A recollection of the past crossed his mind.
“Fifty years ago, when I went to Paris,” he said, “I had a louis. Why have people accused me of prodigality? I have always kept that louis. See—there it is.”
And he showed his son the coin, smiling feebly as he did so.
CHAPTER IV.
DUMAS’ CONTEMPORARIES
Among those of the world’s great names in literature contemporary with Dumas, but who knew Paris ere he first descended upon it to try his fortune in its arena of letters, were Lamartine, who already, in 1820, had charmed his public with his “Meditations;” Hugo, who could claim but twenty years himself, but who had already sung his “Odes et Ballades,” and Chateaubriand.
Soulié and De Vigny won their fame with poems and plays in the early twenties, De Musset and Chénier followed before a decade had passed, and Gautier was still serving his apprenticeship.
It was the proud Goethe who said of these young men of the twenties, “They all come from Chateaubriand.” Béranger, too, “the little man,” even though he was drawing on toward the prime of life, was also singing melodiously: it was his chansons, it is said, that upset the Bourbon throne and made way for the “citizen-king.” Nodier, of fanciful and fantastic rhyme, was already at work, and Mérimée had not yet taken up the administrative duties of overseeing the preserving process which at his instigation was, at the hands of a paternal government, being applied to the historical architectural monuments throughout France; a glory which it is to be feared has never been wholly granted to Mérimée, as was his due.