It was three years after that Madame and the cardinal went to the celebrated ball, the account of which follows in the subsequent chapter of the romance.
Dumas as a dramatist was not so very different from Dumas the novelist. When he first came to Paris the French stage was by no means at a low and stagnant ebb—at least, it was not the thin, watery concoction that many English writers would have us believe; and, furthermore, the world’s great dramatist—Shakespeare—had been and was still influencing and inspiring the French playwright and actor alike.
It was the “Hamlet” of Ducis—a very French Hamlet, but still Hamlet—and the memory of an early interview with Talma that first set fire to the fuel of the stage-fever which afterward produced Dumas the dramatist.
Dumas was not always truthful, or, at least, correct, in his facts, but he did not offend exceedingly, and he was plausible; as much so, at any rate, as Scott, who had erred to the extent of fifteen years in his account of the death of Amy Robsart.
In 1824 was born Alexandre Dumas fils, and at this time the parent was collaborating with Soulié in an attempted, but unfinished, dramatization of Scott’s “Old Mortality.”
By 1830, after he had left official work, Dumas had produced that drama of the Valois, “Henri III.,” at the Théâtre Français, where more than a century before Voltaire had produced his first play, “Œdipe,” and where the “Hernani” of Victor Hugo had just been produced.
It was a splendid and gorgeous event, and the adventures of the Duchesse de Guise, St. Mégrin, Henri III. and his satellites proved to the large and distinguished audience present no inconspicuous element in the success of the future king of romance. It was a veritable triumph, and for the time the author was more talked of and better known than was Hugo, who had already entered the arena, but whose assured fame scarcely dates from before “Hernani,” whose first presentation—though it was afterward performed over three hundred times in the same theatre—was in February of the same year.
Voltaire had been dead scarce a half-century, but already the dust lay thick on his dramatic works, and the world of Paris was looking eagerly forward to the achievements of the new school. One cannot perhaps claim for Dumas that he was in direct lineage of Shakespeare,—as was claimed for Hugo, and with some merit,—but he was undoubtedly one of the first of the race of the popular French playwrights whose fame is perpetuated to-day by Sardou. At any rate, it was a classic struggle which was inaugurated in France—by literature and the drama—in the early half of the nineteenth century, and one which was a frank rebellion against the rigid rules by which their arts had been restrained—especially dramatic art.
D’ARTAGNAN
From the Dumas Statue by Gustave Doré