It is impossible to say in how many places he lived, though one gathers from the “Mémoires,” and from contemporary information, that they numbered many score, and the uncharitable have further said that he found it more economical to move than to pay his rents. Reprehensible as this practice may be, Dumas was no single exponent of it—among artists and authors; and above all in his case, as we know, it resulted from imprudence and ofttimes misplaced confidence and generosity.
One of Dumas’ early homes in Paris, jocularly called by him “La Pâté d’Italie,” was situated in that famous centre of unconventionality, the Boulevard des Italiens, a typical tree-shaded and café-lined boulevard.
Its name was obviously acquired from its resemblance to, or suggestion of being constructed of, that mastic which is known in Germany as noodles, in Italy as macaroni, and in English-speaking countries as dough.
To-day the structure, as it then was, exists no more, though the present edifice at the corner of the Rue Louis le Grand, opposite the vaudeville theatre, has been assuredly stated as in no wise differing in general appearance from its prototype, and, as it is after the same ginger-cake style of architecture, it will serve its purpose.
Albert Vandam, in “An Englishman in Paris,” that remarkable book of reminiscence whose authorship was so much in doubt when the work was first published, devoted a whole chapter to the intimacies of Dumas père; indeed, nearly every feature and character of prominence in the great world of Paris—at the time of which he writes—strides through the pages of this remarkably illuminating book, in a manner which is unequalled by any conventional volume of “Reminiscence,” “Observations,” or “Memoirs” yet written in the English language, dealing with the life of Paris—or, for that matter, of any other capital.
His account, also, of a “literary café” of the Paris of the forties could only have been written by one who knew the life intimately, and, so far as Dumas’ acquaintances and contemporaries are concerned, Vandam’s book throws many additional side-lights on an aspect which of itself lies in no perceptible shadow.
Even in those days the “boulevards”—the popular resort of the men of letters, artists, and musical folk—meant, as it does to-day, a somewhat restricted area in the immediate neighbourhood of the present Opera. At the corner of the Rue Lafitte was a tobacconist’s shop, whose genius was a “splendid creature,” of whom Alfred de Musset became so enamoured that his friends feared for an “imprudence on his part.” The various elements of society and cliques had their favourite resorts and rendezvous; the actors under the trees in the courtyard of the Palais Royal; the ouvrier and his family meandered in the Champs Elysées or journeyed countryward to Grenelle; while the soldiery mostly repaired to La Plaine de St. Denis.
A sister to Thiers kept a small dining establishment in the Rue Drouet, and many journalistic and political gatherings were held at her tables d’hôte. When asked whether her delicious pheasants were of her illustrious brother’s shooting, she shook her head, and replied: “No, M. the President of the Council has not the honour to supply my establishment.”
Bohemia, as Paris best knew it in the fifties, was not that pleasant land which lies between the Moravian and the Giant Mountains; neither were the Bohemians of Paris a Slavonic or Teutonic people of a strange, nomad race.
But the history of the Bohemia of arts and letters—which rose to its greatest and most prophetic heights in the Paris of the nineteenth century—would no doubt prove to be as extensive a work as Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” though the recitation of tenets and principles of one would be the inevitable reverse of the other.