His Monument.
On M. du Camp’s authority there is a charming touch to add to his son’s description of him. ‘Il me semble,’ said the royal old prodigal in his last illness, ‘que je suis au sommet d’un monument qui tremble comme si les fondations étaient assises sur le sable.’ ‘Sois en paix,’ replied the author of the Demi-Monde: ‘le monument est bien bati, et la base est solide.’ He was right, as we know. It is good and fitting that Dumas should have a monument in the Paris he amazed and delighted and amused so long. But he could have done
without one. In what language is he not read? and where that he is read is he not loved? ‘Exegi monumentum,’ he might have said: ‘and wherever romance is a necessary of life, there shall you look for it, and not in vain.’