PROLOGUE, PART I

FEBRUARY 26, 1806

IT was nearly midnight on the night of February 26, 1806, and Alexandre Dumas, the future author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, was asleep at his uncle's house. He was not yet four years old. He was staying there because his father was gravely ill and his mother thought it best for him not to be at home. As the clock struck, he was awakened by a loud knock. By the light of a lamp that burned by the bedside, he saw his cousin sit up, visibly frightened. Alexandre got out of bed. He recalled in his memoirs, forty-some years later:

My cousin called to me, "Where are you going?"

"You'll see," I replied quietly. "I'm going to open the door for Daddy, who's coming to say goodbye."

The poor girl jumped out of bed, greatly alarmed, grabbed me as I put my hand on the doorknob, and forced me back to bed.

I struggled in her arms, shouting with all my strength:

"Goodbye, Daddy! Goodbye, Daddy!"

The next morning the adults came to wake the children, and one of them told Alexandre the news that his father had died during the night.

"My daddy is dead," I said. "What does that mean?"

"It means that you won't see him again."

"What do you mean I won't see Daddy again? ... why won't I see him?"

"Because God has taken him back from you."

"Forever?"

"Forever."

"And you say that I'll never see him again? ... never at all?"

"Never at all."

"And where does God live?"

"He lives in heaven."

I thought hard about this for a minute. Even as a young child, even deprived of reason, I understood that something irreversible had happened in my life. Then, taking advantage of the first moment when they stopped paying attention to me, I got away from my uncle's and ran straight to my mother's house.

All the doors were open, all the faces were frightened; one felt that Death was there.

I went in without anyone's noticing or seeing me. I found a little room where the weapons were kept; I shouldered a gun that belonged to my father, and which he had often promised to give to me when I got older.

Then, armed with this gun, I climbed the stairs.

On the second floor, I met my mother on the landing.

She had just left the death chamber. ... her face was wet with tears.

"Where are you going?" she asked me, surprised to see me there, when she thought I was at my uncle's.

"I'm going to heaven!" I replied.

"What do you mean, you're going to heaven?"

"Let me pass."

"And what will you do in heaven, my poor child?"

"I'm going there to kill God, who killed Daddy."

My mother seized me in her arms, squeezing me so tight I thought I would suffocate.

Alexandre Dumas wrote those lines when he had just turned forty-five and had decided it was time to reflect on his life. He never got past chronicling his thirty-first year — which was well before he had published a word as a novelist — yet he spent more than the first two hundred pages on a story that is as fantastic as any of his novels: the life of his father, General Alexandre — Alex — Dumas, a black man from the colonies who narrowly survived the French Revolution and rose to command fifty thousand men. The chapters about General Dumas are drawn from reminiscences of his mother and his father's friends, and from official documents and letters he obtained from his mother and the French Ministry of War. It is a raw and poignant attempt at biography, full of gaps, omissions, and re-creations of scenes and dialogue. But it is sincere. The story of his father ends with this scene of his death, the point at which the novelist begins his own life story.

For anyone skeptical that a boy so young could recall such details, Dumas responded through the lips of the character Haydee, a white slave, in The Count of Monte Cristo. Haydee's father died when she was four, betrayed and murdered by one of the main villains in the novel. After speaking movingly of her father, she tells the Count: "I was four years old, but as the events held a supreme importance for me, not one detail has left my mind, not one feature has escaped from my memory."

To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget. The villains of The Count of Monte Cristo do not murder the hero, Edmond Dantes — they have him thrown into a dungeon where he is forgotten by the world. The heroes of Dumas never forget anything or anyone: Dantes has a perfect memory for the details of every field of human knowledge, for the history of the world and for everyone he has encountered in his life. When he confronts them one by one, he finds that the assassins of his identity have forgotten the very fact that he existed, and thus the fact of their crime.

I undertook the project of reconstructing the life of the forgotten hero General Alexandre Dumas because of that passage in his son's memoirs, which I read when I was a boy and have always remembered.

JANUARY 25, 2007

"I AM afraid the situation is most delicate," the deputy mayor was saying to me. "And most unfortunate."

Fabrice Dufour, the deputy mayor of the cobblestoned town of Villers-Cotterêts, wore a pained expression. He was in charge of the town's cultural heritage, which, notwithstanding its modest appearance, was considerable. It included a brief moment at the center of power in Ancien Régime France, when, upon the death of Louis XIV in 1715, his nephew Philippe, the Duke d'Orléans and regent to the five-year-old Louis XV, decided the court should spend as much time here as possible. This gray little town fifty miles north of Paris acquired an outsized reputation for royal scandal, misbehavior, and debauchery, which in eighteenth-century France was saying something. The early Renaissance château looming over the office where I sat had been the scene of nude dinner parties and large-scale orgies involving bondage, the comingling of royals and townsfolk, and the help of professionals both male and female. These festivities were referred to as "Adam and Eve nights," and one courtier recalled that, "after the champagne, the lights were turned out and the unclothed company proceeded to indulge in mutual flagellation, seeking their partners as the fortune of the dark dictated and with a thoroughness which diverted His Highness immensely."

Years later, Louis XVI, the shy and awkward husband of Marie-Antoinette, was said to blush if he so much as heard the town's name—which he wouldn't have often after 1723, when the regent died and the focus of court life moved back to Versailles. The town would really only be heard from again because of the man I had come here to learn about, who had lived and died here around the time of the French Revolution. The very backwater chill of the place, distinct on this raw January day, gave me hope that certain documents I believed existed might still be found here. Behind his desk the deputy mayor was an imposing man. He had a lazy eye that squinted involuntarily and an equally involuntary tendency to smile, slightly, as he spoke.

"Most delicate," he repeated firmly.

He then said nothing for perhaps thirty seconds, during which he cast meaningful looks at me, the window, and the objects on his desk. I noticed a motorcycle magazine on a side table, next to a pile of brochures about the château. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed to me the deputy mayor was wearing mascara. His large brown eyes seemed a little too well defined.

He shook his head, smiled, and made a tsk-tsking sound. "Sir, I know you have come all the way from America to see her, but I'm afraid it will be impossible to arrange."

I began mentally preparing the appropriate speech of protest in French. More than any other culture on earth, the French respect protest, which is why they regularly tie up their crucial industries and institutions in nationwide strikes — but one must protest properly. The deputy mayor spoke again, though, before I could say a word.

"It will be impossible to arrange, sir, because the lady you have come to see is dead."

I thought perhaps I had misheard. The lady who had agreed to see me, from a local museum — her name was Elaine — had not sounded old. I hadn't felt I needed to learn her last name, as she was the only person who worked there except a security guard.

"It was very sudden," said the deputy mayor. I thought he added something about an illness, perhaps cancer, but I wasn't sure. The shock of the information seemed to bring my French down two levels."

She didn't mention anything to me about being sick," I said, apologetically.

"We are all very shocked and saddened," the deputy mayor said.

I tried to gather my wits and, after mumbling condolences, to explain about the importance of seeing the papers she'd been keeping: most of them had not seen the light of day for two hundred years, except for the odd moments when they had been sold by one collector of obscure French historical memorabilia to another, eventually ending up here, in the tiny museum that had a modest endowment for their purchase. I asked if anyone had assumed Elaine's duties; the deputy mayor shook his head. Had anyone inventoried her office? looked through the papers? could I be allowed to look?

"That's just it, none of the documents are in her office," the deputy mayor said. "Elaine was worried about security, and she put everything in a safe. A very big safe, very secure, but when she died she took the combination with her. She told no one. She liked to handle everything herself. We have searched everywhere but have had no luck finding the combination ... Sir, I am afraid there is nothing to be done. A few weeks ago, it would have been no problem, but now I am afraid, well, it is most delicate." He squinted at me. "It is tragic."

Though uttered with complete bureaucratic equanimity, the word was well chosen. This bland government office, tucked inside a courtyard next to the notorious old château, was just up the street from the little municipal museum where Elaine had liked to handle everything herself. It was called the Musée Alexandre Dumas. But it was doubtful if more than a handful of visitors to the town realized that the famous author of so many beloved novels, who was born here, had himself been the son of a great man — the original Alexandre Dumas.

***

THE original Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762, the son of "Antoine Alexandre de l'Isle," in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Antoine was a nobleman in hiding from his family and from the law, and he fathered the boy with a black slave. Later Antoine would discard his alias and reclaim his real name and title — Alexandre Antoine Davy, the Marquis de la Pailleterie — and bring his black son across the ocean to live in pomp and luxury near Paris. But the boy would reject his father's name, along with his noble title. He would enlist in the French army at the lowest rank, taking the surname "Dumas" from his mother for his enlistment papers. Once he'd risen by his merits to higher rank he would not even sign his name "Alexandre," preferring the blunt and simple form "Alex Dumas."

Alex Dumas was a consummate warrior and a man of great conviction and moral courage. He was renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery, and his knack for pulling victory out of the toughest situations. But he was known, too, for his profane back talk and his problems with authority. He was a soldier's general, feared by the enemy and loved by his men, a hero in a world that did not use the term lightly.

But then, by the wiles of conspiracy, he found himself imprisoned in a fortress and poisoned by unknown enemies, without hope of appeal and forgotten by the world. It was no accident that his fate sounds like that of a young sailor named Edmond Dantès, about to embark on a promising career and marry the woman he loves, who finds himself a pawn in a plot he never imagined, locked away without witnesses or trial in the dungeon of an island fortress called the Château d'If. But unlike the hero of his son's novel The Count of Monte Cristo, Alex Dumas met no benefactor in the dungeon to lead him to escape or to a hidden treasure. He never learned the reason for his trials, for his abrupt descent from glory to suffering. I had come to Villers-Cotterêts to find the truth of what befell this most passionate defender of "liberty, equality, and fraternity."

In his own lifetime General Dumas was a legendary figure. Official histories of the period often pause to relate some colorful anecdote about him. David Johnson, in his book The French Cavalry, 1792–1815, writes of the general's early career, "In addition to being a first-class soldier, Dumas was possibly the strongest man in the French army ... In the riding school he liked to stand up in the stirrups, take hold of an overhead beam, and lift himself and his horse bodily off the ground." A more plausible story that appears in multiple histories relates that he once fought three duels in one day, winning all three despite being gashed in the head — almost certainly the basis for one of the best-known and most comic scenes in The Three Musketeers, in which d'Artagnan challenges Porthos, Athos, and Aramis to duels on the same afternoon (the scene ends happily — "All for one and one for all!" — as a real enemy appears).

Alex Dumas first came to the army's attention when, still a lowly corporal, he single-handedly captured twelve enemy soldiers and marched them back to his camp. Not long afterward, he led four horsemen in an attack on an enemy post manned by over fi fty men — Dumas alone killed six and took sixteen prisoner. As a Parisian society journalist in the early nineteenth century summed up, "Such brilliant conduct, on top of a manly physiognomy and extraordinary strength and stature, secured his quick promotion; it wasn't long before his talents proved he deserved it."

As his star rose, Alex Dumas was not one to give orders and then hang back in safety while his subordinates did the dangerous work: he led his troops by going out ahead of them. One of his commanding officers once remarked to him, "My dear Dumas, you make me tremble every time I see you mount a horse and gallop off at the head of your dragoons. I always say to myself, 'It's impossible for him to return in one piece if he keeps going at this pace.' What would become of me if you let yourself get killed?"

Even when Dumas became a general, commanding thousands of troops, he always preferred to lead small units on special operations where he could use his wits and outsized physical skills to prevail. As general-in-chief of the Army of the Alps, roughly the equivalent of a four-star general today, Dumas put on spiked boots and led his men up seemingly impregnable ice cliffs at night to surprise an Austrian battery that seemed as unassailable as the guns of Navarone. He captured the enemy's matériel and turned their own guns against them, forcing immediate surrender. He took not only 1,700 prisoners and over forty artillery pieces but Mont Cenis, the key to the Alps.

When they were still both generals in the French Revolution, Napoleon celebrated Alex Dumas's deeds in the classical terms favored at the time, proclaiming him the incarnation of Horatius Cocles, the ancient hero who saved the Roman Republic by keeping invading barbarians from crossing the Tiber. (French revolutionaries, like American ones, lived in a world of classical allusions — everyone referred to George Washington as Cincinnatus.)

When Napoleon launched the French invasion of Egypt, Dumas went as his cavalry commander, but it was there that the two very different soldiers came to loathe each other. The clash was ideological — Dumas saw himself as a fighter for world liberation, not world domination — but it was also personal.

"Among the Muslims, men from every class who were able to catch sight of General Bonaparte were struck by how short and skinny he was," wrote the chief medical officer of the expedition. "The one, among our generals, whose appearance struck them more was . . . the General-in-Chief of the cavalry, Dumas. Man of color, and by his figure looking like a centaur, when they saw him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the expedition."

***

AT over six feet, with an athletic physique, Alex Dumas cut a dashing figure among the French elite. But how was it that he could enter the elite — and indeed be celebrated as a national hero — at a time when the basis of French wealth was black slavery in the colonies?

The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century. His mother, Marie Cessette Dumas, was a slave, and he himself was sold into bondage briefly by his own father, an aristocratic fugitive who needed to pay his passage back to France. But by the time he was twenty, Alex had also made it to France and been educated in the classics, philosophy, fi ne manners, riding, dancing, and dueling. A life of Parisian parties, theaters, and boudoirs ended after a falling-out with his father, and he enlisted as a horseman in the service of the queen. This was in 1786, on the eve of the French Revolution, and when that storm came Dumas seized his chance and began a meteoric ascent through the ranks of the new revolutionary army. He rose to command entire divisions and armies. It would be 150 years before another black officer in the West would rise so high.

The explanations for how such a life had even been possible lie in another forgotten story — that of the world's first civil rights movement. In the 1750s, during the reign of Louis XV, a generation of crusading lawyers went up against one of the most powerful interests in France — the colonial sugar lobby — and won shockingly broad rights for people of color. Slaves taken to France from the colonies brought lawsuits against their masters and won their freedom. (Compare this with the infamous Dred Scott ruling of the

U.S. Supreme Court, which — in the 1850s — would find that blacks were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The ruling actually contains language mocking the French freedom trials of the previous century.) The French lawsuits were decades earlier than the Somerset case, which launched abolitionism in England.

With the Revolution in 1789, the dream of equality in France suddenly seemed almost limitless. Dumas was not the only black or mixed-race Frenchman to rise up; he rode into battle with the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the acknowledged master swordsman of Europe (and an acclaimed composer and musician). Like Dumas, the chevalier was of mixed race: his mother had been a freed slave. When the Revolution broke out, the chevalier formed a corps of mounted cavalry known as the Légion Noire, the Black Legion, and recruited Dumas to be his second in command.

By the time he was thirty-one, Dumas had been promoted to general, having earned almost universal admiration from every officer and soldier who fought beside him. A Prussian-raised French officer who openly proclaimed a "horror of negroes"(not to mention an "invincible antipathy for Jews") nevertheless wrote that General Dumas "might be called the best soldier in the world."

The story of General Dumas brilliantly illuminates the first true age of emancipation: a single decade during which the French Revolution not only sought to end slavery and discrimination based on skin color but also broke down the ghetto walls and offered Jews full civil and political rights, ending a near-universal discrimination that had persisted since ancient times. General Alexandre Dumas, wrote a French historian at the end of the nineteenth century, "was a living emblem of the new equality."

Much has been made of the beginnings of abolitionism in the British world and the question of equality during the American Revolution, but the life of Alex Dumas shows that it was the French Revolution that was the first unbridled age of emancipation, and its complex web of dreams and disappointments would underlie the history of freedom and prejudice for the next two centuries. This revolutionary age of racial emancipation introduced much of the world to modern ideas of human freedom — the idea that all men, regardless of religion or race, deserve equal rights, opportunities, respect — but it also spurred the backlash of modern racism and modern anti-Semitism, which fused older prejudices with the new political and scientific idealogies.

During the days of the Terror, Dumas showed a restraint and humanity that could have cost him his command, or even his life. At a time when the most radical defenders of liberty, equality, and fraternity committed atrocities in the name of these ideals, he never shrank from protecting any victim, no matter what his or her background or ideological complexion. Sent to suppress the royalist uprising in the west of France, the Vendée — the darkest hour of the French Revolution — General Dumas risked his career to oppose the bloodshed he saw all around him. Later, a pro-royalist writer would write, of this "generous republican," that Dumas was one of those rare generals who were "always ready bravely to sell their lives on the battleground, but resolved to break their swords rather than consent to the role of executioners."

Dumas — the son of a marquis and of a slave — had the unique perspective of being from the highest and lowest ranks of society at once. A true idealist, he did not cease to espouse his views once they'd fallen from favor. His capture and imprisonment in an enemy fortress where he languished for two years — until he was released into an even more agonizing labyrinth of betrayal in his own country, by his own side — foretold what would become of the ideals of equality and fraternity, especially for France's men and women of color. And Dumas's birthplace, Saint-Domingue, would have a violent revolution and reemerge as Haiti, to be ostracized by the white nations and moved from the center of the world economy to its desperate margins.

***

 Reprinted from the book The Black Count by Tom Reiss. Copyright 2012 by Tom Reiss. Published by Crown, a division of Random House, Inc.

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