And nearly all of these, nearly all the fine young fellows who made the movement of 1830, had got inspiration from Villemain, who had spoken, constantly and steadfastly, from his platform in the Sorbonne during the ten years from 1815 to 1825, those sturdy and graphic words which gave cheer and courage to so many.
There were a similar vitality and fecundity in painting and music and their sister arts, and the brilliant host stirring for their sake might be cited along with the unnumbered and unnamable pen-workers of this teeming decade.
Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had possession, flooding the stage with his comedies, vaudeville, opera-librettos, peopling its boards with his pasteboard personages. There was call for revolt and need of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted to his very death to his art, longed to fill the rôle of a man on the boards, after so many years' impersonation of bloodless heroes. So he told Dumas, who had come to see him only two weeks before his death, in 1826, when the veteran thought he was recovering from illness—an illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for it gave him, he pointed out with pride, the lean frame and pendent cheeks, "beautiful for old Tiberius"—the new part he was then studying. Death came with his cue before that rôle could be played.
This wish for a real human being on the boards came home to Dumas, when he saw the true Shakespeare rendered by Macready and Miss Smithson at the Salle Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the reading before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more than any other influence. No Frenchman has comprehended more completely than Dumas the Englishman's universality, and he used to say that, after God, Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt to put live men and women on the stage, in "Christine," was crowded out by a poorer play of the same name, pushed by the powers behind the Comédie Française. But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, was produced his "Henri III. et sa Cour," an instantaneous and unassailable success. He might have said, in the words of Henri IV. at Senlis, "My hour has struck"; for from that hour he went on in his triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama had come at last, with its superb daring, its sounding but spurious sentiment, its engorgement of adjectives, and its plentiful lack of all sense of the ludicrous. Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of humor, it had not gone stale so soon.
Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, from the inn in Rue du Bouloi to another of the same sort just around the corner, Hôtel des Vieux-Augustins, in the street of the same name—now widened and renamed Rue Hérold. In the widening they have cut away his inn, at present No. 12, and that of "La Providence," next door at No. 14, where Charlotte Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of the two hotels are covered by the rear buildings of the Caisse d'Epargne, which fronts on Rue du Louvre. One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was born, on January 28, 1791, the musician Hérold, composer of "Zampa" and "Pré-aux-Clercs." Dumas lived for a while later at No. 1 Place des Italiens, now Place Boïeldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought his good mother to town, and took rooms on the second floor of No. 53 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, next door to the old cabaret, "Au Lion d'Argent." Mother and son soon after moved across the river, where he found for her a home in Rue Madame, and found for himself an apartment at No. 25 Rue de l'Université, on the southeastern corner of Rue du Bac. There had been an illustrious tenant of this house, in 1816 and 1817, who was named Châteaubriand. Dumas, in his "Mémoires," gives both the third and the fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to feel like fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and he fitted up the rooms "with a certain elegance." Shoppers at the big establishment, "Au petit Saint-Thomas," may explore its annex and mount to Dumas's rooms in the house that now hides its stately façade and its entrance perron in the court behind modern structures. Here he remained from 1824 to 1833, making a longer stay than in any of the many camping-places of his migratory career. And here he gave his name to his most memorable endowment to the French drama, in the person of his only son, born on July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother, Marie-Catherine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. 1 Place des Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 17, 1831, the father formally owned the son by l'acte de reconnaissance, signed and recorded at the office of the mayor of the Second Arrondissement, May 6, 1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Dumas, fils."
Portions of the child's early life were passed with his father, but separations became more frequent and more prolonged, as the boy developed his own marked character—in striking contrast with that of the elder. Their mutual attitude came, before many years, to be as queer and as tragi-comic as any attitudes invented by either of them for the stage. The son used to say, in later life, that he seemed to be the elderly guardian and counsellor of the father—a happy-go-lucky, improvident, chance child. For the son of the Parisienne had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his father's dramatic range, and this happy commingling of the stronger qualities of the parents gave him his special powers.
The doings of the elder Dumas during the famous three days of July, 1830, would make an amusing chapter. Eager to play the part of his own boisterous heroes, he flung himself, with hot-headed and bombastic ardor, into throne-upsetting and throne-setting-up. Of course he allied himself with the opponents of Louis-Philippe—possibly in keen memory of his monthly hundred francs worth of drudgery—and of course the success of the Orleanists left him with no further chance for place or patronage.
So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved itself to be no broken reed, but a strong staff for support. Strong as it was and unresting, no one pen could do even the manual labor required by the endless volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having finished "Monte-Cristo," he followed it by "The Three Musketeers," and then he put out no less than forty volumes in that same year; each volume bearing his name as sole author. But this sturdy and undaunted toiler was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he was surrounded by clerks for research, secretaries for writing, young and unknown authors for collaborating; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling touches that give warmth and color to the canvas signed by him. His "victims," as they are described in the "Fabrique de Romans, Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie," a malicious exposure, are hardly subjects for sympathy; they earned money not otherwise within their power to earn, and not one of them produced, before or after, any work of individual distinction. In his historical romances, their work is evident in the study and research that give an accuracy not commonly credited to Dumas and about which he never bothered. The belle insouciance of his touch is to be seen in the dash of the narrative, and above all in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he was paid by the line at a royal rate, and he learned the trick of making his lines too short and his dialogues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as he went on, it must be owned that he used his name in unworthy ways, not only for books of no value and for journalistic paltriness, but for shameless signature to shopkeepers' puffs, composed for coin.
As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and poured out again as freely. For he was a spendthrift of the old régime, spending not only for his own caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and hangers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such as building his own theatre and running it; and he squandered fabulous sums in his desire to make real, at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for Monte-Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until his favorite servant, under pretence of fear of the unlucky number thirteen, to which they had come, begged to be allowed to send some of them away. He gave up his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas ordered him to find a fourteenth dog! He would have drained dry a king's treasury, and have bankrupted Monte-Cristo's island of buried millions. Yet with all his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous tomfoolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a manly joy in giving, that disarm stingy censure. The lover of the romancer must mourn for the man, growing poorer as he grew older, and must regret the degrading shifts at which he snatched for money, by which he sank to be a mountebank in his declining years. Toward the last his purse held fewer sous than it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them.
From his eight years' home in Rue de l'Université, Dumas crossed the Seine, preferring always thereafter the flashily fashionable quarters of the northern side; and none of his numerous dwellings henceforward are worth visiting for their character or color. For nearly two years he lived in a great mansion, No. 40 Rue Saint-Lazare, in other rooms of which George Sand lived a little later. His next home, from 1835 to 1837, at 30 Rue Bleue, has been cut away by Rue Lafayette. From 1838 to 1843 he had an apartment, occasionally shared by his son, at No. 22 Rue de Rivoli, between Place des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Roch.