and they came clamoring to the door, and invaded the house--a ravening
horde, ransacking rooms and hunting for valuables. They drove the
widow away, and she found a temporary home with Madame de Surville, at
47 Rue des Martyrs. This house and number are yet unchanged. Cabinets
and drawers were torn open, and about the grounds were scattered his
letters and papers, sketches of new stories, drafts of contemplated
work--all, that could be, collected by his friends, also hurrying to
the spot. They found manuscripts in the shops around, ready to enwrap
butter and groceries. One characteristic and most valuable letter was
tracked to three places, in three pieces, by an enthusiast, who
rescued the first piece just as it was twisted up and ready to light a
cobbler's pipe.
"He died in the night," continues Hugo. "He was first taken to the Chapel
Beaujon.... The funeral service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule.
As I stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second daughter
had been baptized. I had not been in the church since.... The
procession crossed Paris, and went by way of the boulevards to
Père-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church, and when we
reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed
to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin
on the right, holding one of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre
Dumas was on the other side.... When we reached the grave, which was
on the brow of the hill, the crowd was immense.... The coffin was
lowered into the grave, which is near to those of Charles Nodier and
Casimir Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few words.
While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar
off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which
seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the
sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words."
Yes, stretched before his grave, lies all Paris, as his Rastignac saw
it, when he turned from the _fosses-communes_, into which they had
just thrown the body of Père Goriot, and with his clinched fist flung
out his grand defiance toward the great, beautiful, cruel city: "_À
nous deux, maintenant!_"
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Just as Balzac was a victim of calumny during life, so, since
death, has he suffered from carelessness. It is almost impossible to
make sure of incidents and dates in his career. These errors begin
with his birth, which is placed on the 20th May by many writers, and
is so cut on the memorial tablet in Paris. In this text, his
birth-date is fixed on the 16th May, on the strength of his family
records, and the statements of his life-long friends. Of these, some
say that he was born on the _27 Floréal_, and others on the day of
Saint-Honoré. No figuring can make these dates fall on any other day
than the 16th May. As for the many conflicting statements concerning
him that have been handed down, in the absence of indisputable
evidence, those alone are accepted here which are most nearly in
keeping with the proven facts and dates in his life.
THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
[Illustration: The Figure of d'Artagnan.
(From the Dumas Monument, by Gustave Doré.)]
THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
It was in 1823 that Alexandre Dumas, in his twenty-first year, took
coach for Paris from his boyhood-home with his widowed mother, at
Villers-Cotterets. He was set down at the principal landing-place of
the provincial diligences in Place des Victoires, and found a room
near by in an inn at No. 9 Rue du Bouloi. Its old walls are still
there on the street and in the court, and the Hôtel de Blois still
awaits the traveller. Thence he started on foot, at once, for No. 64
Rue du Mont-Blanc, the home of the popular Liberal spokesman in the
Chamber of Deputies, General Foy, an old comrade-in-arms of General
Dumas, to whom his son brought a letter of introduction.
About that house, two years later, a few days after November 28, 1825,
all Paris assembled, while all France mourned, for the burial of this
honest man, whose earnest voice had been heard only in the cause of
freedom and justice. Marked by a tablet, his house still stands, and
is now No. 62 Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin--the renamed Rue du
Mont-Blanc--on the corner of Rue de la Victoire.
Besides this letter, young Dumas carried only a meagre outfit of
luggage, and such meagre education as may be picked up by a clever
and yet an idle lad, in a notary's office in a provincial town.
Indeed, when he was made welcome by General Foy, he was questioned,
too; and, to his chagrin, he was found to be without equipment for any
sort of service. On the strength, however, of his "_belle écriture_,"
he obtained, through the influence of the general, a petty clerkship
in the household of the Duc d'Orléans, coming naturally enough to the
boy from Villers-Cotterets, the country-seat of the Orleans family.
Its stipend of 1,200 francs a year was doubtless munificent in the
eyes of Orleans thrift, and was certainly sufficient for the needs
then of the future owner of Monte-Cristo's millions. He earned his
wage and no more; for his official pen--at his desk in the
Palais-Royal--while doing its strict duty on official documents, was
more gladly busied on his own studies and his own paper-spoiling. For
the author within him had come to life with his first tramping of the
Paris streets and his first taking-in of all that they meant then.
The babies, begotten by French fathers and mothers during the
Napoleonic wars, and during those tremendous years at the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, breathed,
full-lunged, an air of instant and intense vitality. Now, come to
stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of
red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism,
showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature
and the arts, after the sterility of so many years.
When Dumas came to Paris, Lamartine had already, in 1820, charmed the
public by the freshness and grace of his "Méditations." His admirers
were content with the sonorous surface of his vague, spiritual
exaltations, satisfied not to seek for any depth below. Hugo, barely
twenty, had thrilled men with the sounding phrases of his "Odes et
Ballades." These two, coming behind Chénier the herald and
Châteaubriand the van-courier, were imposing pioneers of the great
movement. Even more popular than these two Royalist poets, as they
were regarded, was Casimir Delavigne--already installed over Dumas as
Librarian at the Palais-Royal--rather a classicist in form, yet hailed
as the poet and playwright of the Liberal Opposition. Soulié, not so
well known now as he merits, won his first fame in 1824 by his poems
and plays. De Vigny had brought out his earliest poems in 1822; and
now, "isolated in his ivory tower," he was turning the periods of his
admirable "Cinq-Mars." De Musset was getting ready to try his wings,
and made his first open-air flight in 1828; a flight alone, for the
poet of personal passion joined no flock, ever. Gautier was serving
his apprenticeship to that poetic art, to whose service he gave a
life-long devotion and the most perfect craftsmanship in all France.
"They all come from Châteaubriand," said Goethe, of these and of other
rhymesters of that time. Châteaubriand himself had closed his career
as poet and as imaginative writer as far back as 1809, and had by now
taken his rank as a classic in literature, and in life as a Peer of
France and a Minister of the Bourbons.
But of all the singers of that day it was to Béranger that the public
ear turned most quickly and most kindly; even though he, then
forty-three years of age, might also seem to be of an earlier
generation. Those others touched, with various fingers, the lyre or
the lute; he turned a most melodious hand-organ, with assured and
showy art, and around it the captivated crowd loved to throng, with
enraptured long ears. His cheaply sentimental airs were hummed and
whistled all over France, and, known to everybody everywhere, there
was really no need of his putting them in type on paper, and no need
of his being sent to prison for that crime by Charles X. Yet he had
his turn, soon again, and his _chansons_, as much as any utterance of
man, upset the Bourbon throne and placed Louis-Philippe on that shaky
seat. That most prosaic of monarchs was sung up to the throne, and the
misguided poet soon found him out for what he was.
In prose, during these years, Nodier, Librarian at the Arsenal, was
plying his refined and facile pen. Mérimée showed his hand in 1825,
not to clasp, with any show of sympathy, the hand of any
fellow-worker, yet willing to take his share of the strain. Guizot,
out of active politics for a time, did his most notable pen-work
between 1825 and 1830. His untiring antagonist, Thiers, not yet turned
into the practical politician, produced, between 1823 and 1827, his
"History of the French Revolution," voluminous and untrustworthy; its
author energetically earning Carlyle's epithet, "a brisk little man in
his way." His life-long crony, Mignet, was digging vigorously in dry,
historic dust. Sainte-Beuve left, in 1827, his medical studies for
those critical studies in which he soon showed the master's hand;
notably with his early paper on Hugo's "Odes et Ballades." Michelet
was finding his _métier_ by writing histories for children. The two
Thierry brothers, Augustin and Amédée, proved the genuine historian's
stuff in them as early as 1825. Balzac was working, alone and unknown,
in his garret; and young Sue was handling the naval surgeon's knife,
before learning how to handle the pen.
And nearly all of these, nearly all the fine young fellows who made
the movement of 1830, had got inspiration from Villemain, who had
spoken, constantly and steadfastly, from his platform in the Sorbonne
during the ten years from 1815 to 1825, those sturdy and graphic words
which gave cheer and courage to so many.
There were a similar vitality and fecundity in painting and music and
their sister arts, and the brilliant host stirring for their sake
might be cited along with the unnumbered and unnamable pen-workers of
this teeming decade.
Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had possession, flooding the
stage with his comedies, vaudeville, opera-librettos, peopling its
boards with his pasteboard personages. There was call for revolt and
need of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted to his
very death to his art, longed to fill the rôle of a _man_ on the
boards, after so many years' impersonation of bloodless heroes. So he
told Dumas, who had come to see him only two weeks before his death,
in 1826, when the veteran thought he was recovering from illness--an
illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for it gave him, he pointed
out with pride, the lean frame and pendent cheeks, "beautiful for old
Tiberius"--the new part he was then studying. Death came with his cue
before that rôle could be played.
This wish for a real human being on the boards came home to Dumas,
when he saw the true Shakespeare rendered by Macready and Miss
Smithson at the Salle Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the
reading before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more than any
other influence. No Frenchman has comprehended more completely than
Dumas the Englishman's universality, and he used to say that, after
God, Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt to put live
men and women on the stage, in "Christine," was crowded out by a
poorer play of the same name, pushed by the powers behind the Comédie
Française. But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, was
produced his "Henri III. et sa Cour," an instantaneous and
unassailable success. He might have said, in the words of Henri IV. at
Senlis, "My hour has struck"; for from that hour he went on in his
triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama had come at last, with
its superb daring, its sounding but spurious sentiment, its
engorgement of adjectives, and its plentiful lack of all sense of the
ludicrous. Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had
been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of humor, it had not
gone stale so soon.
Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, from the inn in Rue du
Bouloi to another of the same sort just around the corner, Hôtel des
Vieux-Augustins, in the street of the same name--now widened and
renamed Rue Hérold. In the widening they have cut away his inn, at
present No. 12, and that of "_La Providence_," next door at No. 14,
where Charlotte Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty
years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of the two hotels are
covered by the rear buildings of the Caisse d'Epargne, which fronts on
Rue du Louvre. One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these
historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was born, on
January 28, 1791, the musician Hérold, composer of "Zampa" and
"Pré-aux-Clercs." Dumas lived for a while later at No. 1 Place des
Italiens, now Place Boïeldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought his
good mother to town, and took rooms on the second floor of No. 53 Rue
du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, next door to the old _cabaret_, "_Au Lion
d'Argent_." Mother and son soon after moved across the river, where he
found for her a home in Rue Madame, and found for himself an apartment
at No. 25 Rue de l'Université, on the southeastern corner of Rue du
Bac. There had been an illustrious tenant of this house, in 1816 and
1817, who was named Châteaubriand. Dumas, in his "Mémoires," gives
both the third and the fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to
feel like fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and he fitted
up the rooms "with a certain elegance." Shoppers at the big
establishment, "_Au petit Saint-Thomas_," may explore its annex and
mount to Dumas's rooms in the house that now hides its stately façade
and its entrance _perron_ in the court behind modern structures. Here
he remained from 1824 to 1833, making a longer stay than in any of the
many camping-places of his migratory career. And here he gave his name
to his most memorable endowment to the French drama, in the person of
his only son, born on July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother,
Marie-Catherine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. 1 Place des
Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 17, 1831, the father
formally owned the son by _l'acte de reconnaissance_, signed and
recorded at the office of the mayor of the Second Arrondissement, May
6, 1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Dumas, _fils_."
Portions of the child's early life were passed with his father, but
separations became more frequent and more prolonged, as the boy
developed his own marked character--in striking contrast with that of
the elder. Their mutual attitude came, before many years, to be as
queer and as tragi-comic as any attitudes invented by either of them
for the stage. The son used to say, in later life, that he seemed to
be the elderly guardian and counsellor of the father--a
happy-go-lucky, improvident, chance child. For the son of the
Parisienne had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his father's
dramatic range, and this happy commingling of the stronger qualities
of the parents gave him his special powers.
The doings of the elder Dumas during the famous three days of July,
1830, would make an amusing chapter. Eager to play the part of his own
boisterous heroes, he flung himself, with hot-headed and bombastic
ardor, into throne-upsetting and throne-setting-up. Of course he
allied himself with the opponents of Louis-Philippe--possibly in keen
memory of his monthly hundred francs worth of drudgery--and of course
the success of the Orleanists left him with no further chance for
place or patronage.
So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved itself to be no
broken reed, but a strong staff for support. Strong as it was and
unresting, no one pen could do even the manual labor required by the
endless volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having finished
"Monte-Cristo," he followed it by "The Three Musketeers," and then he
put out no less than forty volumes in that same year; each volume
bearing his name as sole author. But this sturdy and undaunted toiler
was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he was surrounded by clerks
for research, secretaries for writing, young and unknown authors for
collaborating; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling
touches that give warmth and color to the canvas signed by him. His
"victims," as they are described in the "Fabrique de Romans, Maison
Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie," a malicious exposure, are hardly
subjects for sympathy; they earned money not otherwise within their
power to earn, and not one of them produced, before or after, any work
of individual distinction. In his historical romances, their work is
evident in the study and research that give an accuracy not commonly
credited to Dumas and about which he never bothered. The _belle
insouciance_ of his touch is to be seen in the dash of the narrative,
and above all in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and
fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he was paid by the
line at a royal rate, and he learned the trick of making his lines too
short and his dialogues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as
he went on, it must be owned that he used his name in unworthy ways,
not only for books of no value and for journalistic paltriness, but
for shameless signature to shopkeepers' puffs, composed for coin.
As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and poured out again as
freely. For he was a spendthrift of the old _régime_, spending not
only for his own caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and
hangers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such as building his
own theatre and running it; and he squandered fabulous sums in his
desire to make real, at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for
Monte-Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted
hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until his favorite
servant, under pretence of fear of the unlucky number thirteen, to
which they had come, begged to be allowed to send some of them away.
He gave up his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas ordered
him to find a fourteenth dog! He would have drained dry a king's
treasury, and have bankrupted Monte-Cristo's island of buried
millions. Yet with all his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous
tomfoolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a manly joy in
giving, that disarm stingy censure. The lover of the romancer must
mourn for the man, growing poorer as he grew older, and must regret
the degrading shifts at which he snatched for money, by which he sank
to be a mountebank in his declining years. Toward the last his purse
held fewer _sous_ than it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them.
From his eight years' home in Rue de l'Université, Dumas crossed the
Seine, preferring always thereafter the flashily fashionable quarters
of the northern side; and none of his numerous dwellings henceforward
are worth visiting for their character or color. For nearly two years
he lived in a great mansion, No. 40 Rue Saint-Lazare, in other rooms
of which George Sand lived a little later. His next home, from 1835 to
1837, at 30 Rue Bleue, has been cut away by Rue Lafayette. From 1838
to 1843 he had an apartment, occasionally shared by his son, at No. 22
Rue de Rivoli, between Place des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Roch.
Twenty-five years after the death of the father, when the son, as he
says, was older and grayer than his father had ever grown to be, a
letter to him was written by that son. It is an exquisite piece of
literature. He brings back their life in this apartment, when,
twenty-two years apart in their birth, they were really of the same
age. He tells how he, a young man going early to his studies, left the
elder at his desk, already at work at seven in the morning, clad only
in trousers and shirt, the latter with open neck and rolled-up
sleeves. At seven in the evening his son would find him planted there
still at work, his mid-day breakfast often cold at his side, forgotten
and untouched! Then these two would dine, and dine well, for the
father loved to play the cook, and he was a master of that craft. All
the while he was preparing the _plats_ he would prattle of his heroes,
what they'd done that day, and what he imagined they might do on the
next day. And then the letter calls back to the father that evening, a
little later, when he was found by his son sunk in an armchair,
red-eyed and wretched, and mournfully explained: "Porthos is dead!
I've just killed him, and I couldn't help crying over him!" It must
have been at this period that the romancer tried to secure his son as
his permanent paid critic, offering him 25,000 francs a year, and
"you'll have nothing to do but to make objections." The offer was
declined, and rightly declined.
It was in this and in his succeeding residences--Rue de Richelieu,
109, in 1844, and Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 45, in 1845--that he
brought out in newspaper _feuilletons_ "The Count of Monte-Cristo,"
and "The Three Musketeers," these amazing successes written from day
to day to keep pace with the press. In 1846, while his address was at
No. 10 Rue Joubert, he was in Spain with the Duc de Montpensier, one
of his many companions among princes. They, along with other cronies,
male and female, more or less worthy, found Dumas at Saint-Germain
from 1847 to 1854. Then, suddenly, he disappeared into Belgium, "for
reasons not wholly unconnected with financial reverses," as he and his
only peer in fiction, Micawber, would have put it. He was in town
again in 1856, at No. 77 Rue d'Amsterdam, and there remained until
1866, when he rushed off to the head-quarters of the "Dictator of
Sicily," Garibaldi, to whom Dumas appointed himself aide and
messenger. Between 1866 and 1870 his residence was at 107 Boulevard
Malesherbes. On the coming of the Prussians, he was carried, ailing
and feeble, to his country-place at Puys, near Dieppe, where he died
December 5, 1870. His public burial was delayed until the close of the
war, and then, in 1872, was solemnized in the presence of all that was
notable in French art and literature, at his birthplace and his
boyhood-home, Villers-Cotterets.
When Dumas was asked how a monument might be erected in memory of a
dead pen-worker, who in life had been misunderstood and maligned, he
replied: "Use the stones thrown at him while he lived, and you'll have
a tremendous monument." The lovers in all lands of the great romancer
could well have brought together more telling stones than those that
make Doré's monument in Place Malesherbes, near his last Paris home.
And yet, curiously weak in its general impression, its details are
effective. The group in front is well imagined: a girl is reading to a
young student, and to an old, barefooted workman; on the other side is
our hero d'Artagnan. The seated statue of Dumas, on too tall a
pedestal, is an admirable portrait, with his own vigorous poise of
head and gallant regard.
In 1864 the American Minister to France, Mr. John Bigelow, breakfasted
with Dumas at Saint-Gratien, near Paris, where the romancer was
temporarily sojourning. It was toward the close of our Civil War, and
he had a notion of going to the United States as war-correspondent for
French papers, and to make another book, of course. Mr. Bigelow gives
an accurate and admirable description of the host, as he greeted him
at the entrance of his villa; over six feet in height, corpulent, but
well proportioned; a brown skin, a head low and narrow in front,
enlarging as it receded, covered with crisp, bushy hair growing gray,
thick lips, a large mouth, and enormous neck. Partly African and
wholly stalwart, from his negress grandmother, he would have been a
handsome creature but for his rapidly retreating forehead. But in his
features and his expression nothing showed that was sordid or selfish,
and his smile was very sweet.
[Illustration: Alexandre Dumas.]
Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love strength and
daring, loyalty and generosity, good love-making and good fighting. He
has put his own tenderness and frankness and vivacity into the real
personages, whom he has reanimated and refined; and into the ideal
personages, whom he has made as real as the actual historic men and
women who throng his thrilling pages. His own virility and lust of
life are there, too, without one prurient page in all his thousands.
And he tells his delightful stories not only with charm and wit, but
in clean-cut, straightforward words, with no making of phrases.