Because Frederick was also a very handsome young man (as photographs of him c. 1896 show), Paris would have been a wide-open field for romantic adventures. A white American who knew the city well commented, with a hint of envy, that “Frenchmen do not connect the negro as we do, with plantation days. Fair women look upon him with love and admiration, as Desdemona looked upon Othello.” Even more relevant to Frederick was the man’s remark that “everywhere you find the same thing. Colored valets traveling with Americans are raved over by pretty French maids.”
Paris in the 1890s was seen worldwide as the capital of modern urban civilization—a place where everyone with any pretense to sophistication or social standing longed to be. Frederick’s life there was the last stage of his basic education in the ways of the world. After Paris, with its museums and theaters, monuments and grand boulevards, cafés and fashionable shops, temples to haute cuisine and raucous vaudeville, there was little any other city in Western Europe could offer Frederick that he had not already seen.
During the next three years, Frederick traveled extensively, working in different cities for months at a time, and returned to Paris twice. This involved crossing multiple borders, and even though most European countries did not require passports from visitors, an official government document could still be useful as identification; it would also provide a traveler with protection in case he got into any kind of trouble. Frederick applied for his first passport in Paris on March 17, 1896. Among the questions he had to answer was how soon he would return to the United States, and he responded “two years.” However, it is not clear if he meant this or if he simply said whatever he thought would help him keep his options open (American passports had to be renewed every two years). It would not have been in his interest to make the embassy staff suspect that he might have left the United States for good. He also began falsifying his past, something he would continue later as well, by giving Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace, and Brooklyn as his permanent place of residence. Perhaps his reasons were that India was still living in Louisville and that not all blacks had been slaves there. Naming Brooklyn might also have forestalled offhand comments from the second secretary at the embassy, with whom Frederick dealt and who, like his father the ambassador, was a southerner.
After Paris, Frederick went first to Brussels and then to Ostend, a popular Belgian resort on the North Sea. There he worked at the Grand Hôtel Fontaine, which, although not particularly expensive, was recommended by Baedeker’s, a respected tourist guide at the time. Unlike most of the other hotels in Ostend, which closed for the cold season, the Grand Hôtel Fontaine remained open all year. However, Frederick left and went on to the south of France.
The fall of 1896 is probably when he came to the Riviera for the first time, and this is where his expertise and skills were recognized and rewarded in a remarkable way: he became a headwaiter for the season. His employer was a Monsieur G. Morel, the proprietor of the well-known Hôtel des Anglais in Cannes. The hotel, on the northern edge of town, prided itself on having an admirable southern exposure, a beautiful pleasure garden, and a recherché cuisine and cellar, and on providing luxury, comfort, careful service, a lift, hotel baths, telephone, and entertainments such as tennis and billiards. The position of headwaiter in a large establishment like this that catered to a demanding international clientele carried considerable responsibility. It would also have been coveted by experienced, native French waiters. Frederick’s command of English—even though his English was heavily accented—would have been an asset for the hotel’s restaurant because many tourists from Great Britain came to Cannes. But he could not have gotten the job if he did not have command of idiomatic French, which he would have needed to communicate with the management, the waiters, and the rest of the staff. He would also have needed to develop a good understanding of the psychology and cultures of the different classes and nationalities of Europeans with whom he dealt.
After the Riviera season was over, in the spring of 1897, Frederick returned to Paris, where he worked as a waiter in the Restaurant Cuba on the avenue des Champs-Élysées. He then made an extensive tour of Germany, crossing the country from west to east, and working for short periods in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Leipzig. This zigzagging itinerary shows that he had not yet found a place that suited him entirely and that he was satisfying his curiosity to see other parts of Europe. Like other waiters in Europe, Frederick would have heard much about the strict discipline and perfect service practiced in German restaurants and hotels and might have been interested in sampling this world. But like others before and after him, Frederick probably discovered quickly that German patrons were very difficult to please. From Germany he returned to Paris, and late in 1897 he turned south once more, this time choosing first Nice and then Monte Carlo, the capital of the famous, diminutive principality of Monaco on the Azure Coast, where he would have a memorable encounter with a white American.
Drysdale, the reporter making a tour of Europe, arrived in Monaco with an English friend during the first week of February 1898, from Nice and other points farther west on the French coast. Already much impressed by the beauty of the countryside they had seen from the train, with picturesque hills on the left and the azure Mediterranean on the right, he emerged from the Monte Carlo train station only to be struck anew by the remarkable beauty of the town. At the center was the Casino, a grand, elegant, and lavishly decorated concoction of cream-colored stone. It stood on one end of a large square occupying the hill that towered over the area, and that was surrounded by what Drysdale described as a “fairyland of flowers and tropical plants as you may dream of sometimes but seldom see.” The extravagant luxury of Monte Carlo’s appearance, and the gorgeously decorated coaches, drivers, and horses that the town’s twenty-five hotels sent to the station to meet the train and attract guests, overcame Drysdale’s reservations and frugality. He and his friend decided to splurge on the Hôtel de Paris, which belonged to the Casino Company and was, as he admitted, “by many degrees the largest and finest and most expensive in the place.” It also faced the Casino, as it does to this day.
After being escorted by a regally garbed bellman to his handsome rooms facing the sea, Drysdale was in the process of unpacking and preparing to ask a maid for some hot water, in French, when he heard a voice behind him say: “Reckon I better look aftah dis ’Merican gemman.”
Without looking up, Drysdale guessed who had arrived at his door and felt a wave of relief. After traveling for months through the famous cities of Europe, he was delighted to encounter a friendly black servant from home, someone with whom he could feel “completely at ease,” as he put it, and to whom he could confide all the small cares and worries associated with travel. The various Dutch, German, Belgian, and French hotel “boys” had been perfectly obliging and attentive. But this young black man was a “colored friend and brother,” someone as familiar as if “you had brought him up from the cradle,” someone who, when compared with the Europeans, was “an electric light beside a flickering candle.”
Drysdale’s affection for Frederick was genuine, even though it was tainted by an unconscious patriarchal racism. Drysdale had been born in Pennsylvania and lived most of his life in New Jersey while he wrote for newspapers in New York City. Nonetheless, his comments about Frederick betray a nostalgia for a romanticized image of the old antebellum South that began to appear among northerners at the end of the nineteenth century, and that centered on the supposedly chivalrous nobility of the planters and their benevolent relations with contented slaves. Drysdale would also have enjoyed being waited on simply because he was a heavy man, and no longer young at forty-six; indeed, he was to die only three years later. Thus, he found it entirely normal to expect that a black man would be an excellent servant; to think of him as a “boy” even though he was in his mid-twenties; to refer to him as “Sambo,” as an “ebon” or “sunburnt angel,” or as a “dusky brother”; and to record his speech in a way that exaggerated its nonwhite, semiliterate pronunciation (despite the fact that Frederick had probably learned to modulate his native accent when dealing with affluent white clients).