My Memoirs, Vol. III, 1826 to 1830

by Alexandre Dumas

"I declare," he exclaimed contemptuously, "it is dead!"

Larrey was so astonished by this exclamation that he did not even bethink himself to offer apologies to Augereau for having disturbed him to look at so uninteresting an object as a dead mummy.

But throughout that period everybody was literary, not in themselves, or from choice, but from tradition. No one had yet forgotten that Bonaparte had signed his own proclamations to the Army of Egypt, and that Napoleon had accosted M. de Fontanes every time he met him with the question—

"Well, Monsieur de Fontanes, have you found me a poet?"

But the day and the appointed hour had come for all those poets who had escaped the notice of M. de Fontanes and Napoleon's munificent offers. They were springing up, blossoming and glowing like hawthorn in the month of May; and their names had already begun to give promise of the immense sensation they were to create in the future. Their names were Lamartine, Hugo, de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Méry, Soulié, Barbier, Alfred de Musset, Balzac; these were already filling, at the cost of their heart's blood, that great and unique stream of poetry from which France and Europe and the whole world were to drink during the nineteenth century.

But the movement was taking place not only amidst that pléiade which I have just named; a whole host of others was fighting, each helping forward the general cause by separate attacks, to make a breach in the walls of the old school of poetry. Dittmer and Cavé were publishing the Soirées de Neuilly; Vitet, the Barricades and the États de Blois; Mérimée the Théâtre de Clara Gazul. And note carefully that all these movements took place away from the stage whereon the real struggle took place, and apart from its manifestations. The real struggle was that in which I, and Victor Hugo (I put myself first for chronological reasons) were to take part. I was preparing for it not only by the continuation of my Christine, but still more by studying humanity as a whole, combined with individual characterisations.

I have referred to the immense service the English actors had done me; Macready, Kean, Young had in turn completed the work begun by Kemble and Miss Smithson. I had seen Hamlet, Romeo, Shylock, Othello, Richard III. and Macbeth. I had read and devoured not only the whole of Shakespeare, but even the whole of the foreign dramatic output. I had recognised that, in the theatrical world, everything emanated from Shakespeare, just as in the external world everything owes its existence to the sun; that nothing could be compared with him; for, coming before everyone else, he was yet as supreme in tragedy as Corneille, in comedy as Molière, as original as Calderon, as full of thought as Goethe, as passionate as Schiller. I realised that his works contained as many types as the works of all the others put together. I recognised, in short, that, after the Creator Himself, Shakespeare had created more than any other being. As I have stated, when I saw these English artists, actors who forgot that they were on a stage,—the life of the imagination became actual life through the power of Art; their convincing words and gestures seeming to transform them from actors into creatures of God, with their virtues and their vices, their passions and their failings,—from that moment my career was decided. I felt I had received that special call which comes to every man. I felt a confidence in my own powers that I had lacked until then, and I boldly hurled myself upon the unknown future that had hitherto held such terrors for me. But, at the same time, I did not disguise from myself the difficulties in the way of the career to which I had devoted my life; I knew that it would require deeper and more special study than any other profession; that before I could experiment successfully on living nature I must first perseveringly study the works of others. So I did not rest satisfied with a superficial study. One after the other, I took the works of men of genius, like Shakespeare, Molière, Corneille, Calderon, Goethe and Schiller, laid them out as bodies on a dissecting table, and, scalpel in hand, I spent whole nights in probing them to the heart in order to find the sources of life and the secret of the circulation of their blood. And after a while I discovered with what admirable science they galvanised nerve and muscle into life, and by what skill they modelled the differing types of flesh that were destined to cover the one unchangeable human framework of bone. For man does not invent. God has given the created world into his hands, and left him to apply it to his needs. Progress simply means the daily, monthly and everlasting conquest of man over matter. Each individual as he appears on the scene takes possession of the knowledge of his fathers, works it up in different ways, and then dies after he has added one ray more to the sum of human knowledge which he bequeaths to his sons,—one star in the Milky Way! I was then not only trying to complete my dramatic work but also my dramatic education. But that is an error, one's work may be finished some day, but one's education never!

I had just about concluded my play, after two months' peace and encouragement in my humble post in the Archives Office, when I received notice from the Secretariat that, as my position was almost a sinecure, it had been done away with, and that I must hold myself ready to enter the Forestry Department—under M. Deviolaine. So the storm that had been hanging over my head for long had burst at last. I said good-bye to old father Bichet with tears in my eyes, and to his two friends MM. Pieyre and Parseval de Grandmaison, who promised to follow my career with sympathetic interest wherever I might be. The reader knows M. Deviolaine. During the five years I had been in the Government offices I had been looked upon as a bête-noir, so I entered upon my new official work under no very favourable auspices.

The struggle began immediately I took up my new duties. They wanted to herd me together with five or six of my fellow-clerks in one large room, and I revolted against the proceeding. My companions were good enough to explain to me in all innocence that they found it an advantageous way of killing time—that deadly enemy to employés—to sit together, for then they could talk. Now, talk was just what I most dreaded; to them it was a pleasure, to me a torture, for chattering distracted my own ever-increasing imaginative ideas. No, instead of wanting to be in this big office, strewn thick with supernumeraries, clerks and assistants, I had my eye on a sort of recess separated by a simple partition from the office-boy's cubicle, and in which he kept the ink-bottles that were returned to him empty. I asked if I might take possession of this place. I might as well have asked for the archbishopric of Cambrai, which was just vacant. A fearful clamour went up at this demand, from the office boy to the head of the department (directeur général). The office boy asked the clerks in the big room where he could put his empty bottles henceforth; the clerks in the big room asked the assistant head clerk (the one who had never heard of Byron) whether I thought myself too good to work with them; the assistant head clerk asked the chief clerk whether I had come to the Forestry Department to give or to receive orders; the chief clerk asked the head of the department if it were usual for a clerk paid fifteen hundred francs to have an office to himself, as though he were a head clerk at four thousand. The head of the department replied that it was not only absolutely contrary to administrative customs, but that no such precedent would be allowed me, and that my claim was most presumptuous! I was trying to fit myself into the unlucky recess which, for the moment, formed the sum of my ambition, when the head clerk walked haughtily from the office of the head of the department, bearing the verbal command that the rebellious employé, who had dared for one moment to entertain the ambitious hope of leaving the ordinary ranks, should at once return to his place there. He transmitted the order immediately to the assistant head clerk, who passed it on to the ordinary clerks of the large office, who transmitted it to the office boy! There was joy throughout the department: a fellow-clerk was to be humiliated and, if he did not take his humiliation in a humble spirit, he I would lose his situation! The office boy opened the door between his cubicle and mine; he had just come from making a general clearance throughout the office and had brought back all the empty bottles he could manage to unearth.

"But, my dear Féresse," I said, watching him uneasily, "how do you think I can manage here with all those bottles, or, rather, how are all those bottles going to fit in with me,—unless I live in one of them, after the style of le Diable boiteux?"