TWO FAMOUS CARICATURES OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Guizot, the bête noire of the later Louis-Philippe, was actively writing from 1825 to 1830, and his antagonist, Thiers, was at the same period producing what Carlyle called the “voluminous and untrustworthy labours of a brisk little man in his way;” which recalls to mind the fact that Carlylean rant—like most of his prose—is a well-nigh insufferable thing.
At this time Mignet, the historian, was hard at work, and St. Beauve had just deserted materia medica for literature. Michelet’s juvenile histories were a production of the time, while poor, unhonoured, and then unsung, Balzac was grinding out his pittance—in after years to grow into a monumental literary legacy—in a garret.
Eugène Sue had not yet taken to literary pathways, and was scouring the seas as a naval surgeon.
The drama was prolific in names which we have since known as masters, Scribe, Halévy, and others.
George Sand, too, was just beginning that grand literary life which opened with “Indiana” in 1832, and lasted until 1876. She, like so many of the great, whose name and fame, like Dumas’ own, has been perpetuated by a monument in stone, the statue which was unveiled in the little town of her birth on the Indre, La Châtre, in 1903.
Like Dumas, too, hers was a cyclopean industry, and so it followed that in the present twentieth century (in the year 1904), another and a more glorious memorial to France’s greatest woman writer was unveiled in the Garden of the Luxembourg.
Among the women famous in the monde of Paris at the time of Dumas’ arrival were Mesdames Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu, and Delphine Gay.
“For more than half a century this brilliant group of men and women sustained the world of ideas and poetry,” said Dumas, in his “Mémoires,” “and I, too,” he continued, “have reached the same plane ... unaided by intrigue or coterie, and using none other than my own work as the stepping-stone in my pathway.”