The future queen of Haiti was born on May 8, 1778, according to the only known official record of her birth date in the Royal Almanac of Haiti. Marie-Louise’s biographer, Marceau Louis, without revealing the chain of recitation, claimed that she was born Marie-Louise Coidavid on the Bedou plantation in the commune of Ouanaminthe to Black parents with free status. Noting that Henry and Marie-Louise married in 1793—the date can be independently confirmed by the Royal Almanac as having occurred on July 15—Louis owned that he could not be sure how the pair might have met. “Did the two young people meet one day during a patrol made by Christophe through Ouanaminthe,” Louis asked, “or was Marie-Louise more likely to have been in Cap?” “We do not know anything about it at all,” Louis concluded. “But what is certain is a very sweet sentiment must have arisen between them and that in 1793 they married.”[80]
After an extensive search through the parish records of Saint-Domingue, I have been unable to locate either a definitive baptismal record for Marie-Louise or a marriage record for her and Christophe. Records such as these would be critical in establishing their parentage and dates of birth with more certainty, because such entries usually contained genealogical notes about the subject’s parents and any witnesses present. The Royal Almanac, recall, listed Marie-Louise’s birth date as May 8, 1778, but did not say where she had been born. Yet Marie-Louise, who died in Italy in 1851, told the recorder of her
Many of Christophe’s twentieth-century chroniclers claimed that a free Black man named Coidavid owned the Couronne hotel to explain how Henry met Marie-Louise.[85] However, as we have seen, Coidavid did not own the hotel on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, when Marie-Louise was just thirteen years old. At that time, the hotel was owned by Alexandre Faxardo and managed by Gaye, and possibly still Monjeon. Alongside the repeated and inaccurate speculation about Coidavid’s ownership of the hotel exists another, perhaps graver error that has prevented previous chroniclers from accurately unfolding the family relations of the king and queen of Haiti. Marie-Louise, who did go on to use the last name Coidavid after Christophe’s death, seems to have been born with an altogether different last name: Malgrin.
Real estate documents from Saint-Domingue under French republican rule do reveal some crucial details about the elusive Marie-Louise’s family background. A lease from December 1794 shows that in the year after their marriage Christophe and Marie-Louise, with their infant son, Ferdinand, rented and lived in a property owned by the wealthy French colonist Léonard Picard, at 326 rue Dauphine and des Trois Chandeliers.[87]
Source: Daut, Marlene L. The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. First edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025
