be done. The duke saluted and put his hand to his sword. The prince did the same. The marquis stood as second for his friend, and the Prince of Pont for his brother. In a minute’s time the terrible duke had run his sword through the body of the luckless Prince of Lixen, who fell back dead in his brother’s arms. The scandal of this summary vindication of the honor of new blood against the insolence of race did not prevent the steady advancement of one of whom France had need. The duke became the dreaded marshal, but it was forty-five years before he could repay the marquis, -in the person of his son, for the service rendered in this unforeseen duel. It was on the occasion of another duel, less bloody, but even more startling in its cause, which went back to the intervening existence of the father.

The Marquis de la Pailleterie had done little as a soldier, and he scarcely mended his fortunes by following the court. About 1760 he resolved to turn his back on France, and sold out all the property he could lay his hands on. It was a time of colonial speculation, and he used the proceeds to buy an immense tract of land near Cape Rose. There he married his colored wife, whom he seems to have loved sincerely. Although their son, the future general, is commonly set down as a mulatto, she can hardly have been a full-blooded negress. She certainly had the education and energy to take charge of all the details of the marquis’s property ; and when she died in 1772, he frankly recognized his own incapacity to continue without her. Doubtless, too, he regretted the brilliant society in which he had mingled at Versailles. Accordingly, in 1780, he leased his property for a steady income to be paid in France, and returned with his son, then eighteen years of age. The following year the Duc de Richelieu, who was eighty-five and senior marshal, was named president of the Tribunal of the point d’honneur, which is so characteristic of historic France. As such he was called, two years later still, to decide a comical as well as perplexing case. The solution he gave could have been expected only from the Maréchal de Richelieu.

Young Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (the future General Dumas) had made his way in the gay world during the four years he had been in France. His dark skin was rather an advantage to him than otherwise, as it set off the Creole elegance of his person, His bodily strength and address were prodigious, and he was first among the pupils of Luboissière, the most noted fencingmaster of his time. He was the boon companion of other scions of the aristocracy, like La Fayette, Dillon, Lauznn. To his adventures there was no end. One evening he was at the theatre, in the box of a Creole lady, whose beauty and reputation were like what we know of the Empress Josephine at this period of her life. As he was not in full dress, or perhaps to avoid notoriety, he stood well back in the shadow. A musketeer (the first of his kind to make acquaintance with a Dumas) recognized the lady from his place in the orchestra, had the attendant open the door of her box, and, without so much as asking leave, sat down beside her and began conversation.

The lady interrupted him on the spot. “ Pardon, sir, but you do not seem to notice that I am not alone.”

“ With whom are you, then?” asked the musketeer.

The lady pointed to the dark-skinned Comte de la Pailleterie.

“ Pardon me,” said the young guardsman. “ I took him for your lackey.

The insolent words were no sooner out of his mouth than he was seized and tossed over the railing of the box into the pit. There were no seats in the pit of theatres at that time, and the crowded auditors on whose heads he had been pitched by the mulatto count made a natural uproar. Alexandre left the box to await the expected challenge from his adversary in the corridor. Instead, an officer of the constable came up, touched him ceremoniously with the ivory knob of his ebony wand, and arrested him in the name of the marshals of France. Three days later, he was summoned before the Due de Richelieu in that Pavilion de Hanovre of which an ornamental corner still remains on the Paris boulevard, and where the aged marshal and his friends received Cagliostro to invigorate them with his magic elixir of youth. The name of the offending count seemed to awake the fires of other days in the marshal’s breast.

“ Are you, by any chance, the son of an old friend of mine, the Marquis de la Pailleterie, who, during the siege of Philipsburg, was my second in the duel in which I had the misfortune to kill the Prince of Lixen ? ”

“ Yes, monseigneur.”

“ Then, m’sieu’” (a Parisian contraction which was at that day noted as singular in a person of the duke’s quality), “you are the son of a brave gentleman, and must be right. Tell me about it.”

The marshal was struck by the similarity of the insolence to that which determined his own action a half century before.

“You must have reparation made you; and if you will accept me as your second, I shall be delighted to render you the same service which your father did me so long ago.”

The count, with all his amazement, hastened to accept, and the duel took place in the duke’s garden. The young man did credit to his aged second by running his adversary through the shoulder with his sword.

The old marquis was next summoned to the marshal’s pavilion, and the friendship of other days was renewed. It was agreed that the marshal should find a place in the army for Alexandre, who was somewhat spoiling in Paris. But the father, who had domestic fancies in love, suddenly married his housekeeper, and cut off the money supplies of his son. The latter thereupon announced his intention of enlisting as a simple soldier in the first regiment that would take him.

“ Very well,” said the father, who was an aristocrat of the old régime, in spite of his variegated marriages, “ but I am the Marquis de la Pailleterie, a colonel and commissary general of artillery, and I do not mean that you shall drag my name through the lowest ranks of the army.”

For some reason there was no more question of Marshal de Richelieu, and the young count enlisted under his mother’s name as Alexandre Dumas in the regiment of the queen’s dragoons. A certificate was signed by four notables of Saint-Germain that the said Dumas was well and truly the lawful son of the Marquis de la Pailleterie. The Revolution, following on the death of the marquis, finally detached this child of the West India negress from the aristocracy, and it was only long after his death that the certificate was found and presented to his own son, then at the height of his fame as the novelist of adventures, of which his family gave so many examples. It was left to the latter’s child, the marvelous moralist in play writing, to tell his own story as a “natural son.”