The First and Last Queen of Haiti in Exile

Although the queen had stood by Henry Christophe’s side since the earliest days of the Haitian Revolution, and eventually outlived most of her immedi­ate family, dying in 1851, hardly any of the kingdom’s many chroniclers bothered to consult her tale. Much later, while living in exile in Italy — as one of the only “black faces,” in her words — she at last told her story to a British acquaintance, a frequent visitor at the former palace. She lamented that she had suffered through the deaths of her husband and her sons, including that of her eldest, François Ferdinand, who died in Paris in 1805. Seeking neither recognition, nor glory, nor pity, nor wealth, she said with a sigh, “I have lost a husband, an empire, and [nearly] all my children … sorrow has quite weaned me from the vanities of this life; at my age and in my situation, I can only look forward to the next world, as a place of rest and peace.”

Although Marie-Louise, then residing in England, at first with the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s family at Playford Hall, and later with her daughters on Weymouth Street in London’s Marylebone district, told other visitors, too, that she sought only to lead a life of solitude, soon after she arrived in Europe, an unflatter­ing spotlight seemed suddenly to turn in her direction. Almost immedi­ately after news of King Henry’s suicide reached Europe, the Nîmes-based Journal du Gard published a notice about the “fall of Christophe.” The Haitian royal family’s image did not necessarily fare better in England. The Christophe women arrived in London in the fall of 1821 to a British public primed with curiosity about the sordid story of the king’s death.

On December 11, 1820, Britain’s Morning Chronicle, clearly informed by Haitian newspapers, reported that one of the “first advantages that will be derived by humanity from the late revolution in the north side of Hayti, and the Death of Christophe, is the liberation of several vic­tims, who, in the character of political enemies of his late sable Majesty, have long dragged a miserable existence in the dungeons of his citadel of Sans Souci [sic], who possibly had lost all hopes of ever again seeing the light of the sun.”

The Christophe women initially intended to stay with the Clarksons for only a few weeks, but they ended up extending their sojourn for half a year. During that time all three women suffered from bowel complaints and frostbite, unaccustomed as they were to such a cold and rainy envi­ronment. The Clarksons had played patient and sympathetic hosts. They sought medical care for their guests and brought in tutors in French and Italian for the princesses. Clarkson also helped Marie-Louise attend to her finances. With his assistance, she obtained a credit account, and for a time life in England seemed to suit the grieving family. The Christophes even had dinner at the home of their former patriarch’s friend William Wilber­force in 1822, before they moved to a more secluded cottage in the seaside town of Hastings. Away from London’s hustle and bustle, they hoped to avoid the stares of strangers, undoubtedly curious about the presence of these stately and finely dressed Black women.

The friendship between the Clarksons and the Wordsworths grew strained in connection with the presence of the Christophe women. The Wordsworths were more than a little scandalized by the presence of this Black queen in England. Hardly hiding their opinion of what they considered the inappropriateness of her presence, William’s sister, Doro­thy, wrote a letter to Mrs. Clarkson in October 1822 in which she enclosed a racist poem mocking Queen Marie-Louise, written by William Wordsworth (author of the famous sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”) and his sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson. “My dear Friend,” the letter began,

At the end of my letter I must copy a parody (which I hope will make you laugh), that William and Sarah [sic] threw off last Sunday after­noon. They had been talking of Mr. Clarkson’s kindness to every human being, especially of his perseverance in the African cause, and of his last act of kindness to the distressed negro widow and her family. Tender thoughts of merriment came with the image of the sable princess by your fireside. The first stanza of Ben Jonson’s poem slipped from William’s lips, a parody, and together they finished it with much loving fun. Oh! how they laughed! I heard them in my room upstairs, and wondered what they were about; and, when it was finished, I claimed the privilege of sending it to you … Ben Jon­son’s poem begins “Queen and huntress chaste and fair.” You must know it. 

Queen and negress chaste and fair!
Christophe now is laid asleep
Seated in a British chair.
State in humbler manner keep
Shine for Clarkson’s pure delight
Negro princess, ebon bright!

Let not “Willy’s” holy shade
Interpose at envy’s call,
Hayti’s shining queen was made
To illumine Playford hall,
Bless it then with constant light,
Negress excellently bright!

Lay thy diadem apart,
Pomp has been a sad deceiver.
Through thy champion’s faithful heart
Joy be poured, and thou the giver,
Thou that mak’s’t a day of night
Sable princess, ebon bright.

Surprised at the brazen and overt racism, the Clarksons stopped speak­ing to the Wordsworths. This estrangement continued for several months until Dorothy apologized, with a hint of sarcasm, for “our joke on poor fallen royalty.”

Unable to reconcile with the climate, both racial and social, Marie-Louise opted to take her daughters to Italy. According to Catherine Clark­son, who later lost touch with the Christophe women, Marie-Louise remained in contact with her grandson, Prince Eugène’s child, and she hoped to spend the final years of her life back home in Haiti.

Though the climate of Italy suited her well, Marie-Louise still suffered much in body and mind. Her daughters were unwell, and all three women continued to be subjected to ridicule and derision. In an article quoted in the Black American newspaper Freedom’s Journal on May 11, 1827, the author refuted an inflammatory account of Marie-Louise, first published in the New-York Enquirer. In that newspaper, the ardent racist Mordecai Manuel Noah denounced as improbable a rumor that Madame Chris­tophe was engaged to a German prince, since readers must “remember she is a fat, greasy wench, as black as the ace of spades, and one who would find it difficult to get a place as a Cook in this city.” “So much for royal taste,” he concluded. The author of the refutation in Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper in the United States, defended Madame Christophe against “this calumny” by writing, “We are induced, from a personal acquaintance with Madame Christophe for many years previous to and after she was elevated to the rank of Queen of Hayti, to bear testimony against the above illiberal and unjust representation.” “We do not hesitate to say, that no just person acquainted with the Ex-Queen could have thus characterized her, and that there are many Americans who will unite with us in this declaration,” the author wrote.

Marie-Louise and her children made every effort to live with dignity during their long exile. Having spied them in 1830 in the vacation spa town of Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary), part of the Austrian empire at the time, the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand could not help but to take his turn gawking at and then writing about the Christophe women. Of Athénaïs, Chateaubriand wrote that “she was very educated and very pretty.” “Her ebony beauty rests free under the porticos among the myr­tles and cypresses of Campo Santo, far from the field of cane and man­grove trees, in the shade of where,” he added, “she was born a slave.” Of course, lucky for them, Chateaubriand was mistaken: the Christophe girls had never been enslaved. Still, they did not escape sorrow.

The Christophe womens’ exile across the Atlantic took them from England, to Austria, to the Italian cities of Rome, Florence, Turin, and Pisa. Amid their many wanderings, Marie-Louise and Athénaïs experi­enced a new tragedy when in October 1831, shortly after the three women took up residence in Pisa, Améthyste passed away from complications of an enlarged heart. Athénaïs passed away even more tragically eight years later, in the city of Stresa where she had been vacationing with her mother and where they had become friends with the Italian philosopher Anto­nio Rosmini. On September 10, 1839, Athénaïs reportedly hit her head so violently during a fall that she died. After Marie-Louise returned to Pisa, lonely and childless, with her late daughter’s corpse in tow, a friend of Rosmini’s lamented, “I very often see the unfortunate ex-queen of Haiti here.”

Occasional visitors, like the Englishman Robert Inglis, sometimes graced Marie-Louise’s doorstep, but for the most part the former queen passed her remaining days alone. Inglis tried to persuade Marie-Louise to return to England with him, but by that time she was perhaps too infirm due to her own health issues, or too deeply resigned to think of starting over again. She did appear to humor Inglis’s entreaty. He said, “We pressed her to think of coming back: she said that she had never liked any country so well as England; that she would never have left but for the health-sake of her daughters; but that now she had only to lie down & die, that she was daily endeavouring to prepare for it.” During their last meeting, Inglis recalled with an air of wispiness, “I again took her hand & kissed it … she embraced me; & said that I was like her son, that her son would just have been of my age.”

If she did not want to return to England, Marie-Louise did seek to return to Haiti. Addressing a letter to President Boyer from Turin on November 7, 1839, Marie-Louise confessed, “A final and frightful misfortune has just put a climax to the calamities by which it has pleased divine Providence to cause me to experience.” “The last of my daughters, Madame Athénaïse [sic] has just succumbed,” she continued, before imploring, “In the state of isolation and abandonment in which I find myself, my thoughts and my wishes naturally turn toward my dear homeland, love for which has never faded from my heart.” Adding that she hoped to spend her final days among those with whom she shared “blood ties and who do not regard me as a foreigner,” she also asked for a passport for her sister Geneviève Pier­rot. Boyer ended up denying Marie-Louise’s request to return to Haiti, but he did authorize Geneviève to travel to Italy, where both remained for the rest of their days.

Marie-Louise, unfortunately, had more suffering to do. Even with the consolation of a sister by her side, her health continued to decline. Likely a complication from diabetes induced gangrene, Marie-Louise had her left foot amputated in 1842. Afterward, like so many Black women in the nineteenth century who found themselves in Europe, forcibly or of their own volition, she became the unwitting victim of scientific observation. Ferdinando Bellini, the surgeon who operated on Marie-Louise, donated her amputated limb to the museum at the University of Pisa. According to a notation in the museum’s archives, the Black female “chambermaid” that Marie-Louise had with her in her final days, Zefferina, and to whom she bequeathed 400 Spanish pillar dollars in her will, also ended up in the museum after her death in 1855.

A deeply pious woman, Marie-Louise had donated money for a small church to be built in Pisa called San Donnino, where she buried both her daughters under marble headstones in a dedicated sacristy, and where she herself was buried after her death on March 14, 1851.

Thanks to the efforts of scholar Miriam Franchina, there are now two historical markers commemorating the Christophe women in Pisa; the first, outside the chapel where the women were interred and the second in front of Marie-Louise’s last known residence at Piazza Carrara, belated homage to Haiti’s first and last queen.

Adapted from The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe © 2025 by Marlene L. Daut. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Buy This Book