A third "book of the beginning," Antonine, is far inferior to these. It is, in fact, little more than a decentish Paul-de-Kockery, with a would-be philosophical conclusion. Two young men, Gustave Daunont and Edmond de Péreux, saunter after breakfast looking for young ladies' ankles, and Edmond sees a pair so beautiful that he follows the possessor and her unobservant father home. Having then ascertained that the father is a doctor, he adopts the surprisingly brilliant expedient of going to consult him, and so engineering an entry. He thinks there is nothing the matter with him; but the doctor (it was apparently "at temp. of tale"—1834, while the port was getting ready,—the practice of French physicians, to receive their patients in dressing-gowns) discovers that he is in an advanced stage of Dumas fils' favourite poitrine. He says, however, nothing about it (which seems odd) to his patient, merely prescribing roast-meat and Bordeaux; but (which seems odder) he does mention it to his daughter Antonine, the Lady with the Ankles. For the moment nothing happens. But Gustave the friend has for mistress an adorable grisette—amiability, in the widest sense, nez retroussé, garret, and millinery all complete—whom Madame de Péreux, Edmond's mother—a sainte, but without prejudices—tolerates, and in fact patronises. It is arranged that Nichette shall call on Antonine to ask, as a milliner, for her custom. Quite unexpected explanations follow in a not uningenious manner, and the explosion is completed by Edmond's opening (not at all treacherously) a letter addressed to Gustave and containing the news of his own danger. The rest of the story need not be told at length. A miraculous cure effected by M. Devaux, Antonine's father; marriage of the pair; pensioning off of Nichette, and marriage of Gustave to another adorable girl (ankles not here specified); establishment of Nichette at Tours in partnership with a respectable friend, etc., etc., can easily be supplied by any novel-reader.
But here the young author's nascent seriousness, and his still existing Buskbody superstition, combine to spoil the book, not merely, as in the Tristan case, to top-hamper it. Having given us eight pages of rather cheap sermonising about the poetry of youth not lasting; having requested us to imagine Manon and Des Grieux "decrepit and catarrhous," Paul and Virginie shrivelled and toothless, Werther and Charlotte united but wrinkled,[368] he proceeds to tell us how, though Gustave and his Laurence are as happy as they can be, though Nichette has forgotten her woes but kept her income and is married to a book-seller, things are not well with the other pair. Antonine loves her husband frantically, but he has become quite indifferent to her—says, indeed, that he really does not know whether he ever did love her. Later still we take leave of him, his "poetry" having ended in a prefecture, and his passion in a liaison, commonplace to the nth, with a provincial lawyer's wife. La moralité de cette comédie (to quote, probably not for the first time, or I hope the last, words of Musset which I particularly like) would appear to be—first, that to secure lasting happiness in matrimony it is desirable, if not necessary, to have lived for eighteen months antenuptially with a charming grisette—amiability, nez retroussé, garret, and millinery all complete—or to have yourself been this grisette; while, on the other hand, it is an extremely dangerous thing to recover a man of his consumption. Which last result the folklorists would doubtless assimilate to the well-known superstition of the shore as to the rescue of the drowning.
La Vie à Vingt Ans.
Two other early books of this author promise the Pauline influence in their titles and do not belie it in their contents, though in varying way and degree. Indeed, the first story of La Vie à Vingt Ans—that of a schoolboy who breaks his bounds and "sells his dictionaries" to go to the Bal de l'Opéra; receives, half in joy, half in terror, an assignation from a masked débardeur, and discovers her to be an aged married woman with a drunken husband (the pair knowing from his card that his uncle is a Deputy, and having determined to get a débit de tabac out of him)—made me laugh as heartily as the great Paul himself can ever have made Major Pendennis. The rest—they are all stories of the various amatory experiences of a certain Emmanuel de Trois Étoiles, and have a virtuous epilogue extolling pure affection and honest matrimony—are inferior, the least so being that of the caprice-love of a certain Augustine, Emmanuel's neighbour on his staircase, who admits only one other lover and finally marries him, but conceives a frantic though passing affection for her voisin. Unluckily there is in this book a sort of duplicate but, I think, earlier sketch of the atrocious conduct of Duval to the Dame aux Camélias; and there are some of the author's curious "holes where you can put your hand" (as a Jacobean poet says of the prosodic licences in nomenclature and construction of his fellows).
Aventures de Quatre Femmes.
The other, much longer, and much more ambitious and elaborate book, Aventures de Quatre Femmes et d'un Perroquet, seems to me on the whole worse than any just mentioned, though it at least attempts to fly higher than Antonine. It begins by one of those goguenardises which 1830 itself had loved, but it is not a good specimen. Two men who have determined on suicide—one by shooting, one by hanging—meet at the same tree in the Bois de Boulogne and wrangle about possession of the spot, till the aspirant to suspension per coll. recounts his history from the branch on which he is perched. After which an unlucky thirdsman, interfering, gets shot, and buried as one of the others—"which is witty, let us 'ope," as the poetical historian of the quarrel between Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Buchanan observes of something else.[369] As the book begins with two attempted and disappointed suicides, so it ends with two accomplished ones. A great part, and not the least readable, is occupied by a certain English Countess of Lindsay (for Dumas the younger, like Crébillon the younger, commits these scandala magnatum with actual titles). The hero is rather a fool, and not much less of a knave than he should be. His somewhat better wife is an innocent bigamist, thinking him dead; and one of the end-suicides is that of her second husband, who, finding himself de trop, benevolently makes way. As for the parrot, he nearly spoils the story at the beginning by "singing" (which I never heard a parrot do), and atones at the end by getting poisoned without deserving it. I am afraid I must call it a rather silly book.
It does not, however, lack the cleverness with which silliness, especially in the young and the old, is often associated, and so does not break the assignment of that quality to its author. All these five books were produced (with others) in a very few years, by a man who was scarcely over twenty when he began and was not thirty when he wrote the last of them. Now people sometimes write wonderful poetry when they are very young, because, after all, a poet is not much more than a mouthpiece of the Divine, whose spirit bloweth where it listeth. But it is not often that they write thoroughly good novels till, like other personages who have to wait for their "overseership" up to thirty, they have had time and opportunity roughly to scan and sample life. There is, in this work of Alexander the younger, plenty of imitation, of convention, of that would-be knowingness which is the most amusing form of ignorance, etc., etc. But there is a good deal more: and especially there is plenty of the famous diable au corps, of verve, of "go," of refusal to be content with one rut and one model. And all this came once, even at this period, in La Dame aux Camélias, to something which I shall not call a masterpiece, but which certainly is a powerful thesis for the attainment of the master's degree.
Trois Hommes Forts.
Perhaps there is no better example of the curious mixture of verve, variety, and vigorous hitting-off which characterised the youth of Dumas fils than Trois Hommes Forts—a book of the exact middle of the century, which begins with an idyll, passing into a tragedy; continues with a lively ship-and-yellow-fever scene; plunges into a villainous conspiracy against virtue and innocence diversified with a bull-throwing; and winds up with another killing, which, this time, is no murder; a trial, after which and an acquittal the accused and the Crown Prosecutor embrace before (and amidst the chalorous applause of) the whole Court; not forgetting a final panache of happy marriage between innocence, a very little damaged, and the bull-thrower-avenger-ouvrier, Robert. It is of course pure melodrama—Minnigrey and the Porte-Saint-Martin pleasantly accommodated. But it is not too long; it never drags; and it knocks about in the cheerfullest "pit-box-and-gallery" fashion from first to last. When the wicked "Joseph le Mendiant," alias M. Valéry, alias Frédéric Comte de La Marche[370]—who has stabbed a priest with one hand and throttled an old woman with the other; then made a fortune in Madagascar; then nearly died of yellow-fever on board ship, but recovered (something after the fashion of one of Marryat's heroes) by drinking a bottle of Madeira; then gone home and bought an estate and given himself the above title; then seduced the innocent sister of the person who heard his confession; then tried to marry a high-born maiden;[371] then threatened to betray the sister's shame if her brother "tells"—when this villain has his skull broken by Robert, all right-minded persons will clap their hands sore. But remembrance of one passage at the beginning may "leave a savour of sorrow." Could you, even in Meridional France, to-day procure a breakfast consisting of truffled pigs' feet, truffled thrush, tomato omelette (I should bar the tomatoes), and strawberries in summer, or "quatre-mendiants" (figs, nuts, and almonds and raisins) in winter, with a bottle of sound Roussillon or something like it, for three francs? Alas! one fears not.