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The Fourth Musketeer is an English translation of a French biography of Dumas called La vie d'Alexandre Dumas père published in 1928.
THE FOURTH
MUSKETEER

THE FOURTH
MUSKETEER

THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER DUMAS


TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF
J. LUCAS-DUBRETON
BY MAIDA CASTELHUN DARNTON




COWARD-McCANN, INC.
NEW YORK     °     MCMXXVII
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY COWARD-MCCANN, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
TO MY FRIEND CLERGEAU

CAPTAIN OF A SHIP

WHO, DURING HIS CRUISES IN THE PACIFIC,
LEARNED "THE THREE MUSKETEERS" BY HEART.

J. L.-D.

FOREWORD

     Michelet wrote to the elder Dumas: "Monsieur, I love you and I admire you because you are one of the forces of nature."
     He used the right phrase. The ideology, the social themes, and the ethical problems dear to the younger Dumas play no part in his father's life. That life expresses itself solely on the plane of action and of instinct—hence its characteristic violence of tone, boldness of gesture, serene assurance, and innocent gaiety.

CONTENTS

I. THE BABE IN THE WOODS
II. ALEXANDER'S YEARS OF APPRENTICESHIP
III. "THE CROWN IS MINE"
IV. REVOLUTION AND SATANISM
V. IN WHICH ALEXANDER EXPANDS
VI. BOHEMIA
VII. ALEXANDER AT HIS ZENITH
VIII. THE GLORY OF MONTE-CRISTO
IX. ALEXANDER FOUNDERS AND COMES UP AGAIN
X. FROM MUSKETEER TO SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
XI. THE LAST CONQUESTS OF ALEXANDER
XII. THE DEATH OF PORTHOS
 NOTE
THE FOURTH
MUSKETEER

CHAPTER I

THE BABE IN THE WOODS

     POLYXÈNE DAVY DE LA PAILLETERIE, wife of the Chevalier de Salmon, lord of La Brosse, was on bad terms with her husband and at his instigation was shut up in 1703 in the Convent of the Madeleine at La Flèche. But on the death of the lord of La Brosse, she immediately made her escape and went away to live in Paris. After eleven years' imprisonment she meant to enjoy her freedom.
     She enjoyed it thoroughly, but not after the manner of a person of rank, and she behaved so recklessly that, when she had spent her last sou she was stranded in a furnished room "next door to an old woman of very bad repute."
     The father of Polyxène who owned a manor in Normandy and prided himself on belonging to a noble family—a Davy had been the king's ambassador to Switzerland in the sixteenth century—could not put up with his daughter's ways and ordered her back to the convent; but Polyxène was in no mood to return. She preferred the freedom of her furnished room to a pious cell, no matter how arranged for the use of great ladies. To make her listen to reason her father asked for a "lettre de cachet" from the Regent, the way of that time for hushing up the scandals in the families of the great. On December 12, 1716, the impetuous Polyxène was led back, under custody, to the Convent of la Flèche. What became of her afterwards no one knows. But the fact worth noting is that this father who had his daughter imprisoned was without doubt the great-great-grandfather of the author of The Three Musketeers.

     In 1760 another Davy de la Pailleterie, the eccentric Alexandre-Antoine, former gentleman of the Prince of Conti and Commissary General of Artillery, led by love of adventure, set sail for San Domingo and settled on the western point of the island at a place called "Jeremy's Gap." There he lived like a potentate surrounded by black slaves; and in 1762 he had, by one of these, Louise-Césette Dumas, a son to whom he gave the name Thomas-Alexander. Later he grew homesick; he wanted to behold his Normandy once more and the family manor with its four towers surmounted by spikes. In 1780 he returned to France, taking with him the little mulatto, born of his love affair with Louise-Césette.
     The little mulatto dreamed only of the hunt and battles, and his visit to Normandy pleased him so little that he said to his father: "I want to go away 'and be a soldier." Indifferent, perhaps, Alexandre-Antoine did not oppose him; but, being an aristocrat, he gave his consent on one condition only: Thomas-Alexander should not enlist under the noble name of Davy de la Pailleterie, but under that of his mother, the black slave of "Jeremy's Gap." . . . As Thomas-Alexander Dumas he was signed on as a soldier in the army of France.
     There he made his way in the grand manner, for he was audacious and those were troublous times. In 1793, seven years after his enlistment, he was general of a division. He fought in the Pyrenees and in the Alps; he took seventeen hundred prisoners at Mont-Cenis which he occupied in spite of snow and the superior numbers of the enemy; he passed over into Switzerland and, quite alone, defended the Bridge of Clausen against the Austrians, which feat won him the title, Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol. He was popular in the army and rightly so. This colossus of five feet ten inches, with dark skin, soft, chestnut-colored eyes, white teeth, and hands and feet whose womanly delicacy revealed his aristocratic origin, always marched in the front rank and threw himself personally into every struggle.
     One day he returned to camp, clean forespent. "Are you wounded. General?" asked Dermoncourt, his aide-de-camp.
     "No, but I have killed so many, I have killed so many . . ." and he fainted dead away.
     Yet this killer was a kind fellow. Once, in the village of Saint-Maurice, he destroyed the guillotine at the moment when they were about to execute four poor devils accused of trying to drag away the bells of their church to melt them. Collot d'Herbois summoned him to justify himself before the Convention. But politicians, even the Terrorists, held no terror for him; and after he had got rid of them, he went back to play again cheerfully, joyfully, with all his might. You could have seen him lift four gun-barrels, not with outstretched arm, but with outstretched finger, or catch hold of a beam with his delicate womanly hands and raise his horse between his legs. His skill with pistol and with rifle was astounding, and people marveled at this gaucho, this cowboy, this laughing giant. And yet this Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol, Black Devil and bugbear of the Austrians, was really the best fellow in the world. General Thiébault, who disliked mulattoes, declared: "He is the only colored man whom I have forgiven his skin."
     But Thomas-Alexander was not content with being brave, skillful, and strong; he was shrewd as well. During the Italian campaign an Austrian spy who had just been taken prisoner was brought before him. The man was searched, but nothing was found on him. "Give him a purge!" ordered Thomas-Alexander; and soon after an aide-de-camp brought him a little wax ball enclosing a letter. This was sent to the General-in-Chief Bonaparte who summoned Berthier.
     The letter proved to be important and the reputation of Thomas-Alexander grew at a leap. He followed Bonaparte to Egypt and, for a good beginning, drove the Mamelukes into the Nile; "and that," he modestly added, "is called, I believe, the Battle of the Pyramids." Just as he had been a terror to the Austrians, he now terrified the Egyptians. In the thick of battle he was everywhere. When he appeared in the cemetery at Cairo, whirling his flashing saber above his head while his horse pranced and reared and crashed its forehoofs down on the gravestones, the natives, at sight of this demigod with face scorched by the sun of Egypt, fled in panic crying, "The Angel! The Angel!"
     The Angel, or the Black Devil, saw before him a brilliant future. He was thirty-five years old and he knew that he was favorably noted by Bonaparte; but he had won his stripes under the Revolution, he was firmly republican, and when he discerned in the General-in-Chief the way of a dictator, he plotted against him. Diplomacy was not his strong point and he had a bitter experience—the plot was discovered, and Thomas-Alexander was forced to embark forthwith for France. And now his misfortunes began. The ship in which he sailed was seized by the enemy and conducted to Tarentum. Thomas-Alexander was imprisoned, kept in close confinement, and treated with special severity. It seemed as though the jailers had some private grudge against their prisoner and had received orders to rid themselves of him; two several attempts were made to poison him. At the end of twenty months he regained his freedom, but in what wretched shape! Lame, deaf in one ear, almost blind, partially paralyzed, and suffering frightfully from stomach trouble, he who had been the brilliant general of the Army of the Alps, of Italy, and of Egypt, found himself stranded in Villers-Cotterets.
     It was at Villers-Cotterets that he had married in 1792, between campaigns, Marie-Louise-Elizabeth Labouret, daughter of Sieur Labouret, landlord of the Hôtel of the Crown and Commandant of the National Guard.
     For a soldier of fortune who had roamed the world and suffered much and who now came back to the fold, broken in health and penniless, Villers-Cotterets should have been a delightful haven. The forest is crossed by noble avenues; woods frame the meadows; the sky is mild, yet not too soft; and there is something soothing and harmonious in the landscape of Villers-Cotterets. The dominant note is a château of the Renaissance which, though fallen to the low estate of a place of confinement for vagrants, still reared its lofty chimneys, marked with the fleur-de-lys or symbolical salamander, above the little town. Past magnificence has left its ghostly shadows and the essential character of the country has not altogether disappeared even before the march of an industrial age. Even the games preserve a certain ancient and lordly flavor. Villers-Cotterets takes pride in a company of archers.
     In his house in the rue de Lormet—the simple house of a humble citizen, with only one story and a yard— Thomas-Alexander tasted without relish the charms of provincial peace. He suffered from inaction and from physical weakness; and his daughter, Alexandrine-Aimée, born in 1793, was not enough to divert him. When a man has marched over the roads of Europe and even reached Africa, when his friends and comrades are still fighting and building epic history, how can a man be content at Villers-Cotterets?
     He was very poor. All his attempts to collect his arrear-pay were in vain. When some one mentioned his name to Bonaparte, "I forbid you ever to speak to me of that man again," was the reply.
     There was no appeal against this judgment, and the servant's rancor matched that of the master. Thomas-Alexander, recalling a day when Bonaparte had embraced him, after some splendid deed, muttered, "When I think that I had him between my arms and could have strangled him!" After a while he grew resigned and, established as a citizen of Villers-Cotterets in spite of himself, he puttered about, a superannuated soldier.
     Now, in 1802, on July 24—the fifth of Thermidor in the tenth year of the Republic as the General, who grew more and more republican, preferred to say—at half past five in the morning Madame Dumas gave birth to a son, who, in accordance with family tradition, was called Alexander. Great was everyone's joy, for up to that time the household had only a daughter. (1)
     (1) This sister of Dumas, who later became Madame Letellier, played no part in her brother's life.
     "I have to announce to you," General Dumas wrote to his friend. General Brune, "that my wife yesterday was delivered of a son who weighs nine pounds and measures eighteen inches. If he continues to grow outside as he has grown inside, he bids fair to attain a very fine figure."
     Would Brune become the godfather of this prodigy? But Brune refused. He had been godfather five times, his five godchildren were all dead, and he was afraid of bringing bad luck to young Alexander. So the boy entered upon life without this lofty sponsorship. Perhaps this was an advantage . . .
     Madame Dumas looked at her son with rapture; she had been very afraid that he might be quite black! A few days before the 24th of July she had seen a marionette show where Polichinelle was carried off by a black devil named Berlick. This Berlick had frightened her and she had gone home in a fit of nerves: "I'll be ruined! I shall give birth to a Berlick!" But far from it; Alexander had a fair skin, light hair, and blue eyes; he was not at all diabolical and he flourished on the admiration of his gigantic father, "the calf of whose leg was as big round as the waist of his mother."
     But the giant was falling into a decline; the stomach trouble from which he had suffered since his imprisonment at Tarentum became more violent. In 1806 he died. Alexander was in despair. He could not conceive that a man so big, so good, and so strong could disappear in this way; and when he was told that his father had been taken away by God, he wanted to go to Heaven to search for God up there and demand satisfaction of him.
     Madame Dumas, poorer than ever by the death of her husband, now lived with her parents in the Hôtel of the Crown. She could not dream of procuring a scholarship for her son from the Emperor and so entrusted him to a good priest, the Abbé Grégoire, who was to teach him his rudiments. But Alexander leaned not at all toward letters and even less toward mathematics; he never got beyond the multiplication tables. His mother then thought of having him learn the violin and put him in the hands of an old musician of Villers-Cotterets, father Hiraux, a man a little like Hoffmann, long and thin, with a black silk cap which he pulled over his ears whenever his pupils played the wrong note. He drew down his little black cap very often when Alexander scraped away on the violin. At the end of three years Madame Dumas was informed that to try any longer to make a musician of her son would be to rob her. Alexander, said the report, couldn't so much as tune his instrument!
     For what would the lad be good, then? The widow was in despair. Happily his writing master, M. Oblet, boasted of his pupil's attainments. Alexander formed every line and curve of the five kinds of writing with clearness and elegance. "But every idiot can write well," said his mother and she continued to be uneasy.
     Young Alexander, for his part, remained serene; he was quite pleased with himself. Happening to cry one day, he was asked what the matter was and answered: "Dumas is crying because Dumas is troubled." Center of his little universe, Dumas knew what he was worth; Dumas would make his way; why should his mother be concerned about him?
     Certainly he was ill at ease on a school bench or before a desk. He wasted no time in dreaming; but out of doors he expanded mightily. To start at daybreak to catch birds in the woods, with the poacher Hanniquet, nicknamed Quiot-Biche, or his friend Boudoux, who ate everything and at all times; to prepare limetwigs, imitate the jay, and return with a string of birds; to go hunting with his mother's kinsman, M. Deviolaine, inspector of the forests; or to spend the day at the château of Villers-Hélon with M. Collard—how delightful and satisfying were these ways of spending his time and of enjoying life!
     When the weather was bad Alexander had other amusements. At the lock-up for vagrants, he looked up the old fencing master, father Mounier, who stammered frightfully because of a wound in the mouth, but who could teach fencing according to the very best methods. Young Alexander pressed forward with the free gait of a colt that has been given its head.
     Sometimes his mother took him with her to pay visits. He wore his company jacket of printed calico, and he harangued the grown people with complete assurance although he was no higher than a Hessian boot. People amused him, they never frightened him. One evening, at the Collards he saw an old lady, dressed in black, breathless, terrified, and with disheveled hair, sweeping in like a storm—a witch coming from the Witches' Sabbath. It was Madame de Genlis, a relative of the Collards. Her coachman had let her get lost in the forest and she was afraid of ghosts. To the urchin Alexander the old lady only seemed very funny.
     He was now more than ten years old and his mother, whose only livelihood was her tobacco shop, decided to send her son to the clerical seminary. At first Alexander made no objection; but when one of his Deviolaine cousins assured him ironically that she would later take him as her father-confessor, he ran away from home and for three days lived in the woods, hunting birds with his friend, Boudoux the insatiable. And so ended all talk of the priesthood.
     1814.—Villers-Cotterets lies on the road of the invader. There you get the smell of war, there you encounter the Cossack, and schools and school boys are thrown into the background. The Bourbons return, but for a short time only. In June, 1813, Alexander sees in the main street of the town a carriage driving by full tilt, and through the curtain the profile of a man. It is the Emperor about to take command of the army. Several days later he sees him again, dejected, crushed, but still swept full speed along the highway. These two visions that flash by like lightning remain fixed in his memory forever.
     Madame Dumas, practical woman, tried to profit by these events. With the Bourbons reëstablished on the throne and her husband's enemy finally vanquished, she gave her son the choice between calling himself Davy de la Pailleterie and finding a position with the royal family, or calling himself Dumas like his father, the republican, and having no prospects at all. Alexander did not hesitate; he would have no other name than his father's. Very well, but meanwhile he must live; and this friend of Boudoux, this pupil of father Mounier had as his sole capital his beautiful handwriting. What to do with that? Copy, engross . . . and so, at fifteen, Alexander went into the office of Maître Mennesson, the notary, as his third clerk.
     The smell of dust and ink and paste did not suit him at all; and inactivity got on his nerves. At the end of half an hour, his legs, his very long legs—for he had suddenly shot up and become thin as a lathe—itched and he took every chance to sneak off, to look up the poacher Quiot-Biche, or the foresters who loved him in memory of his father. But these were only snatches of freedom; always he had to return to the office and scratch away at his papers along with the other clerks. It was here, however, at Maître Mennesson's, a liberal in politics, that Alexander improved, if one can call it so, his mind; he set to work to read the writers dear to the adversaries of the Restoration: Voltaire, Pigault-Lebrun, Legouvé, Demoustiers (a celebrity of Villers-Cotterets), Louvet de Couvray, and the minor poets, Bertin and Parny—all huddled together. This collection was perhaps not the best for forming his taste, but the third clerk failed to see its humor. His readings, with the exception of Faublas, did not inspire him with enthusiasm and he still preferred bird-catching in the forest or even an evening "in society."
     He was now beginning to take an interest in his appearance and regarded it not without approval. His blond hair curled gracefully, his large blue eyes were soft, his nose was straight, his lips were strong and sensual, his teeth very white . . . and above all he had a dazzling skin! In truth, he was an attractive young man; and to prove his attractions, he undertook to seduce a young girl of the town. Adèle Dalvin. This little campaign interested him greatly, and as Adèle soon yielded, life appeared in rainbow colors to the triumphant Alexander. He sought to acquire the elegances and even tried within his feeble means to become a provincial dandy. At night, like a new Faublas, he scaled the window to his lady fair.
     Who can tell? Perhaps he might have made his way in the practice of the law, perhaps he could have become the lion of Villers-Cotterets, terror of mothers and darling of daughters. He was promoted to be second clerk with Maître Lefèvre at Crépy-en-Valois. His career promised to be peaceful. . . . But the uproar of Paris echoes even to the provinces, and suddenly to Alexander everything looked different.
     The person who disclosed to him the marvels of the capital and brought with him the air of the great world was a young man of fashion named Adolphe de Leuven, descended from a Swedish nobleman who had taken part in the assassination of King Gustav IV and then retired to France. Adolphe sometimes came to the environs of Villers-Cotterets to rest from the fatigues of his Parisian life. Always dressed to kill, with the easy manners of a grand seigneur, he won immediately the heart of Alexander who listened to him, open-mouthed, as he told of theaters, actors. Mlle. Mars, Talma—Adolphe knew them and could visit their dressing-rooms—of fashionable authors, cafés, boulevards, especially the Boulevard de Gand where all the celebrities met nightly. Like a kaleidoscope full of color and charm, the delights of the world passed before the eyes of Boudoux's friend. Beside such wonders, what signified the office of Maître Lefèvre, the shelter for vagrants, and shabby little provincial parties? Beside the beautiful ladies whom Adolphe visited, what figure could be cut by Adèle Dalvin? Alexander's imagination magnified and exalted things and people alike; he dreamed of glory and of orgies; he forgot the forest and bird-catching. . . . He would visit Paris; from now on he was firmly set on this, and Adolphe offered to act as his guide.
     There was the question of money. An insignificant trouble! He took his gun, plunged into the forest and brought back some game which he sold to an innkeeper. Next you see him, one morning in November, 1822, on his way to Paris with a few francs in his pockets. Hours of joy, hours of impatience, the discovery of a world were before him.
     Next day, in Adolphe's company, he danced attendance at the Théâtre-Français. Talma! He was to be presented to Talma who was playing the rôle of Sulla that evening. It wasn't easy to push his way through to the great man. Alexander made himself very small and slipped through the crowd, while Adolphe named the various celebrities whom they jostled. Here were Soumet, Guiraud, Etienne, and there Casimir Delavigne, pale and wretched .... With his big blue eyes, still very innocent, Alexander stared at these leaders in the arts.
     Suddenly a voice is heard: "Make way for Mlle. Mars!"
     There is a rustling of satin, an exquisite perfume, a cloud of gauze, from which flash sparkling eyes, and teeth white as pearls. Then he hears "a voice sweet as the strings of a lyre." She enters, and goes out again a few moments later; again there is the same rustling and that seductive perfume! In the wake of this divinity Alexander feels stunned, overwhelmed. . . .
     At last he is received in the dressing room of the Master; but where he expected an imposing Sulla, crowned with laurels, he sees only a little old man in a flannel dressing gown, as hairless as a billiard ball. His embarrassment grows when Talma asks him what he is doing.
     "I'm a notary's clerk," murmurs Alexander.
     "Bah!" says Talma, "Corneille was an attorney's clerk."
     At that Alexander regains his assurance: "Touch my forehead. That will bring me good luck," he begs.
     "Very well, so be it! Alexander Dumas, I baptize thee poet, in the name of Shakespeare, Corneille, and Schiller."
     Shakespeare, Corneille, Schiller—these names had not yet made a very profound impression on the mind of the neophyte. He knew the first only through the staid translation of Ducis, a Shakespeare much sobered and polished. But the future would be his. He had been consecrated a poet and by Talma, the first tragic actor of the age—what a date in his life! Now his choice was made; he would be a writer, a dramatist, perhaps, like those gentlemen he had passed in the antechamber who, after all, did not look much cleverer ,/ithan other people. When he had to go back to Villers-Cotterets—his purse was empty and his absence had made trouble at the office—he said to Adolphe de Leuven with a solemn air, "Have no fear, I shall come to Paris, I promise you." Maître Lefèvre received his second clerk without scolding, but remarked with irony that if a machine is to work all the wheels must function together. Alexander made no reply. He had to write in order to live. But while he was covering legal documents with beautiful penmanship, his mind was elsewhere, no longer in the forest with Quiot-Biche, no longer, alas! in Adèle Dalvin's cottage, but in a dressing-room at the Théâtre-Français.
     Adolphe-Mephistopheles continued to teach and to spur him on. They would collaborate, they would "divert a branch of the river Pactolus which watered the grounds of M. Scribe," they would become rich and celebrated. What a happy future! As soon as he had closed the door of the office behind him, Alexander looked up his books, seeking subjects to write about and instinctively turning the novels which he read into plays. He made a melodrama from Ivanhoe; and on the day when he discovered the ballad of Lenore, by Bürger, he was dazzled indeed. This was something different from the verses of Ducis! This was moving, terrifying, fantastic, and froze the very marrow! Thanks to his fiery imagination and to his unspoiled freshness of mind, thanks also to a complete lack of the critical spirit, every new discovery echoed in him with peculiar intensity. But how could a man develop his gifts in a mediocre little town? Paris, he must have Paris. How was he to bring this about? His departure was effected in the simplest possible way. Among his numerous talents Alexander was a superior billiard player. One evening he won at the inn-keeper's the price of six hundred small glasses of absinthe, about ninety francs. It was a fortune, enough to pay for the coach to Paris and even to live there while finding his way about. The chance was too good to miss.
     Alexander shook the dust of Maître Lefèvre's office from his shoes, kissed his mother whom he left lamenting, and set out for the conquest of the capital.

CHAPTER II

ALEXANDER'S YEARS OF APPRENTICESHIP

     WHEN d'Artagnan, who resembles Dumas like a brother, came first from Gascony to Paris, he had his letter of introduction stolen, the letter which his father had given him for M. de Treville, Captain of the Musketers. Everybody knows this—it is history.
     Alexander had better luck. One Sunday in May, 1823, when he stepped down from the carriage of "The Lightning Coach-Offices" and stood in the courtyard of the Hôtel des Fermes in the rue du Bouloi, he had in his pocket several letters to old friends of his father whose interest Madame Dumas bespoke for her prodigal son. It was the only provision for his journey which she had been able to give him.
     But this viaticum did not prove of much use. General Sebastiani remained intrenched behind a regiment of secretaries who stood sentinel at his doors and made up his bodyguard; another friend was too poor to be of any help to the son of an old comrade. In despair Alexander looked up General Foy, the famous tribune. This time fate smiled upon him. Foy, a well known liberal, was on good terms with the Duke of Orléans, who lived at the Palais Royal and never refused anything to those of the opposition party. Alexander forthwith drew a petition and presented it to the general.
     "Certainly, everything's all right!" exclaimed Foy.
     "But why so?" asked Dumas.
     "You write a beautiful hand."
     Dumas was stunned. A beautiful hand! It was the stock phrase that greeted him everywhere, at Paris, as at Villers-Cotterets, and his mother's words came back to him: "Every idiot can write well." His self-esteem was wounded sore, but he had no right to be exacting. And so, several days later he entered the offices of the Duke of Orléans as a supernumerary clerk, at a salary of twelve hundred francs a year.
     In order to live cheaply he left the hotel in the rue des Vieux-Augustins (rue Hérold) where he had stayed since his arrival and rented a little room with an alcove on the fourth floor of a house at No. 1, Carré des Italiens, facing the Opéra-Comique. It was a modest lodging, adorned with yellow wall paper at twelve sous a roll, and the rent was only ten francs a month. True, Alexander, in order to establish his position in the eyes of the concierge, gave him a royal gratuity of a louis. The concierge bowed to the ground and offered to look after monsieur's household. The louis was well spent.
     But the respect he enjoyed at the Carré des Italiens did not follow him to the Palais Royal. There he remained the humblest of clerks; and when he appeared in the office dressed in a long frock coat to his ankles—the fashion was for frock coats ending just above the knee—and bowed his large head so that his hair, now growing kinky, stood out like a grotesque aureole and made him look like a lotion peddler who advertises his lion-like mane, he was greeted with unkindly laughter. To buy another frock coat that was not a Villers-Cotterets model was out of the question; but he did have his hair cut. Short hair did not suit him—he looked like a skinny seal.
     His life was now very much like that he had led at Maître Lefèvre's. Shut up from ten to five o'clock and in summer sometimes again from seven to ten o'clock in the evening on account of the "portfolio of Monseigneur," then living at Neuilly, he copied, copied . . . and the splendors of Paris hardly existed for him at all. The theater was a luxury and he saw the world of fashion dear to Adolphe de Leuven only in the evening, as he walked up from the rue Saint-Honoré to his own lodgings. His room seemed like a cell. Dumas no longer cried because Dumas had grown up, but Dumas could not put up with loneliness.
     Facing his door, on the same landing, lived a young woman named Marie-Catherine Lebay, very blond, very fair, not pretty but charming. After an amicable separation from her husband because of incompatibility, she had come from Rouen to Paris where she had opened a linen shop. Dumas often met her on the stairs. Catherine was much older than he, to be sure, but she was gay and attractive and he liked her. Why not have a common household? Catherine's lodgings consisted of two rooms. With his yellow chamber, they would have an apartment . . . and so Dumas recovered his confidence in life.
     At the office, talking with one of his colleagues, Lassagne, who was a great devourer of books, Alexander had made a discovery—it was that he knew nothing. His desultory reading had simply burdened his mind; and thanks to "his education at three francs a month," as that old grumbler Deviolaine called it, he knew next to nothing about antiquity, about the history of France, and about foreign literature. His little stock of scattered facts floated in a void of ignorance. His whole education must begin anew. Bravely he started to school again, reading at the office between two copies, reading after supper, reading all night. Sometimes he went to see a friend at the hospital of la Charité, and took lessons in physics, chemistry, and physiology. He stored up what he found with untiring devotion and touching sincerity.
     But this disinterested work did not increase his budget, and on July 27, 1824, his situation became tragic, for on the very day when the Duke of Montpensier made his appearance in the world at the Palais Royal, a boy was born on the fourth floor of the Carré des Italiens who was registered as the son of Catherine Lebay, keeper of a linen shop, and who received the inevitable name of Alexander.
     Young Dumas' responsibilities as a father were heavy and yet it was this very moment that he chose to invite his mother to come to Paris. She had long been complaining of her loneliness at Villers-Cotterets; and when her son, touched by her distress, sent for her, she sold her tobacco shop and came up at once. Alexander rented a little apartment for her at 53, Faubourg Saint-Denis, next to the Lion d'Argent, for three hundred and fifty francs. He could then draw up his balance sheet for the year—two households and four persons to keep on twelve hundred francs a year.
     But Alexander was not the man to despair. Since he could not earn enough at the office to support this family, he would write for the theater, a sure highway to fortune. With Adolphe de Leuven and a gay bohemian named Rousseau, he wrote a vaudeville sketch, La Chasse et l'Amour, which was finally performed at the Ambigu theater and had a little success. As his share Alexander received three hundred francs and with characteristic business sense he immediately used the money to have his volume, Nouvelles Contemporaines, printed. Written during his leisure hours, it was to establish his reputation. The bookseller sold four copies; and Dumas realized at last that the moment had come "to triuimph or to present his throat."
     Since the vaudeville had fetched so little, he must pass from the frivolous to the serious, and he set to work again. One day, at an exposition, he had noticed a bas-relief of the assassination of Monaldeschi. The name meant nothing to him but it was evidently a tragic episode; he borrowed the Biographie Universelle at his office and read the articles on Christine of Sweden and Monaldeschi. . . . What a wonderful story! The queen, her favorite, the betrayal, the cowardice of the victim, with Fontainebleau as the setting. He would go to Fontainebleau, he would write his drama and in verse, not in Ducis' manner, but in powerful, terrible, overwhelming lines, something like Bürger's Lenore. Here was where his talent lay! He felt himself incapable of tamely submitting to the rules laid down by the great masters, and with his violent temperament thought that the classic unities were merely organized suppression. And so, alone, without influence, without an eye to the world of letters, this tall starveling, hardly transplanted from the provinces, found the formula for the new era.
     Christine's gestation was painful. The manuscript, concealed in a blotting-case at the Palais Royal, would come forth under the light of the lamp at the Carré des Italiens. Catherine sewed, the baby cried, and Alexander, finally impatient, seized his son by the arm and sent him flying, hit or miss, at the bed.
     "I can still see myself in the air," the younger Dumas used to say years later.
     Catherine lost her temper. . . . And the next day, at the dinner hour, Alexander came home with a melon to buy her forgiveness.
     At the Duke of Orléans' palace they were beginning to think that "the outside work" of M. Dumas, if not actually prejudicial to his office work, was proving an annoyance, and one day Alexander was summoned before his chief, M. Oudard. That he should perpetrate literature was too bad, but endurable; but in any case it should be classical literature, decorous, worthy of an employee, in short, and take as its model the works of M. Casimir Delavigne. Alexander rose. He had a perfect horror of this author's works, "as breathless as the man, as consumptive as the poet." He replied squarely that he would certainly write something quite different or he would not write at all.
     From that time forward it was agreed at the Palais Royal that the clerk Dumas was a revolutionist.
     About this time (1827), Alexander attended a performance of Hamlet given by an English company; and although he understood very little of what he heard, it was a revelation to him. At the point in the play within the play when the actor Kemble, in order better to see the queen's agitation, cried, "Light! Light!", Dumas almost rose himself and cried, "Light! Light!" He perceived now that he had been wandering blindly in the dark. The true Shakespeare opened his eyes for him and made him understand what a drama ought to be, composed of comedy and of tragedy, like life itself. . . . And desperately he set to work once more upon Christine.
     Meanwhile he was writing little poems for ephemeral reviews, an elegy on the death of his benefactor, General Foy, and timidly asking newspaper editors to quote passages from it. This certainly was not fame! And though his salary had increased from twelve to fifteen hundred francs, life was still precarious. He now lived with his mother in the rue de l'Ouest. Every morning at half past nine the household cat, Mysouff, accompanied him to the rue de Vaugirard, and in the evening at half past five it waited for its master at the same corner. It was a peaceful family life, favorable for work; but there were also Catherine and the child, living at the Carré des Italiens.
     Christine was finished; and there was nothing more to do but to get it produced. Where was he to turn? Alexander knew no influential personages. He had made connections with some of the writers of his own age, with Méry, a jolly and highly gifted native of Marseilles, whom he had met at the Luxembourg; and Adolphe de Leuven was still well disposed toward him. But these young men trying to carve out their own ways could not support him. He needed loftier patronage.
     Alexander arrived at a momentous decision. He would go to see Nodier, Nodier, the Providence of young men of letters, and ask of him an introduction to Baron Taylor, Commissary Royal of the Théâtre-Français.
     The morning he rang the bell at the door of the Arsenal where Nodier was director of the Library, a young girl came to answer it. He gave his name and his position, a man of letters, and then waited. He waited a long time. At last the young girl returned and, a little embarrassed, murmured that her father could not receive him. Alexander smiled pleasantly: "Thank you, Mademoiselle, I'm not easily discouraged. I shall return."
     Three days later he again went up the big stairway with its baluster of carved wood, and when the same young girl appeared he inquired: "Well, Mademoiselle, what's your impression, if you please? Do you think I shall be more fortunate today?"
     Marie Nodier smiled. She did not understand why her father persisted in his presentiment that this tall chap with the amiable, pleasant expression was a poor wretch coming to ask for alms; and she went off again as his ambassador. . . . Several minutes passed. When Marie returned, she asked Dumas to follow her.
     "I'm extremely grateful to you. Mademoiselle," he said, "you seem to have taken a great deal of trouble."
     He passed through the antechamber, the dining room, and the drawing-room, and was led into the bedroom.
     It was Nodier's custom to receive strangers only during the two hours in the morning before he got up, and that morning he awaited his persistent visitor with mocking smile; but as Dumas unfolded his tall figure before him, his smile came off.
     "It seems to me," Marie murmured in her father's ear, "that the Alexander Dumas you expected and mine are two different persons."
     "Ah! the poor fellow," Nodier answered softly, "he owes you a fine candle!"
     A half hour later Alexander had his letter of introduction to Baron Taylor; and Nodier, captured by his charm and his good humor, called to him from the depths of his alcove that he must come again to see him, and "be on his guard against that rascal of a literary man who had twice taken his name."
     The following week Dumas was received by Taylor, not in his bed but in his bath, where he listened to the reading of Christine. He liked the play, but the vote of the Committee and of M. Picard, the authority of the moment in dramatic affairs, was necessary. This Picard was a terrible little man, hunch-backed, sharp-eyed, with pointed nose and chin. When Alexander presented himself to learn the verdict on Christine, Picard received him stiffly, declared flatly that the play was worthless, and playing with the manuscript like a cat with a mouse, inquired: "Have you any other means of existence than a literary career?"
     "Monsieur, I have a position that brings me in fifteen hundred francs with Monseigneur the Duke of Orléans."
     "Ah, very well," replied Picard, thrusting the manuscript between Alexander's fingers, "go back to your office, young man, go back to your office!"
     Happily the Committee proved less severe, and the play was taken under consideration. Mlle. Mars was to play the lead.
     When Alexander went to thank Nodier he was received with open arms and invited to his Sunday evenings. It was Alexander's first step into the world of celebrities. The drawing-room with its white panelling and Louis XV moldings was simple yet elegant, furnished with a dozen armchairs and a sofa covered with red cashmere; the window draperies of the same color; a statue of Henry IV, and a portrait of the head of the household.
     At six o'clock the table was set. Madame Nodier, crossing her pretty little feet before her as she sat in her armchair, received her guests affably; but if any one had the bad luck to be the thirteenth, he was banished to a separate table. There was no formality. Nodier was still the country gentleman from Franche-Comté. He preferred brown bread to white bread, pewter to silver, tallow candles to wax, and cabbage soup was to him the king of soups. He insisted that coffee should be served at the table because he thought that one should not get up between the dessert and the final perfection of dining.
     Just before the end of the meal Madame Nodier would go to the drawing-room with Dumas who, thanks to his height, could light the candles without mounting a chair. He had become a son of the household, so to say, with his place set next to Marie Nodier, and he delighted every one by his direct intelligence and good-natured exuberance. At last he had found the milieu which suited him, where his nature could develop freely, and he revealed himself as he was in this friendly company.
     When the guests rose from the table Nodier would be moaning and gasping as if he could hardly breathe; and as he lay stretched out on the sofa, he would let his slender, discolored hands and his feet dangle, while his friends were all agreed that an inexpressible charm somehow radiated from all his awkwardness and all his carelessness. Dumas appreciated him more than any one else. For him Nodier was the man who knew everything in ancient and modern times, who had passed through the ages, a kind of Count de Saint-Germain; and when Nodier spoke Dumas was silent—with Alexander always the final proof of admiration.
     What amazing stories he listened to! Whether on beetles, politics, or grammar, on German or Anglo-Saxon legends, on bibliography, occultism, or poetry, Nodier was inexhaustible. He had the kind of universal knowledge that Dumas envied, a mind open to everything curious and fantastic. He was as superstitious as a Negro, caustic as a pamphleteer, and his memory never failed him. He would tell you all about the habits of a strange insect he had discovered, the taratantaleo, or insect-velocipede, and a moment later recite in minute detail all the conspiracies under the Empire. His heavy, provincial accent resounded through the room. Alexander listened, storing away this wealth of anecdote. Nothing was lost on him.
     Outside the frogs croaked on the shores of the island. It was pleasant in this friendly salon among these kind people; Marie Nodier, "the grand-marshal's lady of the palace," as her father called her, sat down at the piano; the armchairs were ranged along the walls and then they began to dance, while Nodier, in a window-niche, played cards. Everybody here was cheerful and unaffected. Sometimes they put five candles on the floor, in a square with one in the middle, and the various couples performed their figures "in the midst of these flaming dangers," while their shadows moved on the ceiling in fantastic silhouettes. . . . When his game was finished Nodier disappeared and a little later his wife would go upstairs carrying a smoking warming pan; but nothing interrupted the fun.
     It was in the course of these evening parties which he dearly loved to recall in after years that Dumas became acquainted with most of the men who were to be his friends or his rivals—Fontaney and Alfred Johannot, two mysterious figures who entertained "a presentiment of the grave"; Vigny, who still kept up his intercourse with people; Barye, the sculptor, detached in the midst of the hubbub; Boulanger, the painter, melancholy today, giddy tomorrow; young Musset who was dreaming his Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie; Francisque Michel, the Chartist; Valéry, librarian of the Palace at Versailles, who was so tall and so flat that Méry could write this of him:
     "He stoops to catch the birds on the wing."
     Here, too, young Dumas learned to care for Lamartine, the aristocrat, to whom he was always attached though life kept them apart; and here he became the friend of a stocky youth with lofty brow, whom he had first met one day at a fair in the Boulevard du Temple in a booth where both had gone to gaze at a mermaid's skeleton. The young man was Victor Hugo, celebrated even then. A contemporary of Alexander and like him the son of a general, Hugo had a place apart in the salon of the Arsenal; grave and usually silent, precociously playing his role of torch-bearer, he came forward only when Nodier, tired of talking, exclaimed: "We've had enough prose. Now for the poet!"
     Dumas' role was different. He enlivened all occasions with his high spirits and his animation was the delight of his hosts. When he asked Valéry, who had a cough, "Didn't you have cold feet last year?" everyone shouted. Nobody could be angry with this big fellow so clearly well-intentioned, who looked at you so honestly with frank blue eyes.
     The Arsenal was not only a club for Alexander where his wits were sharpened, and a springboard for his imagination, but a support as well. Nodier was serviceable and on hand with good advice. A man of the fireside, Lamartine called him, the confidant of everyone. Dumas who had been so lonely now found some one to whom he could talk freely of his plans, and in expressing his hopes to Nodier he seemed to realize them. The older man listened with unwearied patience. He approved his young friend's writing for the theater according to a new formula. "One should realize," he said, "that people in the big cities gain their education or make it over through melodrama." Had he himself not written, though he hadn't dared to sign his name to it, a frightful, fantastic play, The Vampire? And when, after one of these long chats, Alexander returned to the rue de l'Ouest, he felt buoyant, happy. Decidedly life was going to be beautiful.
     The day after at the Palais Royal he had to come down to earth again. It was impossible to work quietly in the midst of so much racket, and as he had just been newly assigned to the department of forests he made a request for "a private niche," the retreat where a porter stored empty ink bottles. The request was thought outlandish and the porter, threatened with being ousted, answered Dumas insolently, who, with a back stroke of his hand, knocked the fellow's cap off. The gesture did no good and Alexander felt the wind of disfavor. Not satisfied with gadding after literature, he was permitting himself to be impolite—that went beyond the limits! Dumas pulled himself together, and galled, returned to his harness. He was so weary in the evening that he went to bed as soon as he got home. But at midnight he was up and at his work again. . .. Meanwhile Christine was still waiting in the folder at the Théâtre-Français.
     Alexander went on with his varied studies in the school of sentiment; he showed no disposition toward stability in love. His Negro blood made him find something charming in polygamy. He had separated from Catherine after a violent scene, but he still assisted her to the best of his ability. He quickened the pace of his adventures, seeking his pleasure without too much refining. When one of his passing mistresses became pregnant, he wrote to a friend: "I am not so presumptuous as to believe myself the author of this miracle, but if the baby does bring to this vale of tears a head of kinky hair, I shall have to be convinced."
     On June 3, 1827, however, he experienced something like a bolt from the blue. One of his comrades, Theodore Villenave, had invited him to take tea that day with his father, who lived at 82, rue de Vaugirard, a little mansion that had been turned into a museum. In the salon, by the side of a bronze urn which had contained the heart of Bayard, Alexander admired a portrait of Anne Boleyn by Holbein and a landscape of Claude Lorrain. Passing over the barricades of books and portfolios filled with autographs and engravings, he reached the master of the house. This elder Villenave was a curious person. He had lived at Nantes at the time of Carrier and the drownings of 1792, since which time the mania of collecting had occupied him utterly. He lived buried in history and in dust, and this exclusive taste had not developed kindliness in him. His countenance, crowned by white hair carefully put up in curlpapers, was suspicious, without a smile; and Alexander did not find again, in this citadel of books, the warm welcome of the Arsenal.
     Suddenly a young woman appeared. She was not pretty, rather thin, and of very dark complexion—in every way Catherine's opposite—but with her very soft black eyes, beautiful hair, and something half modest, half coquettish, she was altogether attractive. It was Mélanie Waldor, Villenave's daughter, married to a Captain of Infantry who rarely came to Paris. Alexander blushed and instinctively leaned against the door for support. This apparition of youth in a decaying cavern overwhelmed him; for the first time in his life he did not know what to say and felt ridiculous. . . .
     He became an intimate of the family, beguiled old Villenave by giving him autographs from General Dumas' collection, and established the pleasant habit of going to the rue de Vaugirard twice a day. Mélanie received him with a charming, slightly melancholy air; she was thirty years old—five years older than Alexander—devoted to literature, wrote verse, and apparently had not found happiness in marriage. Dumas declared his feelings and in what ardent fashion! She replied with virtuous indignation; and the next day he wrote to her: "Forget my madness of yesterday, above all forget my boldness. The strength with which you rejected the idea that your friendship might become something more has almost cured me of the idea." But he was really not cured and his protestations of love, his exclamations of despair were only multiplied. Ah! if she would but understand him, become his Muse, his inspiration, he would conquer the world!
     Mélanie allowed herself to be overwhelmed, deluded by his voice now vehement, now caressing. The passion of this young savage had a different tone from the conjugal C-major of Captain Waldor; and Alexander little by little pressed his advantage. He read Christine to her and his comments were more thrilling than the text. Mélanie's resistance was growing weaker, but the conventional modesty of her class still restrained her, when Alexander decided the moment had come to end this situation. He rented a small, discreet room "to shelter their love," according to formula; and to assure his victory, he disturbed Mélanie with Machiavellian letters: "If you had told me the truth, if I were vicious! . . . Oh! yes, in matters of love you have the purity, I might almost say the ignorance of a child of fifteen." She promised to come, if he would agree not to ruffle her. Could he not be satisfied with a pure, ethereal friendship?
     To this he answered: "Observe that there is a refinement of cruelty in saying to me, I shall come to see you looking my loveliest,' and then imposing conditions on me. . . . Yes, yes, I shall spare your beautiful toilet, have no fear. . . . I ask only that you take off your hat and your veil." And so what was bound to come to pass came to pass; on September 12, 1827, Mélanie yielded.
     Alexander enjoyed a wordy triumph. When he was not seeing his mistress, he was writing to her at every hour of the day and of the night, beginning at eight o'clock in the evening, continuing until midnight, stopping at two o'clock, and beginning again at dawn. It was truly a glorious passion. He wrote to her in verse. He broke off in prose. "Ah, and now to my task!" (This meant that he was writing at the office and had just been given a report to copy.) Now he struck the note of prudence: "Be calm, my love, although your exhaltation (sic) proves to me how much you love me," and wrote on: "Adieu, my angel. Hunger is consuming me. . . . I shall be with you at a quarter to seven."
     Plainly Alexander is a robust lover, not given to languishing; he frightens even Mélanie by his violent demands. In vain she tries to lead him over to a more platonic temper, to a more moderate expenditure of his ardor. He replies: "Believe me, I am so much in love with love only because it seems to bind us more closely together. The after moments are delightful, perhaps sweeter than love itself. Believe me, I know how to relish love!"
     Mélanie thought he relished it too much. She suffered from suffocation and from palpitations. She pined away and became dyspeptic. Alexander, who had an excellent digestion, was displeased. "You must fatten yourself up quickly, quickly, my dear; and I shall make you thin again by plaguing you;" and as soothing syrup he sends "a thousand million kisses" to his thin lady-love.
     On April 30, 1828, the newspapers announced that the Théâtre-Français had just accepted a play by M. Alexander Dumas, called Christine à Fontainebleau; they added that the recommendation of the Duke of Orléans had been instrumental in bringing this about. Alexander, who knew very well what the views of Monseigneur and his departments were about him, smiled but did not correct the statement. His years of apprenticeship were over.

CHAPTER III

"THE CROWN IS MINE!"

     REHEARSALS had begun at the Théâtre-Français and Alexander saw almost daily the same Mlle. Mars who had so agitated him a few years before. But she did not, it seemed to him, improve on closer acquaintance. Since she had made her reputation in playing the classical repertory, she did not understand how any one could depart from the sacred rules; as an actress of Racine's queens and Molière's coquettes, she thought the role of Christine of Sweden extravagant and sure to fail. She was headstrong, too, and fancied that she knew better than anyone else what the public wanted, so she worked very quietly to destroy the play in which she was to appear, declaring that certain lines were impossible and absurd. But Alexander had lost his provincial shyness and maintained that his verses were excellent. Mlle. Mars, with nerves on edge, pretended to yield. "We'll recite them, these verses of yours, and you shall see what effect they will make!" and she went on with her underhand work of wrecking the play. Alexander displeased her decidedly. He was not submissive; he seemed cold to her charms; and when he had left her dressing-room, she would say to her maid: "He smells like a Negro! His hair has the Negro smell! Open all the windows, open them quickly!"
     Thanks to her incessant interference, the rehearsals dragged. Alexander began to lose heart, and when he heard that a certain M. Brault, author of another Christine, an old gentleman with one foot in the grave, was eager to have his play produced before he made his earthly exit, gallantly he yielded his place. He deserved credit for this, for he was wholly dependent on his small clerk's salary; but the spirit of Alexandre-Antoine was in his grandson. "Whether I was earning 1,500 or 15,000 francs a year," he said later, "I have always played the grand seigneur a bit."
     Besides, in literature as in love, creation was no effort for him. When Christine was laid aside, he came by chance on another subject for a play, while turning a page of the historian Anquetil describing the love affairs of the Duchess of Guise and of the Duke's vengeance on her lover. To this tragic story he added two fragments from the chronicles of l'Estoile, a scene from Walter Scott's The Abbot, and interlarded the whole with words and oaths of the Renaissance. In two months Henri III et sa Cour, a drama in prose, was, if not written—it never was quite that—at least set on paper. What an advantage not to be embarrassed by too much knowledge!
     The first reading of the play was before Mélanie; the audience was enthusiastic. Alexander dashed off to Nestor Roqueplan, a journalist, who lived in a little room on the fifth floor, with a mantelpiece adorned with a basin instead of a clock and duelling pistols instead of candelabra. With his second hearer he had the same success. There remained only the actors whose approval Dumas wanted to be sure of before the final decision. Henri III was submitted to the actor Firmin, who might play the principal part; Firmin approved. All was well.
     The play was accepted by the Théâtre-Français on September 17, 1828; the rôles were to be assigned . . . but Alexander was counting without Mlle. Mars. She was not willing that the page—a moving, sympathetic character appearing in disguise, for which the author had a special predilection—should be given to Mlle. Despréaux. Dumas, who found the young Despréaux very pleasant, did not yield. His exasperation grew. Why, in heaven's name, had he returned to this wasps' nest? Weren't there other theaters in Paris? "This Théâtre-Français," he exclaimed, "is one of the circles of hell forgotten by Dante where God sends the writers of tragedy who have the strange whim to make the least possible money, to have twenty-five performances instead of a hundred, and to be decorated in their old age with the cross of the Legion of Honor, not for success achieved but for sufferings endured."
     Belated wisdom; he was already in the thick of greenroom battles. And then, one fine morning, he is summoned before the director general of the secretariat of the Duke of Orléans. M. de Broval, a man of the world, explains to him that literature and administration are enemies who can not live together. "Choose between them." One foot in the stirrup and glory calling, Dumas renounces his salary and borrows 3000 francs from the banker Laffitte, leaving the manuscript of Henri III as a pledge. Liberty! Fortune! They are soon to be his!
     Joyfully he now watches over his rehearsals, and puts the finishing touches to what really is a bit too much a rough draft. He acquires a taste for this theater air, makes his peace with Mlle. Mars, who will be a superb Duchess of Guise, and bestows his attentions on Mlle. Virginie Bourbier, an actress so charming that he can not refrain from telling Mélanie, too, all about her.
     To see him, you would take him for a hardened old dramatist; he has an eye for everything, finds the most effective word, the moving gesture, supervises the scenery, the costumes, the whole setting—and the press. When an obscure journalist criticizes Henri III in advance, he looks him up, stick in hand, accompanied by a friend, and demands a correction. "The pamphleteer" humbles himself before the giant. These are days of expectation, of fever, and of joy. While Mélanie, consumed by jealousy, pines away, Alexander swells and waxes pleased with himself.
     Three days before February 11, 1829, the date set for the first performance, Madame Dumas, who now lived not far from the Villenaves, had an attack which left her paralyzed in one arm and one leg. Alexander, who adored his mother, was in despair. He could not dream of postponing his play. Three days and nights he kept running between his house and the theater, tormented by having to help along the birth of his play and caring for his sick mother.
     On February 11 he dresses himself in haste. He can't find a collar. He cuts one out of cardboard. He dashes to the theater and looks through the hole in the curtain . . . The house is full. In the balcony he sees his patron Monseigneur the Duke of Orléans and his official family who want to do honor to their employee—a sign of the times—; Hugo and Vigny are in a box; other comrades are scattered here and there; and in a discreet corner box is Mélanie.
     People about the theater had doubted whether the scene where the Duke of Guise twists his wife's hand with his steel gauntlet would go over well. Alexander himself was sure of it. The scene was his declaration of war, the bold stroke which would overthrow tradition. . . . When the Duchess of Guise cried, "Henri, you are hurting me, you are hurting me frightfully!"—Mlle. Mars spoke the line in a tone of appalling suffering—the audience shuddered. A moment's hesitation and then an enthusiastic tumult burst out. The actor Firmin, endowed with epileptic ardor, forgot his part and held the scene with his convulsions. Everyone applauded. The public stood up, as if seized with madness. And the delirium turned into frenzy when Alexander appeared after the fourth curtain, radiant and "holding his head so high that his disordered mop of hair threatened to take fire from the stars."
     He had just come from seeing his mother, and, having found her no worse, he enjoyed his triumph to the utmost; Mélanie, when he went to her box, was weeping; his relative, Deviolaine, who had sworn that Alexander would never amount to anything, was literally moved to the depths; and his friends from the Arsenal were exuberant with joy. At the fall of the curtain there was unbridled pandemonium. "Melpomene and Thalia have been surpassed!" the younger generation shouted on the passing of Alexandre Duval, Népomucène Lemercier, and the classicists who had too long monopolized the theater. The tyranny "of the old wigs" was broken. A new world was before them.
     Next day, Alexander, who had spent the night on a mattress next to his mother's bed, woke to find himself celebrated; and poor Madame Dumas was dumfounded at the masses of flowers that filled her room. His success was unheard of, complete. This young mulatto with his paper collar, unknown and badly educated, a stranger to the theories and dogmas of romanticism, this clerk at 1,500 francs a year who had left his position, this muscular young faun ran with freer, ampler stride past his contemporaries in the race, and could now exclaim: "The crown is mine!"
     The public did not see that this was merely the plate and varnish of antiquity nor recognize the borrowing from everywhere; it admired the tone, the color, the brilliance, the dramatic ease and richness, all the things that were new to their eyes. The gauntlet of the Duke of Guise made them shiver; d'Epernon's sling, the cup-and-ball of Joyeuse, the old oaths, "God's Blood" and "God's Death," filled them with rapture. They were carried away.
     After a bit, criticism had its chance, nor did it fail to make the most of it. Le Corsaire wrote that the work was a monstrosity and the author a Jesuit who had a pension from the secret fund; La Gazette de France, saw in it "a flagrant conspiracy against the throne and the altar." Others considered Dumas "an adventurous spirit, not profound, but versatile, who had relieved these scraps of history with scenes of genuine passion." Another newspaper man remarked, more severely, that in all this rubbish there was only one interesting scene and that did not belong to the author. The historians objected to the liberties taken by Dumas with the portrait of Guise, unworthy of le Balafré. Last, the Academy, speaking through the high priests of classicism, Arnault, Jouy, Viennet, and Andrieux, denounced in the tragic manner the harm that such pieces would do to the Théâtre-Français, the theater founded by Louis-le-Grand, which "would fall below even the lowest popular stages," unless order were reestablished.
     To no effect. Alexander was hailed as a great dramatist and great man by the young romantics who adopted him and raised him on this shields. Sainte-Beuve glorified in song this happy era when the famous men of the future were still marching on, hand in hand:
         Ils étaient bons et grands. L'amère jalousie
         Jamais chez eux n'arma le miel de poésie
                 De son grêle aiguillon. (1)
         (1) They were good and great. Bitter jealousy
         Never among them armed sweet poetry
                 With his sharp spur.
     As though it were the most natural thing in the world, Alexander settled himself in his new glory. He was born for this. He posed before the dignified David d'Angers, "a blond and' straightlaced man," who modeled a medallion of him, and before Achille Devéria, who made an astonishing etching. One of them describes how the young conqueror, Mélanie's happy lover, looked: "His head, almost childlike in character, is attractive, good-looking, charming, adorned with a cloud of hair and a very tiny, black beard, straggling, scanty, and as soft as down; his nose is still uncertain, but his mouth is that of a youth who is feeling the coming of dawn." Alexander has given up his long frock coat from Villers-Cotterets, and, "slender as a dandy fresh from the pages of Jeunes-France," he now wears a tight coat with collar à la Goethe, and a light waistcoat under whose lapels passes the black cord of his eyeglasses. Why eyeglasses? Alexander had excellent eyesight. But the setting in which he now displays his elegances proclaims the newness of his fortune, and the divan on which he rests would not disgrace a furnished apartment.
     Being what he was, he accepted the honors and amenities of his new life gracefully. Emile de Girardin asked him to write for his journal, Le Voleur, and requested a biographical article "to which he would be happy to append his very favorable opinion of the author of Henri III"; Madame de Girardin, the Muse Delphine, took a liking to him, and the ties that bound him to the austere Vigny became closer. The Duke of Orléans, proud of his employee, appointed him librarian at a yearly salary of 1200 francs—the duke always remained a careful manager—but after all the post was only a sinecure.
     Alexander now began to have larger views. He rented a little house at Passy for Catherine Lebay and his son, established himself in an apartment at the corner of the rue de l'Université and the rue du Bac, and "looking toward the future," made an agreement with a neighboring restaurant-keeper for his board for one year. He thought this an excellent speculation.
     His circle, formerly consisting of only three or four friends, Leuven, Méry, Frédéric Soulié, and Laurent Pichat, a young poet of frail health, now grew larger daily, for every one found this big fellow sympathetic who laughed at his victory and at the pontifical defeat. When somebody told him that Casimir Delavigne had not been present at the first night of Henri III, he answered: "Nonsense! That's as if you'd try to make me believe that the condemned man isn't on the scaffold erected for him." He did not take things to heart and it amused him enormously that drawing-rooms gossiped of his African passions and tropical customs. He remained high-spirited, agreeable, a good fellow. He was not envious and recognized his own limitations.
     On February 11, Hugo, on congratulating him, had said: "And now it's my turn!" At the end of July Alexander was asked to the rue Notre-Dame des Champs to hear Marion de Lorme read.
     The whole pleiad was present—Musset stretched out on a couch, Sainte-Beuve bustling about his beloved Victor, Eugène Delacroix, "distant, haughty, and with a touch of the exotic," Balzac, grown stout and bursting out of his tight coat, Vigny, Mérimée. . . . Hugo read on "with his voice impressive in its monotony," and when he had finished, there was an explosion of applause and extravagant praise. Dumas, more excited than all the rest, lifted Hugo up in his arms and cried, "We shall carry you to glory!" While he was stuffing himself full of little cakes, he kept repeating, "Wonderful! Wonderful!"
     His enthusiasm was sincere. Magnificence of style overwhelmed him "who was above all lacking in style"; and he would willingly have given Henri III to have written the fourth act of Marion de Lorme. While Balzac, "who never could succeed in writing verse," affected to disdain poetry—like Stendhal and Mérimée—Dumas frankly avowed his inferiority. He acknowledged that he had never had a feeling for the music of words and he respected those who had the gift of song. In him there was no bitterness, no desire to belittle the merit of others, no ill-natured reservation.
     Hugo quarreled with Nodier, bitter jealousy scattered the brothers of the Arsenal. Dumas alone remained a faithful friend, always devoted, always ardent; and Nodier, who was now aging, said of his beloved Alexander: "He exempts me from talking."
     Success did not change his high spirits or his ingenuousness. A sister of the painter Amaury Duval describes how once she was returning from the Arsenal on foot with Dumas who was carrying her pattens and her comb; it was one o'clock in the morning; and the young woman was so tired that she could hardly walk. Suddenly Dumas, looking up at an unusually beautiful moon cried: "Ah! Madame, what a wonderful moon! Won't you go as far as the gate of l'Etoile? Don't you feel yourself carried beyond yourself by some invisible power?" She, more earthly, answered: "I feel myself carried beyond myself so little, Monsieur, that a hack would have more charms in my eyes at this moment than all the moons in the world." Dumas was stunned and could not speak for a quarter of an hour. . . . A little later, when he had become the "familiar friend at the Quai Conti," where the young woman lived, he appalled the classical Alexandre Duval and the historian Mignet by declaring flatly that Racine had ruined the theater and Boileau, poetry.
     As Marion de Lorme had been forbidden by the censorship, it was Vigny who upheld the banner of romanticism and fought the new battle in October, 1829, with his Othello. Alexander was present in the first row. It may have been he who, in the hubbub, shouted to one of the classicists: "I shall drive your hisses down your throat with this dagger!" He was present again on the opening night of Hernani when Théophile Gautier rallied his troops around his crimson waistcoat. After this, having labored for the common good, Dumas began to think of himself and of Christine which had finally found a place at the Odéon. His friends came forward, and Soulié, author of a Christine which had fallen flat and also director of a sawmill, generously sent fifty of his workmen to fill the pit and help the play along.
     When Dumas, after the performance, was crossing the Place de l'Odéon, he heard some one call him by name. A carriage stopped and a lady got out who rushed toward him and threw her arms around him. "Ah! Monsieur, what talent you have and how well you know how to write about women!" It was Marie Dorval, an actress supreme in boulevard melodramas, a daughter of the profession, and soon to be one beloved more for Alexander. At his house he gathered round him the admirers of Christine and when he saw the austere Vigny grow more human and tender while looking at Marie Dorval, he smiled. . . .
     Sainte-Beuve, in his exclusive veneration for his dear Victor Hugo, wrote about Christine: "There is talent displayed in the last two acts, but it is talent of the second class, and as much below Hernani as the hyssop is below the cedar." Stendhal for his part held that Henri III was "only a Henri III à la Marivaux"; and Alexander reflected on these words. He saw that he was ill at ease in poetic drama and that he had not yet found the true tragic subject—some subject very somber, full of concentrated passion so that it might go straight to the heart of the public, appealing through the emotions and not through theatrical tinsel.
     It was Mélanie who supplied this subject without suspecting it. Jealousy always preyed on her. She was not unaware of Alexander's fondness for Virginie Bourbier, his reconciliation with Mlle. Mars, and his meeting with Dorval. She was becoming irritable, demanding letters at a definite hour and always ready to pick a quarrel. He tried to soothe her: "Oh Mélanie, never be angry at me! When you are displeased it cuts me to the soul"; to which he tactlessly added that the hours which he spent with her ought to be "hours of recreation and not of labor." She grew incensed, and he tried to get out of it by plunging into generalities—"'Our love has changed in character of course. Our feelings may be different, but our love is still our life. We are still happy."
     Abruptly and without apparent reason, this lover who can reason so clearly takes it into his head to become jealous of the husband. Yet Captain Waldor had never stood in his way. When the captain had failed to gain an appointment at Courbevoie, Alexander, thanks to his ministerial connections, had straightened things out, and Waldor was able to continue his obscure life in a provincial garrison. But tumultuous passions are becoming to a Romantic. He has need to turn Byronic, become savage and dissatisfied, join love with death. Dumas practices the game. He would have Mélanie all to himself, snatch her in his arms before the whole world, and cry: "She belonged to me before she knew me!" He would cover her face with kisses, not kisses ordinaires, but "with kisses that burn, electrify the whole body, make one shiver with delight, and are so full of happiness that almost it is sorrow."
     To vary the theme, he pays his farewells to the room where their love had hidden itself, "our little room which we shall probably never again see together, which other indifferent people will occupy without knowing what took place there. No breath will hint to them of the emotions we experienced. For them there will only be four walls adorned with more or less shabby wallpaper and with a more or less fine mirror which like the heart of a coquette preserves none of the pictures which it has reflected. . . ."
     Another fatal idea strikes him; he beholds the phantom of her husband, her legal master, rise before him. "Mélanie, at last you understand me," he cries, "you know what love is and so you know what jealousy is. Have you ever felt anything like it? Yet the idiots who made religions invented a hell of physical sufferings! How ill they understood tortures! It's pitiable. A hell where I would see you always in another's arms! Curses! The thought of it would inspire crime."
     The part he is playing absorbs the fine fellow. He pretends he is becoming consumptive. His handkerchief is stained with blood. Is he going to die? No, no! "How can you believe that I could die while you still love me? I should become an unbeliever and a blasphemer, my angel, because I could not believe in God. I should curse him for separating me from you!"
     There is no longer any little room. They make their rendezvous at Pêre-Lachaise. He delights and terrifies her by rambling on about his childish metaphysics; he wants to convert her to Satanism, to hatred of this world; immediately afterwards he regrets his imprudent words. "Noon! What a letter I've written you! If I could recall it! But I hope that it is so stained with my tears that you can not read it. I slept hardly an hour and a half—a sleep of the damned, with dreams, visions, delirium. And to think what they call Love in the world of society! What puppets they are!"
     Mélanie, who is herself a poet in the manner of Anaïs Ségalas, Elisa Mercoeur, and Victorine Babois, is in the seventh heaven of delight and proudly rejoices in this volcanic love to which Alexander applied the word "fatality" from its inception. The passion of the famous young man flatters her and she displays with pride the scarf with the picture of Saint-Mégrin in Henri III which he has given her as souvenir.
     With Dumas, it was otherwise. As his love for Mélanie cooled in fact, he made it more ardent in letters and literature, inflamed his imagination, and unconsciously invented his drama. He, on whom life was smiling and who basked in that smile for the moment, transforms himself into an unfortunate creature, scorned by society and condemned to live alone "like a bastard." Mélanie becomes in his fancy the virtuous woman who struggles against her love, who yields, and is consumed by remorse. At last Captain Waldor appears, to do justice. . . . But how should he end this bourgeois tragedy fittingly? How would it be if he had the bastard kill his mistress, to save her honor, at the moment when he is surprised by the husband? It was a stroke of genius! Dumas set to work and on Wednesday, June 9, 1830, at noon he wrote the final speech of Antony: "She resisted me. I have assassinated her."
     At the moment when she became a romantic heroine, Mélanie was unaware that Alexander had set forth on new love affairs. At the end of May, 1830, he had met at the actor Firmin's a pretty young woman "who played the Mars parts in the provinces." She had jet black hair, deep blue eyes, "a nose like that of the Venus de Milo and pearls instead of teeth." Bell Krebsamer compared favorably with Mélanie. Dumas was pleased that there were so many enchanting creatures under the sun. He immediately took Bell under his protection, promised that she should one day play the Duchess of Guise in Henri III, and advised her to remain in Paris. Bell, seeing a brilliant future before her, took lodgings in the rue de l'Université, a few steps from her protector; and, as it had been in the days of Catherine Lebay, the two households were soon one.
     Alexander had laid aside the mask of despair. He was rich and happy; the season was propitious for travel, and as he had never known the sea, he decided to go, accompanied by Bell,
         Contempler ton azur, ô Méditerranée! (1)
     (1) To contemplate thine azure blue, O Mediterranean!

CHAPTER IV

REVOLUTION AND SATANISM

     ON July 26, 1830, at five o'clock in the evening, Dumas was setting forth to take the mail coach to Marseilles when he learned of the publication of Charles X's orders suspending the liberty of the press, dissolving the Chamber of Deputies, and modifying the electoral law. Up to that time he had been fairly indifferent to politics; he called himself a republican without really knowing why, perhaps because his father had been one. Now that all Paris was excited, Alexander forgot Bell and their journey completely; he put on his hunting outfit, seized his gun, and, like d'Artagnan, threw himself into the scrimmage. The fate of the elder Bourbons did not greatly interest him; he had never asked any favors of them, and he felt entirely free of obligation toward them.
     After a tour of inspection through the city he came home utterly worn out. Paris resembled the bridge of a ship at the moment of clearing. Although the fire was banked and was even then blazing forth at the Place de la Bourse, revolution was not yet actual.
     Next morning his servant came to wake him, wild with fear—the rioters were taking the Artillery Museum near Saint Thomas of Aquinas by assault. Dumas, half dressed, rushed down the stairway, rejoined the insurgents, broke into the Museum with them, decked himself out in a helmet, a shield, a sword of Francis I, and an arquebuse of Charles IX, and then, since he was after all the author of Henri III, he laid these royal relics reverently upon his bed. Then he departed once more, armed with his gun, along the quays, and from behind the lions of the Institute he fired at the Swiss who were defending the Louvre. . . . He was filled with joy, the delight of battle! He was in his element; but he felt awfully hungry; and as the sister of Amaury Duval, the lady who hadn't been able to appreciate the moon, lived only a few steps away, he rang the bell.
     He made a sensational entrance. Black with powder and with perspiration rolling down his cheeks, Alexander described his campaign while gulping down an enormous cup of coffee. Then he stopped abruptly and, gazing at the Louvre which could be seen through the window, he said: "Do you realize that this would be an excellent place to shoot from?"
     "Never, never," cried his terrified hostess. "I don't want my house to be a point of attack"—and Alexander walked out, deeply distressed to abandon so excellent a position.
     The victory of the people took shape. Dumas played his part a little in the manner of the fly on the wheel of the coach. He saw the leaders of the movement, Cavaignac, Arago, and Charras, and by contact with them became strengthened, in his republican faith; and when the conquerors marched on Rambouillet in order to put the fear of God into the heart of the dethroned Charles X, he accompanied them.
     But he could not fit himself to this subordinate role. He must play a star part; and as powder was needed in Paris, he offered to go to Soissons to get hold of some there. It was a confidential mission which he carried out magnificently. After he had passed through Villers-Cotterets as a conqueror and sown the good seed of republicanism, he arrived at Soissons and ordered the king's lieutenant, M. de Liniers, to deliver up the powder. The lieutenant, who had experienced several revolutions in the colonies, was not intimidated by Alexander's pistol; but Madame de Liniers, frightened by the big fellow with the woolly hair and complexion bronzed by three days' sun, cried out to her husband: "Oh! my darling, yield! This is another revolt of the Negroes!" Dumas, master of the field of battle, went to break down the door of the powder magazine.
     When he came back to Paris he was embraced by La Fayette, "the hero of Two Worlds," who was at the Hotel de Ville; and the Duke of Orléans received him with these words, "M. Dumas, you have just achieved your finest drama." Raised to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, Alexander offered to devote himself to the cause once more. He will undertake any embassy, to Prussia, Spain, or Russia. He is ready for anything. . . . Once more Mélanie interferes. She was lamenting at La Jarrie, a little farm in the Vendée, not far from Clisson, where she had fled far from the riots in Paris. A geranium which Alexander had given her had been broken, and she saw in this a sign of approaching ill-fortune. Dumas reassured her as best he could. "I shall not accept any military mission, my angel, but a movement like this could not be accomplished unless I lent it my name. Thank God! It has been accomplished." And then he added cautiously, "Adieu, my love, you would be wrong to come to Paris at this time."
     Mélanie was not convinced and wanted to see her lover again. At that moment Alexander conceived the brilliant idea of starting off, not for Prussia, Spain, or Russia, but for La Vendée to organize the National Guard there, and he laid this plan before La Fayette.
     "Have you reflected on this?" asked La Fayette.
     "As much as I am capable of reflecting on anything. I am a man of instinct, not of reflection!"
     La Fayette approved. Dumas had a magnificent uniform made for himself—a shako with red plumes, silver epaulettes and belt, coat and trousers of king's blue, and a tri-colored cockade. In this array he traveled over the high roads of the West with an insurgent as his guide, a counterfeiter whom he had saved from the galleys. The peasants looked at this "Monsieur Tricolore" with hostile eye, but Alexander was so affable that he disarmed them. After visiting the melancholy Mélanie at La Jarrie, he returned to the rue de l'Université, having organized nothing at all, but with the material for an imposing report on the need of opening up roads through Le Bocage.
     During his absence the situation in Paris had greatly changed. The republicans perceived a little too late that the Duke of Orléans, who had now become Louis Philippe, had, by united front with the liberals, juggled away the revolution. A bourgeois monarchy had succeeded the legitimate monarchy, but it was still a monarchy; and the republicans, who had been duped, engaged in an open struggle with the government of the Citizen-King.
     Alexander had no serious grievance against Louis Philippe, who in March had requested Charles X to bestow a decoration upon his employee, "whose dramatic successes seem of a nature to deserve this honor." He appreciated the unaffected simplicity of the new dynasty and his personal interest of course urged him to march in the direction of the rising sun. But his character was such that he turned his back on it. Was it his atavistic republicanism? Was it the influence of his new friends, Cavaignac and Arago? Both undoubtedly influenced him. In any event an involuntary bit of awkwardness on his part brought about a rupture with Louis Philippe.
     The latter had just dissolved the Artillery of the National Guard, suspected, quite properly, of revolutionary sympathies; and a few days later, on December 31, 1830, the New Year's reception took place at the Tuileries. Alexander presented himself in the uniform of an artillery-man.
     "Ah! good day, Dumas," said the king as soon as he caught sight of him. "I see you are acting true to form!"
     Alexander stood open-mouthed, bewildered by this greeting, when Vatout, the librarian, murmured in his ear: "You have come to make your New Year's visit to the King en habit de dissous." Dumas was now completely at a loss. His "habit de dix sous"? "His suit worth ten sous"? What were they making fun of? When his mistake was explained and he understood that the "habit de dissous" was his uniform of the National Guard that had just been dissolved by the King, he exclaimed, "Do you think that I read Le Moniteur?" and he swore never to set foot in the Tuileries again.
     His displeasure was so great that he wanted to give resounding publicity to the breach. Napoleon was then all the vogue, and the manager of the Porte Saint-Martin Theater, M. Harel, Mlle. George's friend, asked Dumas to put together a play on the life of the Emperor. But the difficulty was to get hold of Dumas. This devil of a fellow always slips between your fingers! Today he is at the rue de l'Université, tomorrow in the country, on still another day on some excursion with Bell. So Harel took strong measures. He summoned Alexander, shut him up in his own house under lock and key with the Memorial and several other documents—meanwhile sending Bell a bracelet to keep her quiet—and informed the author that he would not restore his freedom until the play was delivered. Alexander protested as a matter of form, but at bottom the procedure entertained him greatly. He set to work with scissors and paste pot, and in a week he had patched up his piece.
     Napoléon Bonaparte, although acted by Frédérick Lemaître, enjoyed only a qualified success—George Sand called it a contemptible piece; but Dumas seized the occasion to proclaim his attitude toward authority. In the preface to his play he solemnly notified Louis Philippe that he resumed his freedom of action: "Sire, it is long since I wrote and published that in my case the man of letters would serve only as preface to the man of politics. . . . I am all but certain that on the day when I have attained thirty years, I shall be appointed deputy; I am now twenty-eight, Sire! . . ." If he had not hired himself to the Empire which had left his father and his mother penniless, or to the Restoration, he could not, in all conscience, rally to the new regime, whose acts were "arbitrary and destructive of liberty." In short, he tendered his resignation. While waiting until old enough to enter the Chamber of Deputies, he would consecrate himself to art. He would devote himself to "the art that entertains and interests"—a fairly safe formula.
     Louis Philippe, on reading this challenge, simply said, "Just a big schoolboy!" but the big schoolboy took his rôle seriously and dreamed of nothing less than making over dramatic art by exploiting the Théâtre-Français with Victor Hugo. Hugo, the business man, had started the project. There was to be no subsidy from the state, but a guarantee of 2000 francs of the receipts for every play by Racine or Voltaire produced. With fifty-four performances, there would be 108,000 francs a year assured, and, as the expenses of the theater were only 1500 francs a day, the daily gain would amount to 500 francs. . . . Naturally this magnificent plan resulted in nothing and Alexander cherished a certain acrimony on the subject.
     He who was usually so confident became depressed. After the great undertakings of July, after Soissons and La Vendée, he was relapsing into dullness. The charms of Bell did not succeed in raising his spirits. His name had disappeared from the newspapers and that, since the success of Henri III, was something he could not endure. His Napoléon was worthless, he knew, and his faith in a dramatic career was tottering. He might have become prudent and returned peacefully to his office, as Picard had advised him to do; but, blunderer that he was, he had just burned his bridges behind him. So he stuck to Antony, forgotten since June; he clung to it as if it were his sheet-anchor.
     After the play was accepted by the Théâtre-Français, Alexander directed the rehearsals energetically; but as they went on, he no longer recognized his own work. Mlle. Mars reduced the pathetic rôle of Adèle to a puppet like one of M. Scribe's roles, and Firmin "softened all the asperities" of the hero so that Adèle and Antony became two charming lovers of the Gymnase who might just as well have been named Arthur and Céleste.
     "Such a nice play," "A charming piece of work," his friends said to Dumas. "We never thought you capable of working in this genre!" "Nor should I have thought it," he answered, his heart torn by the way in which the actors were prettifying his drama. Happily Mlle. Mars, bent on having her new toilets make their proper effect, wanted to have the production wait until the new luster, lighted by gas, should be installed. Dumas seized on this pretext, withdrew his play, and took it to Marie Dorval.
     He had neglected her a bit since his liaison with Bell, but he had always preserved a special partiality for her. Frank, thoughtless, feeling intensely, and acting instinctively, she was like Dumas in her friendliness and good-nature. When he now came to her house, he wanted to resume their former relations, but though she embraced him warmly and called him "My great big doggie!" she repulsed him. Vigny loved her, and she loved Vigny, she said.
     "In that case, my dear," Dumas replied, "receive my most sincere compliments. First of all, de Vigny is a poet of immense talent; he is also a true gentleman. He's more worth your while than me, a mulatto."
     But Dorval insisted on explaining her passion. "Monsieur le Comte" at first had been so timid and reserved that she hadn't in the least understood his attitude. Was he going to make a proposal of marriage? But he had finally declared his sentiments and she, as a good natured girl, had not made him languish; and now Monsieur le Comte loved her furiously, and wrote "little exaltations" for her. Ah, but he was an ardent lover! She went into details that amused Alexander and concluded with this: "You know there are men whom one doesn't deceive—they're the men of genius; or if one does deceive them, upon my word, so much the worse for those who do the deceiving!"
     Dumas did not object. All this interested him much less than Antony, the manuscript of which he had in his pocket. He sat down in an armchair, Dorval curled up at his feet, and he read the play to her. . . . She was carried away—it was the play of which she had dreamed! Even now she knew how she was going to read such and such a speech and with what gestures she would accompany it. So, shutting up Dumas in her husband's room (for Dorval was married to a journalist named Merle who had the spirit of the eighteenth century and left her absolutely free), she ordered him to rewrite certain scenes and to emphasize certain incidents.
     Thanks to Dorval, Antony recovered its fatal and satanic style; but the advice of Vigny might he helpful, and so Dumas wrote to the poet to reassure him about his feelings toward Dorval: "As to doing anything which would cause you pain, and you may take the word in all its implications, consider me a dishonorable man if I should do so." Vigny actually did supply some final touches to the play, to its advantage, and on May 3, 1831, Antony was ready to revolutionize Paris.
     On that evening there was a curious excitement stirring round the approaches to the Porte Saint-Martin. There were strange, savage faces, curled mustachios, pointed imperials, hair worn in the Merovingian fashion or cut like a brush, extravagant doublets, coats with velvet revers, cloaks of green oilcloth, hats of every shape "excepting of course the usual shape." The ladies, a bit frightened, stepped out of their carriages dressed in the style of the day, with their hair arranged à la girafe, their high tortoise-shell combs, their mutton-leg sleeves, and their short skirts displaying their buskined shoes. . . . Now and again they made way for some young author whom they greeted, while the people of Paris eyed these privileged persons as they passed before them.
     In the house the atmosphere was feverish. But people were not interested in the romantic costumes of the romantic literary set—they wanted to see Antony. The author, it was rumored, had actually copied nature!
     Success was assured by the end of the first act. The audience recognized itself in these persons dressed in the style of 1831; it trembled with sympathy and breathlessly followed the events of the thoroughly bourgeois little adultery out of which Dumas had made a play of blood and iron. The handsome Bocage who played Antony filled the stage with his roarings. "Ask a corpse how many times he has lived!" . . . "Curses! I went to sleep with my hands on my dagger and I dreamed of the place of execution and the scaffold! . . ." And in a box a young woman broke her fan and exclaimed "Ah! what a pagan he is!"
     Dorval with her poignant, disturbing voice, "which seemed to vibrate with tears" as it stole into the heart, made the young people shudder. Her tones were from nature; her cries from the heart brought the house down. Her simple gestures, the way in which she untied the ribbons of her hat or threw herself into a chair, the tone with which she said "Oh, but I am ruined. I'm ruined!" everything got across. The young men would have blown their brains out for this gentle, virtuous woman, possessed by love. . . . And Mélanie, hidden away in a box, with tears in her eyes, heard those phrases which she had inspired and which sounded so strangely familiar.
     Dumas did not come to see her. When he was recognized by the house, he was acclaimed, mobbed. The crowd hung on to him, tore away the skirts of his coat—a green coat buttoned from top to bottom—and so he went behind the scenes with a round jacket.
     The success of Antony exceeded that of Henri III. It was the first modern romantic drama, a drama of revindication which proclaimed the rights of love, attacked the accepted ideas of marriage, and ended with an act of heroic delicacy—the lover killing his mistress and preferring to die himself rather than to compromise her! The effect "on this inflammable public, on this volcanic youth," was prodigious; and all Young-France to prove worthy of its name, began to carry in its belt a dagger like Antony's, with the device, Adesso e sempre—Now and forever.
     The artful Alexander had taken care to crown his work with a declaration of atheism. He spoke simply of giving over his life to the angel of evil, "and his soul . . . if he believed in a soul." This impious touch increased the excitement, as he had hoped. "The most obscene play that has ever appeared in these days of obscenity!" the classicists cried. His Parisian success penetrated to the provinces. At Marseilles Antony unloosed the battle; the romantics of La Cannebière who came off victorious, crowned the prompter's copy and, to celebrate the defeat of the classicists, carried a wig at the end of a pole as their trophy. At Vichy the play was performed in a barn, and when it was over the citizens said as they came out: "Heavens, what a filthy piece! And Madame X . . . actually took her daughter there! Well really, they got what they deserved." But the barn was crowded to the last seat.
     Dumas had struck the right note. His play had one hundred and thirty consecutive performances, a figure unheard of at that time. Its success was undeniable. Later some of the conservative deputies threatened to refuse to vote the budget if the resumption of Antony at the Théâtre-Français was authorized. Thiers, who was minister, reflected: "Antony and no budget, or a budget and no Antony." He did not hesitate—he forbade the play; but Alexander took his case to court, won his suit, and Antony appeared behind the footlights as lively as before. Casimir Delavigne sighed: "What that devil of a Dumas writes is poor stuff but it prevents their thinking my stuff good."
     Young Flaubert admired "this picture of love in five acts" unreservedly and he could hardly contain himself while listening to Dorval, whose drawling accent and rather thick intonation he ended by imitating. According to him the importance of Antony was enormous, and he was right. Dumas had created a living theater out of a closet theater; he had skillfully played with the literature of despair and made real "this satanic work," of which Goethe speaks, "with an incredible feeling for the truth, which keeps him from uttering an empty or a false word."
     In the days when Alexander was posing as a republican hero, old Deviolaine said to him: "What grieves me, you see, is that with your character you'll die on a beggar's pallet like your father!" Dumas had a good laugh at this; now he was eating "with all the teeth of glory," he was lodged comfortably in a new house in the Square d'Orléans in the rue Saint-Lazare; and as he took a rather barbaric delight in everything tawdry and gaudy, he displayed astonishing waistcoats, green as the sea, amaranthine-colored cloaks, and massive golden chains. . . . He chose this time, too, to close his accounts with the past.
     He had already broken with Mélanie, but when she asked him to burn her letters, he answered in Antony's best vein: "No, I shall return them, but I shall not burn them. If I ever burned them, it would be to light the chafing-dish containing the charcoal with which I would asphyxiate myself." This love was the only love, the great love of Mélanie's life; she allowed people to speak to her of her faithless lover. She had no harsh feelings toward him and she recounted her sorrows in lyrics which she entitled "Poems of the Heart." He saw her again one day, by chance, at Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore's; she hid "her face, pale as a sheet of paper," beneath her hat. Then the storm passed. . . . They met again and a quiet intimacy was established between them. Mélanie's daughter played with Dumas' little son who made her a declaration of love, and Alexander rubbed his hands, crying "Bravo! I recognize my own blood. You are really my son."
     Since he now had some money, he decided to acknowledge Catherine Lebay's child, and he sometimes went to Passy to breathe the country air. He was rather a tender father. One day the child fell down the stairway and they looked for Dumas who came, breathlessly, in his uniform of the National Guard and fainted when he saw that his son was hurt. They had to unbutton the coat of the military man to bring him to!
     When the child was seven years old, Dumas decided to send him to boarding school, but Catherine was opposed to this. There was a painful scene and young Alexander hid under the bed from where his father had to drag him to take him to the Vauthier School in the rue de la Montagne-Saint-Geneviève. Catherine, after this separation, was unwilling to accept any further assistance and she became manager of the linen department in a school where she courageously earned her living.
     Dumas, in the mood to set things in order, also acknowledged the daughter whom Bell Krebsamer had borne him on March 7, 1831. Everything was now cleared up. His old affairs of the heart were ended; he was ready to begin all over again.
     And now began that curious life in which work, love, gastronomy, travel, festivals, financial speculations, dazzling successes and heavy failures, splendor and misery, were inextricably mixed—the life which, with few variations, he was to lead to the very end.
     During the summer of 1831 Dumas with Bell had discovered Trouville and while taking down the culinary recipes of Mother Oseraie, the innkeeper, he wrote a tragedy in verse, in five acts, called Charles VII chez ses Grands Vassaux. It was to reestablish his literary dignity among his contemporaries. When he returned to Paris, he submitted his work to Vigny, since "some objections to its style" had been made. He attended the first night of Marion de Lorme, where he startled the public by his exclamations and gesticulations, and he kept running to the Odéon to watch over his Charles VII. . . . But as Musset—that crown of thorns whom Alexander admired but did not love—remarked of the play: "You can announce on a poster that a play is a tragedy; but it's another thing to make people believe it." The success of Charles VII was slight, the house was cold.
     The night of the opening Dumas returned to his house in the Square d'Orléans, holding his son by the hand, the child "trotting along to keep in step with his father's long legs." Together they went past the old walls of the rue de Seine, near the Institute, and their silhouettes, the one gigantic, the other very tiny, stood out on the damp wall, lighted by the moon's rays. Dumas was troubled that evening, Dumas admitted to himself that "he lacked a sense of style."
     But his spirits rebounded quickly. If he couldn't succeed with tragedies in verse, why should that hold him back! He returned to the satanic genre, and wrote Teresa, a strong piece with a double adultery. Bocage had just discovered an actress who would play the part of the heroine admirably—"A young girl now at Montmartre who has a great deal of talent." Dumas went to see this pearl lost in the suburbs, and Ida Ferrier appeared—a small woman, decidedly plump but with a delicate talent, charming, very sincere, and free from all theatrical conventions. She would be a wonderful Teresa. As a matter of fact the play was performed amid cheers, while Ida threw herself into Dumas' arms exclaiming: "Ah, Monsieur, you have just done me the greatest service. You have established my reputation as an actress, poor little me! I shall owe you my future." Dumas answered as he always answered on such occasions—he took his heroine to supper. Bell Krebsamer was forgotten. . . .
     At the beginning of 1832, the cholera, brought from Asia by way of London, was raging in Paris. From his window in the rue Saint-Lazare Alexander every day saw fifty or sixty convoys of ammunition wagons loaded with coffins going toward the cemetery of Montmartre; and in this funereal state of mind he wrote a comedy entitled Le Mari de la Veuve.
     Then, on April 15, just as he was accompanying to the stairway Liszt, the pianist, and Boulanger, the painter, who had been drinking black tea with him to fortify themselves against the disease, he felt his legs give way. There was a blinding flash in his eyes and a shivering sensation in his skin. He had the plague. Fortunately for him, that night during his fever he swallowed half a bottle of ether which had inadvertently been left on the table. It seemed to him that he had swallowed "the sword of the angel of extermination," but it saved his life. His servant, the faithful Catherine, rubbed him and roasted him with a hot warming pan . . . and, thanks to this simple Negro remedy, he grew well.
     When he took his first steps out of doors, he found Paris agitated and uneasy. The struggle of the republicans against Louis Philippe continued with more violence than ever, and the slightest incident brought on a riot. Alexander, weak as he was, went to see his friends Cavaignac and Arago who told him of the insurrection at hand. General Lemarque, a Deputy of the opposition party, had just died, and his funeral obsequies supplied the occasion to overthrow the July Monarchy.
     On June 5, 1832, accordingly, all the revolutionary forces, mobilized as if by magic, followed the convoy shouting "Honor to General Lamarque!" Alexander naturally could not stay at home. He was there in his uniform of the National Guard, and as he passed, some of the men in the crowd pressed his left hand—his right held his saber—and murmured, "Let the Guard have no fear, we are here." The air was heavy; great black clouds hung in the sky; it needed only a spark and the city would be on fire.
     At the bridge of Austerlitz„the ringleaders gave the signal and an hour later half Paris was in the hands of the insurgents. Dumas rejoiced to feel again the spirit of 1830, but he was less aggressive and contented himself with saving the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin by handing over to the rioters the weapons in the property-storerooms.
     "It is I, M. Alexander Dumas who lends you these arms," he exclaimed. "From those who are killed, I shall demand nothing; but those who survive will restore their arms here. Is it agreed? On your word of honor!"
     They applauded him, as was his due. Then he went up to Mlle. George who implored him to take off his compromising uniform, and, putting on civilian clothes again, he returned to the Square d'Orléans where he arrived so exhausted that he fainted away on the landing.
     The insurrection failed and the repressive measures were harsh. On June 9, 1832, a legitimist newspaper announced that Dumas, taken with weapon in hand, had been shot; and Nodier wrote to his friend: "I have just read that you were shot yesterday at three o'clock in the morning. Be good enough to let me know whether that will prevent your coming to the Arsenal tomorrow to dine with Taylor." Alexander went, to give Nodier "news of the other world," but he knew that he was marked by the police as "a republican in the full meaning of the term." One morning an aide-de-camp from the Tuileries actually did come to warn him that there was some talk of arresting him and that he would be wise to spend a month or two abroad. At the same time his physician was advising a change of air.
     So politics and hygiene prevailed on him to expatriate himself; and as he had never seen any high mountains, he started off for Switzerland on July 21, 1832.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH ALEXANDER EXPANDS

     HE enjoyed his journey exceedingly. In the Rhone valley he went trout-fishing with pruning-bill and lantern, a wonderful sport; he ate bear's meat and his host obligingly informed him that this particular bear had devoured half of the hunter who had attacked him, which rather disturbed Alexander's digestion. By his gift of good fellowship he made friends with the guides of Mont-Blanc and with them scaled several crags, "which waggled like teeth that are about to fall out." In the morning he used to start out, cheerful and nimble, his gun over his shoulder as at Villers-Cotterets, and "hunt for his breakfast." At the inn he was proud of the omelets which he prepared himself and served to the ladies, and prouder still when the ladies learned that the cook was the author of Antony.
     Next he went to Lucerne to pay a visit to Châteaubriand whom he had met in days gone by in David d'Angers' studio. The master was weary and disillusioned, but friendly; and Dumas, who had a strong sense of veneration, was deeply moved in seeing the hand that had written Le Génie du Christianisme "throw bread to the marsh hens on the lake." When he went to Reichenau, he stopped in the little Louis XV room, adorned with golden arabesques, where the erstwhile Duke of Chartres—now Louis Philippe I, King of France—had led the obscure life of an exile and taught little children drawing. As Dumas had neither rancor nor consistency in his opinions, he grew sentimental over the misfortunes of this prince whom a month before he had fought in the streets of Paris.
     Finally, to crown his journey, he paid his respects to Queen Hortense, daughter of the Empress Josephine, at the Château d'Arenenberg. There he suddenly fell under the spell of the Bonapartist atmosphere. He forgot how badly the Emperor had acted toward his father, and spoke only of the hero who had cast the seeds of revolution abroad through Belgium, Poland, Italy, and Germany. As the Queen seemed troubled about the fate of her son, Louis Napoleon—the future Napoleon III—Dumas gave her this remarkable piece of advice: "I should tell your son to secure the remission of his exile, buy an estate in France, have himself elected deputy, try by his influence to get control of the majority of the Chamber of Deputies, and by this means depose Louis Philippe and have himself elected in his place."
     "Ah," sighed the Queen, "how I wish that my son were here and could hear what you have just said."
     Alexander could not easily restrain himself. As he wandered over the world he began to see that Dumas was never bored provided only that Dumas was present. He was not in the least indifferent to new landscapes, but what he really liked was seeing himself there. He acted his own comedy on his own stage, which constantly shifted, and he enjoyed himself hugely while playing his part. Then, when he began to note down his impressions in his scrapbook, he discovered in himself, as he says with happy sincerity, a natural liveliness in narration—still another gift not to be neglected, another charm in life.
     On his return, he had the disagreeable experience of finding his public ill-disposed toward him. One of his plays, Le Fils de l'Emigré, had been shamefully hissed and the critics accused the immoral author of prostituting his talent. Alexander realized that he must change his course, abandon the artifice of the theater and, while awaiting better days, take up literature. He went to Buloz, manager of La Revue des Deux Mondes.
     Buloz, Dumas tells us, was a man of pale complexion, scanty beard, yellowish hair, and undecided features, taciturn, almost gloomy, and not inclined to answer because of increasing deafness. But he had a genius for discovering talent and editing a review. Gifted with finesse but devoid of charm and fluency, he followed undisturbed the line which he had marked out for himself.
     Alexander in 1831 had brought him a novel. La Rose Rouge, which he declared had never been published, and then said that it had already appeared under another title. But Buloz did not seem to remember this trifling deception and when Dumas proposed to write some historical articles for his review, he accepted.
     The journey to Switzerland had been expensive and times were hard for a man who, always open-handed, did not know the meaning of that villainous word, economy. The restaurant-keeper of the rue de l'Université, with whom Dumas had made the brilliant arrangement of "board for a year," had played him the nasty trick of failing in business; and Alexander now took his meals in a cabaret in the rue de Tournon, connected with the Hôtel of the Emperor Joseph II, where a dish cost six sous. Expensive amusements were out of the question—it was an excellent time to work.
     Pen in hand, he set himself to reading works of history, cutting out incidents which might supply a subject for drama; but he soon realized that everything was unrelated in his mind, that the connecting thread was missing. Clearly the school of Villers-Cotterets, the lessons of the Abbé Grégoire, his education at three francs a month, and even the advice of his old office friend, Lassagne, were not enough. Once again he had to return to the beginner's textbook.
     The day on which Dumas acquired L'Histoire de France en Vers, a work of the Abbé Gauthier, revised and corrected by M. de Moyencourt, was a great day in his life. From the beginning,
         Clodion prend Cambrai, puis règne Mérovée;
         De la fureur des Huns Lutèce est préservée,
to the end,
         Philippe d'Orléans, tiré de son palais,
         Succède á Charles X par ie voeu des Français,
he assimilated the whole substantial volume and derived great satisfaction from it. Just the same it was a bit dry. Why not go back to original sources? From Sidoine Appollinaire to Tallemant des Réaux a noble lineage of chroniclers presented themselves to him; and with new ardor Alexander resumed his notes. He was in ecstasy, enchanted. What a wonderful journey into the past! He traveled through ancient France as he had just traveled through Switzerland, talking with the people, dressing like them, sharing their joys and sorrows. The world of other days, at his approach, lived again with a warmth of life and an intensity of color which overwhelmed him. He did not suspect for a moment that he drew this warmth and this color from his own inner self.
     The sketches from the Middle Ages which he published did not fail to please, but he thought it necessary to prove to his contemporaries that he could treat his subjects in higher vein; and so, after he had conscientiously plundered the Etudes Historiques of Châteaubriand and the books of Augustin Thierry, he wrote Gaule et France, a fascinating panorama rich in unexpected views and with its horizon bathed in a mist of prophecy. The people, he said, wished to share in the national life, and the monarchy one day or another would be forced to grant universal suffrage. Then the government of the future, the republic, would be established.
     Politicians sneered at him, the learned scorned him, but Augustin Thierry declared himself satisfied: "There is in M. Dumas' work," he wrote to Buloz, "boldness, warmth, poetry, and much intelligence; and I am very proud of the fact that he has ventured to use our German roots with me." For, as one might expect, Alexander had not failed to write Chlode-Hilde instead of Clotilde.
     So the author of Antony showed a new phase of his character—from the satanic he passed to the philosophical. He had money again, times were better. He was thirty years old and once more he stepped into the gay life.
     His talent for sociability was such that he made himself at home in the most varied circles. As he never gave up old friends and constantly attracted new ones, his following became imposing. In his hours of chatting or idleness, he held forth as the representative of a romanticism at once violent and good-natured—or, to put it more simply, as a most extraordinary story-teller.
     The Arsenal where he had begun his conquest of Paris continued to be his favorite salon; and with his natural redundance he said to Nodier, "I venerate you as my master, I love you as a brother, and I respect you as a son." Nodier, too, kept his old partiality for Dumas. His Alexander had never deceived him like some of the others and the only thing he reproached him with was his lack of taste. When he saw Dumas arriving in his appalling clothes, green or red, and covered with trinkets, chains and rings, he would sigh: "Ah, Dumas, my poor fellow, what a lot of baubles! Will you Negroes always be the same and forever be delighted by glass beads and corals?"
     Dumas did not take offense. He loved to see again, in the red cashmere salon, the people who had received him so kindly when he was unknown and who were still so friendly toward him. There was one change, for by the side of Marie Nodier's son—she had become Madame Menessier—there was now another child who accompanied the piano by beating the drum. It was young Dumas, his son.
     At the Café de Paris, on the boulevard, Alexander breathed the air of the great world. There the celebrities of journalism, literature, and dandyism met. That man with the warlike hat and blinking eyes' is Nestor Roqueplan who has now left his garret, his washbasin-clock and his pistols-candelabra for the comfortable offices of the Figaro. Next him is Jules Janin, who looks comfortably rotund but thinks only of snapping at his neighbor, and who will later fight a duel with Dumas about a wretched question of dramatic criticism. That fellow by way of being a gentleman, dressed with the correctness of an English lord in a blue coat with gold buttons, a yellow waistcoat, and pearl-gray trousers, is the husband of Marie Dorval, Merle, one of the legitimist party, an epicure and an authority on gastronomy. . . Over at the long table, orating in a high voice, with his face awkwardly swathed in an enormous neckcloth to hide certain unpleasant scars, is Veron, nicknamed the Prince of Wales, actual