An American founding father's diary describes the pinnacle of European talent: a man who could shoot a coin out of the air, was unmatched with a sword, an expert horseman and a genius on the violin. That man was Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, born in Guadeloupe in 1745 to a wealthy white plantation owner and Nanon, an enslaved Senegalese teenager in his household. This episode challenges the romantic framing of his father's patronage and traces his path through what we call a glass maze, a society that let him climb to the top while enforcing invisible legal barriers at every turn.

Enrolled in an elite Parisian fencing academy at 13, Saint-Georges mastered the small sword and publicly humiliated the racist master fencer Alexandre Picard in Rouen, earning an officer's post in the royal bodyguard and a title that carried no  ...