Louis Gauffier, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas in Hunting Costume, 1801, oil on canvas. Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bayonne, France, CM 539. Photo: RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

A nineteenth-century writer described Lethière’s home as “open to all Creoles.” In this period of French colonial history, the term Creole was used to denote any person born in the French colonies of European, African, or mixed ancestry, like Lethière—that is, someone who was born in the colonies but not Indigenous to them. 

Lethière played a central role in the Caribbean community in Paris. He was close friends with the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas from Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). In his memoirs, the general’s son, the celebrated novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas, recalled the two men’s friendship as well as the warm welcome he too received in Lethière’s home. Beyond Lethière’s immediate acquaintances, a larger Caribbean community, made up of notable artists, cultural figures, and political actors, took shape in mainland France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.