With all due credit, then, to Hugo, it was Dumas who led the romanticists through the breach that was slowly opening; though at the same time one may properly enough recall the names of Alfred de Musset, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard de Nerval.
Dumas’ next play was in “classical form”—“Christine.”
Mere chance brought Dumas into an acquaintance with the history of Christine of Sweden, and, though the play was written and accepted before “Henri III. et Sa Cour,” it was not until some time later that it was produced at the Odéon; the recollection of which also brings up the name of Mlle. Mars.
The statue in Paris in the Place Malesherbes, erected to the memory of Dumas, has been highly commended in conception and execution. It was the work of Gustave Doré, and, truth to tell, it has some wonderfully effective sculptures in bronze. A group of three symbolical figures en face, and a lifelike and life-sized representation of the courageous D’Artagnan d’arrière. These details are charming when reproduced on paper by process of photography or the hand of an artist. Indeed, they are of much the same quality when viewed as details, but in the ensemble, combined with a cold, inartistic base or pedestal, which is crowned by a seated effigy of Dumas—also life-size—clad in the unlovely raiment of the latter nineteenth century, there is much to be desired.
Statues, be they bronze or marble, are often artistically successful when their figures are covered with picturesque mediæval garments, but they are invariably a failure, in an artistic sense, when clothed in latter-day garb. Doublet and hose, and sword and cloak lend themselves unmistakably to artistic expression. Trousers and top-hats do not. Just back of the Place Malesherbes is the Avenue de Villiers—a street of fine houses, many of them studio apartments, of Paris’s most famous artists. Here at No. 94 lived Alexandre Dumas during the later years of his life; so it is fitting that his monument should be placed in this vicinity. The house was afterward occupied by Dumas fils, and more lately by his widow, but now it has passed into other hands.
Of interest to Americans is the fact which has been recorded by some one who was au courant with Parisian affairs of the day, “that the United States Minister to France, Mr. John Bigelow, breakfasted with Dumas at St. Gratien, near Paris,” when it came out that he (Dumas) had a notion to go out to America as a war correspondent for the French papers; the Civil War was not then over. Unhappily for all of us, he did not go, and so a truly great book was lost to the world.
In this same connection it has been said that Dumas’ “quadroon autographs” were sold in the United States, to provide additional funds for the widows and orphans of slain abolitionists. As it is apocryphally said that they sold for a matter of a hundred and twenty dollars each, the sum must have reached considerable proportions, if their number was great.