(PUBLISHERS' NOTE.)
"MY DEAR FOURNIER,—A decree passed by the Courts in 1832 ordered that La Tour de Nesle should be printed and billed with my name alone; and this was done, in fact up to 1851, the period when it was forbidden. Now that we are going to revive it, I allow you, and even beg you, to join my name with that of Alexandre Dumas my collaborator, to whom I wish to prove that I have forgotten our old quarrels, and only remember our good relations in the past, and the large part his incomparable talent had in the success of La Tour de Nesle.—Yours, etc.,
"F. GAILLARDET
"PARIS, 25 April 1864"
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.—The above note appears in the current edition of the Memoirs. In the Appendix to the Paris edition of 1854 will be found a long letter by M. F. Gaillardet, dated 12 April 1854, which Dumas did not reproduce in the Brussels edition.]
[1] In order to close the story of this quarrel, which made such a stir in the literary world, we think we had better reproduce here the letter which M. Gaillardet, with an impulse which does him honour, wrote spontaneously to M. Marc Fournier, manager of the Porte-Saint-Martin, since the revival of La Tour de Nesle at that theatre, in 1861.