Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie

served the government of France as Général commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint-Domingue.

Marquis

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Alexandre Antoine Davy de La Pailleterie (or Marquis de La Pailleterie ), born June 20, 1714 in Belleville-en-Caux , died on June 15, 1786in Saint-Germain-en-Laye , is a French soldier and gentleman , colonel and commissioner general of artillery and grandfather of Alexandre Dumas (father).
Biography
From Normandy to the West Indies
His family inherited the land of La Pailleterie, established as a marquisate by Louis XIV in 1707. At the beginning of the 18th century , the three Davy de La Pailleterie brothers — Alexandre, Charles born in 1716 and Louis born in 1718 — joined the army. Alexandre, a fallen nobleman, lives idle in his manor house in Belleville-en-Caux where his first ancestor had lived since 1410. In 1738, after the War of the Polish Succession , he left to join his younger brother, Charles who left the army and made his fortune on different plantations (tobacco, sugar and indigo) in the province of Monte Cristi in Santo Domingo, island the richest French woman in the Antilles where he settled in 1732.
His debauched and expensive life causes him to fall out with Charles who must honor his brother's debts. He flees taking three slaves (Rodrigue, Catin and Cupidon) as hostages. Posing as missing (under his initiative or that of his brother?), he buys a small plantation under the pseudonym Antoine Delisle thanks to the resale of his three slaves. This property is located near Cap Rose in the village of Jérémie (at La Guinaudée, near Trou-Jérémie), in another part of the island.
According to the family legend told by his grandson Alexandre Dumas , Alexandre (alias Antoine Delisle) bought at a high price from Mr. de Maubielle a black slave or mulatto woman of African origin whom he freed, Marie-Cessette Dumas, young woman of great beauty whom he marries and with whom he has four mulatto children
(Thomas Alexandre Dumas and three daughters Adelphe, Jeannette and Marie-Rose, daughter that Cessette had before her purchase). In fact, it is unlikely that Alexandre would have married Cessette, since he was trying to hide. No marriage certificate has been found.
Heritage management during the disappearance of Antoine Davy de La Pailleterie
Charles Davy de La Pailleterie returned to France where he could adorn himself with the title of marquis of his deceased older brother. In debt after a failure in the sugar trade, he set up a triangular trading company in 1760 , creating a landing stage at Monte Cristo in Santo Domingo ( Alexandre Dumas was inspired by this to create his character The Count of Monte Cristo). He bought a ship named after his daughter, the Douce Marianne , which made two disappointing crossings, and gave up this activity. He squanders his capital through reckless spending and incompetent management. As a result, he returned to Santo Domingo hoping to revive his abandoned farms, where most of his slaves had died. He died there in July 1773 of “an attack of increased gout” . The second brother, Louis de la Pailleterie, died in the fall of the same year, shortly after a fifteen-day prison sentence following a scandal involving the sale of defective weapons to the French army. Alexandre Dumas will be inspired by his two great-uncles to portray the opponents of Edmond Dantès.
Charles' daughter, Marie-Anne-Charlotte Davy de La Pailleterie, and her husband Léon de Maulde, whom she had married on May 1, 1764, then inherit “family estates and assets, burdened with heavy inheritance liabilities” . Maulde managed to improve the situation, through better management and arrangements with creditors.
Return to France
Alexandre (aka Antoine Delisle) sells his children in Réméré as slaves to Mr. Caron, a mulatto settler from Nantes, to be able to pay for his return trip aboard the Trésorier to France [ ref. desired] , where he arrived in Le Havre in December 1775. There he settles inheritance matters, recovers his name, his title and his property. The following year, he sold his château de La Pailleterie for 100,000 pounds and a life annuity of 10,000 pounds. Having become rich, he returned to Santo Domingo to buy back his son Thomas-Alexandre and brought him permanently with him to mainland France, leaving his partner and three other children in Jérémie.
After settling for a time in Lisieux , the father, his mistress and his son lived libertinically at the royal court in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1778 . After the death of Marie-Cessette Dumas from dysentery, he married on February 14, 1786 with Marie Retou, daughter of a winegrower, young woman aged thirty-two. He died on June 15 of the same year.
Upon his death in 1786 , Thomas-Alexandre engaged in a legal battle with his mother-in-law over the estate, although it was entirely mortgaged. The latter finally ceded to him “all property rights over Marie-Cessette, a negress, mother of the said Rétoré, over Jeannette and Marie Rose, Creoles, daughters of the said Cessette and sisters of the said Rétoré”.
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Antoine_Davy_de_La_Pailleterie]
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Jérémie (Kréyòl: Jeremi) is a city in southwest Haiti. It is the capital city of the Grand'Anse Département. Jérémie is also called the City of Poets because of the many writers, poets, and historians that were born or live there, such as Etzer Vilaire and Émile Roumer. The father of the French writer Alexandre Dumas, père, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born at Madère, near Jérémie. History The town was founded in 1756 when the country was the French colony of Saint-Domingue. It was built where there was a small fishing town called Trou-Jérémie." [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%A9mie]
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"Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, was a French nobleman who became a marquis. After establishing a Jeremie coffee plantation in the 1750s, he purchased a slave named Marie Cessette and they had four children together.
Antoine sold his wife and children into slavery, but pawned his favorite son, Dumas, and, in August of 1776, redeemed him. Dumas and Antoine moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a small city west of Paris."
[https://instaread.co/insights/history-political-social-science-biog...]