That multiple personality whom Vandam embodies in “An Englishman in Paris” admits that Lola was naturally graceful, that her gait and carriage were those of a duchess. When he goes on to say that her wit was that of a pot-house, I seem to detect one of his not infrequent lapses from the truth. Only three years had elapsed since Lola had shone in Court circles in India, where the social atmosphere was not that of a bar-room; and since then she had been wandering about in countries where her ignorance of the language must have left her manner of speech and modes of thought almost unaffected. Pot-house wit would not have fascinated Liszt, nor the fastidious Louis of Bavaria. “Men of far higher intellectual attainments than mine, and familiar with very good society,” admits our nebulous chronicler,[8] “raved and kept raving about her.”
Dumas, he says in another place, was as much smitten with her as her other admirers. This, of course, is no guarantee of her refinement, for the genial Creole had the reputation of not being over nice in his attachments and amours. He was then in the prime of life, and may be considered to have just reached the zenith of his fame by the publication of “Les Trois Mousquetaires,” “Monte Cristo,” and “La Reine Margot” (1844-5). Two years before he had formally and legally married Mademoiselle Ida Ferrier—this step, so inconsistent with his temperament and mode of life, having resulted from his own reckless disregard of the conventions. The lady had fascinated him while she was interpreting a rôle of his creation at the Porte-St.-Martin. It did not strike him that it would be irregular to take her with him to a ball given by his patron, the Duke of Orleans, and he straightway did so. “Of course, my dear Dumas,” said His Highness affably, “it is only your wife that you would think of presenting to me.” Poor Alexandre, the lover of all women and none in particular, was hoisted with his own petard. A prince’s hints, above all when he is your patron and publisher, are commands. Dumas was led to the altar, like a sheep to the slaughter, by the charming Ida. Châteaubriand supported the bridegroom through the ordeal. However the chains of matrimony sat lightly on the irrepressible romancier. Madame Dumas soon after departed for Florence, greatly to the relief of her spouse. He was living, at the time of Lola’s visit to Paris, at the Villa Médicis at St. Germain. There he could superintend the building of his palace of Monte Cristo, on the road to Marly, a part of which, with imperturbable sang-froid, he actually raised on the land belonging to a neighbour, without so much as a “by your leave.” This ambitious residence emptied Dumas’s pockets of the little money that the ladies he loved had left in them.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, SENIOR.
Alexandre, of course, fell passionately in love with Lola Montez. We need no written assurance of that. We read that he told her that she had acted “like a gentleman” in her treatment of Frederick William’s policemen, and with what far-fetched compliments he followed up this commendation it is easy to imagine. There were certain resemblances in their temperaments, though the woman was far the stronger. Posterity is never likely to agree on an estimate of Dumas’s character. Théodore de Banville thought him a truly great man.
“Dumas,” he wrote, “had no more need to husband his strength and his vitality than a river has to economise with its waters, and it seemed, in fact, that he held in his strong hands inexhaustible urns, whence flowed a stream always clear and limpid. In what formidable metal had he been cast? Once he took it into his head to take his son, Alexandre, to the masked ball of Grados, at the Barrière Montparnasse, and, attired as a postilion, the great man danced all night without resting for a moment, and held women with his outstretched arm, like a Hercules. When he returned home in the morning, he found that his postilion’s breeches had, through the swelling of the muscles, become impossible to remove; so Alexandre was obliged to cut them into strips with a penknife. After that what did the historian of the Mousquetaires do? Do you think he chose his good clean sheets or a warm bath? He chose work! And having taken some bouillon, set himself down before his writing paper, which he continued to fill with adventures till the evening, with as much ‘go’ and spirit as if he had come from calm repose.
“Nature has given up making that kind of man; by way of a change, she turns out poets, who, having composed a single sonnet, pass the rest of their lives contemplating themselves and—their sonnets.”
Prodigious! It is gratifying to think that this indefatigable worker had always two sincere admirers—himself and his son. The latter, it is true, would have his joke at the former’s expense. “My father,” remarked the son, “is so vain that he would be ready to hang on to the back of his own carriage, to make people believe he kept a black servant.” Notwithstanding, the two loved each other tenderly. Innumerable anecdotes bear witness to the paternal fondness of the one, the filial devotion of the other. Yet their relation was more that of two sworn friends, as is so touchingly expressed in these lines from the “Père Prodigue”:—
“... I have sought your affection, more than your obedience and respect.... To have all in common, heart as well as purse, to give and to tell each other everything, such has been our device. We have lost, it seems, several hundred thousands of francs; but this we have gained—the power of counting always on one another, thou on me, I on thee, and of being ready always to die for each other. That is the most important thing between father and son.”
These are the words of Frenchmen. An Englishman would have put such language into the mouths of husband and wife.