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.