Intensely astonished, I read the letter I have just transcribed above. I knew that M. Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, who was very friendly towards me, had been urged by Beauchesne to send my name in to M. de la Bouillerie's office; but it was far enough from my thoughts that the Duc d'Orléans would ever consent to recommend me himself. I blushed excessively, stammered out a few words of thanks and asked him to whom I owed the good fortune of being recommended by him.
"To a friend," he replied, and that was all I could extract from him.
Unfortunately, the duke's recommendation was of no avail. I have since been informed that it was M. Empis, head clerk of the king's household, who frustrated the kind intention of the prince and of M. de la Rochefoucauld. M. Empis belonged to an entirely opposite school of literature from mine; he had written a very remarkable play called La Mère et la Fille, the leading part in which was created by Frédérick Lemaître, upon his first appearance at the Odéon, and the piece was extraordinarily successful. I said above "Unfortunately the duke's recommendation was of no avail." Let us explain the word unfortunately. Unfortunate it was, indeed; for at that time the Cross of the Légion d'honneur had not been bestowed broadcast, and it would have been a rich prize had I obtained it. I was young and full of hope and vigour and enthusiasm; I was just on the threshold of my career; and therefore the fact of my nomination would have given me very great delight. But it is among the misfortunes of those who have the power of giving such honours that they never know how to give them in time; this cross, that the Duc d'Orléans asked for me in 1830, King Louis-Philippe only gave me in 1836, at the Fêtes of Versailles; even then it was not he himself but the prince royal who gave it me, upon the occasion of his marriage, when the orders at his disposal were one grand'croix and two croix d'Officier and one croix de Chevalier. The grand'croix was for François Arago; the two "croix d'Officier" were for Augustin Thierry and Victor Hugo; the croix de Chevalier was for me.
Having reached this period of my life, I will tell all the stories connected with this order, and how M. de Salvandy, so that he might be forgiven for presenting the croix d'Officier to Hugo and the croix de Chevalier to me, felt obliged to give one at the same time to an excellent fellow, whose name was so totally unknown as to preserve, by its very obscurity, the celebrity of our own. The result was that I put my cross inside my pocket, instead of pinning it in my buttonhole.
And this reminds me of the story of the father of one of my literary confrères, a wealthy cotton merchant, who, having received the cross, because he had lent Charles X. two million francs, only wore the ribbon in the buttonhole of his fob. Thus I had, for the time being, to deprive myself of the red ribbon. I was angry at first with M. Empis for having defeated my pretty dream, but far more angry with him later for having written Julie, ou la Réparation!
However, we managed to find endless diversions during that happy winter of 1830, severe though it was. It is a remarkable fact that revolutions almost always surprise people in the midst of dances, and kings in the midst of fireworks. There were, too, any number of masked balls. There was a Salon held in Paris in those days by Madame Lafond, which was entirely comprised of artistic society. Madame Lafond was, at that date, a woman of between thirty-six and thirty-eight years of age, in the zenith of her beauty, which was that of a brunette, and she was admirably preserved: she had dark speaking eyes and black wavy hair, add to these charms a most bewitching smile, the most graceful hands imaginable, and an intellect that was remarkable both for its power and its kindliness, and you will still only have a very imperfect impression of the mistress of that Salon. Her husband was the musician Lafond, who was a talented violin player: he was small and fair, and supported his wife to perfection at her soirées, playing the same part Prince Albert plays at the Court of Queen Victoria. I believe he was killed by a carriage accident. He had two sons a great deal younger than I, who still wore little round jackets and turned-down collars, and were sent to bed at eight o'clock. They have grown up into two delightful young fellows, whom I have since met at various Embassies.
In those days, neither the costume of pierrots nor that of dock labourers had become the fashionable rage; Chicard and Gavarni were still hidden in the dark depths of the future; and the Opera ballet had not emerged from the traditional domino in which it would have been a difficult matter to thread those mad galops, to the sound of that terrible music, which won Musard the nickname of "the Napoleon of the Cancan." The real cancan, which was a capital national dance, the only one which possessed the elements of spontaneity and of the picturesque, was consigned to the outskirts of civilisation, with other contraband goods proscribed by custom.
Now, the choice of a suitable costume was a very serious business to an author of twenty-six, who had already begun to possess the reputation, whether erroneously or not, of being quite an Othello. I had made the acquaintance at Firmin's balls—I do not know why I have never yet spoken of those delightful réunions of his, where one was sure to find, without powder or paint, the youngest and prettiest faces in Paris—of a clever young fellow, a pupil of M. Ingres, and who has since become the celebrated antiquary Amaury Duval. He had just returned from Greece, where he had taken part in an artistic expedition that had been sent to the land of Pericles, after the battle of Navarino. He appeared at one of Firmin's balls in the disguise of a Pallikar. The Pallikar was all the rage then; Byron had introduced, it, and all our pretty women had collected funds for that mother of lovely women, the land of Greece. From this time I became great friends with Amaury and, later, I gave his name to one of my romances, in remembrance of our youthful friendship; or, rather, let us say, of the friendship of our youth. He proclaimed himself a fanatical partisan of my works, and he it was, it will be recollected, son and nephew of an Academician, who was said to have demanded the heads of the members of the Academy, after the first representation of Henri III. So I went and hunted him up, for it was most important at a fancy dress ball to make the most of one's natural advantages. I have said that I never was good-looking, but I was tall and well built, although rather slight; my face was thin, and I had large brown eyes, with a dark complexion; in a word, if it was impossible to create beauty, it was easy enough to form character. So we decided that the dress of an Albanian would suit me exactly; and Amaury accordingly designed me a costume. Now, the turban was the most striking part of this costume, and, being rolled two or three times round the head, it passed round the neck and was tied at the point it started from. But the costume had to be made, and, as it was covered with embroidery and braid and lace, it took a fortnight to make.
At last, the evening arrived, and the dress was finished by eleven o'clock; by midnight I entered Madame Lafond's house. This costume of mine was then almost unknown in France: the jacket and leggings were of red velvet, embroidered with gold; the fustanelle, as white as snow, had not been robbed of a single inch of its proper width; the dazzling silver arms were marvellously wrought, and, above all, the originality of the head-dress drew all eyes upon me. I guessed I should make a triumphant sensation, but had no idea of the method in which it would be expressed. I had not taken ten steps into the room before a young woman, clad as a Roman priestess, crowned with verbena and cypress, made her apologies to her partner and left him to come to me. She then led me apart into a small boudoir and, making me sit down, remained standing in front of me and said—
"Now, Monsieur Dumas, you are going to teach me how to put on a turban like that; to-morrow I am acting Desdemona with Zucchelli and you know how those Italian devils array themselves; I should, at any rate, like him to have a head-dress like yours, it would work me up!"