General Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie

Calvin Candie: White cake?

Dr. King Schultz: I don't go in for sweets, thank you.

Candie: You brooding 'bout me getting the best of ya, huh?

Schultz: Actually, I was thinking of that poor devil you fed to the dogs today, D'Artagnan. And I was wondering what Dumas would make of all this.

Candie: Come again?

Schultz: Alexander Dumas. He wrote The Three Musketeers.

Candie: Yes of course, doctor.

Schultz: I figured you must be an admirer. You named your slave after his novel's lead character. If Alexander Dumas had been there today, I wonder what he would have made of it?

Candie: You doubt he'd approve, huh?

Schultz: Yes. His approval would be a dubious proposition at best.

Candie: Soft-hearted Frenchy.

Schultz: Alexander Dumas is black.

Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was the first black general in French history and remains the highest-ranking person of color of all time in a continental European army. He was the first person of color in the French military to become brigadier general, the first to become divisional general, and the first to become general-in-chief of a French army. Pailleterie shared the status of the highest-ranking black officer in the Western world only with Toussaint Louverture (who in May 1797 became the second black general-in-chief in the French military) until 1989, when the American Colin Powell became a four-star general, the closest United States equivalent of General of the Army, Pailleterie's highest rank.

Pailleterie was the son of Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie and a slave, Louise-Céssette Dumas, on the Caribbean island colony of Saint Domingue (now called Haiti). When Pailleterie proposed to join the army, his father only agreed on condition that he did not use the de la Pailleterie name. He obliged and began to use the name Dumas.

Following a successful campaign with Napoleon in Egypt, Dumas seemed set for a brilliant future - but, involved in a republican plot, he was despatched to France, captured during the journey and imprisoned. Freed after 20 months he was lame, deaf in one ear, partly paralysed and penniless. At the age of 35 he had to retire to Villers-Cotterêts, a quiet village near Paris where he had married Marie-Louise Elizabeth Labouret in 1792. He died of stomach cancer in 1803. His son, Alexandre Dumas, was only 6 at the time.