Paul Marchand, F. M. C.

Fleming, Robert E.

Charles W. Chesnutt. Paul Marchand, F. M. C. Intro. Matthew Wilson. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. 179 pp. $20.00.

After the publication of The Colonel's Dream (1905), Charles W. Chesnutt's dream of professional authorship essentially ended. Although he had seemed destined for a successful literary career in the 1890s, after the turn of the century, his popularity waned as he treated increasingly sensitive areas of race relations. Chesnutt would continue to write after 1905, but his experience had convinced him that he could not make a living by his writing.

Paul Marchand, F. M. C. (free man of color) is the product of a later period. Written in 1921, the novel might have been expected to show Chesnutt unfettered by the demands of the literary marketplace. He had returned to Cleveland, Ohio, reopened a successful legal stenography business, and assumed a respected place in the community. Like a voice from the grave, Paul Marchand might have been a racial jeremiad or an enlarged version of "Baxter's Procrustes," a sly satire on authorship, publication, and literary fame.

Instead, Chesnutt penned a romantic novel that seems one part Dumas, one part Twain, and one part George Washington Cable. Yet the bizarre and outdated plot, involving duels with swords, babies switched at birth, mistaken identities, and large inheritances, allows Chesnutt the freedom to fictionalize views on race and racism that he had not previously expressed in his published fiction.

At the beginning of the novel, Paul Marchand inhabits the no man's land between slavery and freedom in antebellum New Orleans. Educated in France, he has returned to the South, married the illegitimate quadroon daughter of a wealthy Creole, and lives a life of material ease, social ostracism, and legal inferiority. His fortune changes when he is revealed to be the unacknowledged son of a wealthy white man who has left his large estate to Marchand.

Now Marchand faces a terrible choice: As a white man married to a woman of color, he is expected to renounce his wife (or demote her to his mistress), disinherit their children, and make an advantageous marriage to a socially prominent New Orleans heiress. Instead, Marchand renounces his inheritance, returns to France with his biracial wife and children, and leaves his inheritance to a cousin.

Chesnutt had employed a conventional passing theme in The House Behind the Cedars (1900). Paul Marchand, F. M C. in a sense reverses the formula of the passing novel: Marchand's real problems begin when he discovers the secret of his unmixed white ancestry. A vestige of the more conventional plot exists in Marchand's discovery that one of his four "white" cousins is of mixed blood. He leaves them to wonder which of them is "tainted."

While editor Matthew Wilson compares Paul Marchand to black "paragon" figures created by Chesnutt contemporaries such as Sutton Griggs and J. McHenry Jones, the fact remains that Marchand is white, not black, except by nurture. Perhaps what Chesnutt is suggesting is that environment and upbringing are far more important than inheritance. Just as Marchand has been molded by his experiences as a "man of color," three of his four cousins have been warped by the perception that they belong to a "superior" race.

Paul Marchand, F. M. C., like most posthumously published novels, is not a masterpiece. It does, however, offer some interesting insights into the thinking of an author whose career ended many years before it should have.