Finally, through the kindly aid of General Foy, Dumas—son of a republican general though he was—found himself seated upon a clerk’s stool, quill in hand, writing out dictation at the secretary’s bureau of the Duc d’Orleans.
“I then set about to look for lodgings,” said Dumas, “and, after going up and down many staircases, I came to a halt in a little room on a fourth story, which belonged to that immense pile known as the ‘Pâté des Italiens.’ The room looked out on the courtyard, and I was to have it for one hundred and twenty francs per annum.”
From that time on Dumas may be said to have known Paris intimately—its life, its letters, its hotels and restaurants, its theatres, its salons, and its boulevards.
So well did he know it that he became a part and parcel of it.
His literary affairs and relations are dealt with elsewhere, but the various aspects of the social and economic life of Paris at the time Dumas knew its very pulse-beats must be gleaned from various contemporary sources.
The real Paris which Dumas knew—the Paris of the Second Empire—exists no more. The order of things changeth in all but the conduct of the stars, and Paris, more than any other centre of activity, scintillates and fluctuates like the changings of the money-markets.
The life that Dumas lived, so far as it has no bearing on his literary labours or the evolving of his characters, is quite another affair from that of his yearly round of work.
He knew intimately all the gay world of Paris, and fresh echoes of the part he played therein are being continually presented to us.
He knew, also, quite as intimately, certain political and social movements which took place around about him, in which he himself had no part.