Paris has ever been written down in the book of man as the city of light, of gaiety, and of a trembling vivacity which has been in turn profligate, riotous, and finally criminal.
All this is perhaps true enough, but no more in degree than in most capitals which have endured so long, and have risen to such greatness.
With Paris it is quantity, with no sacrifice of quality, that has placed it in so preëminent a position among great cities, and the life of Paris—using the phrase in its most commonly recognized aspect—is accordingly more brilliant or the reverse, as one views it from the boulevards or from the villettes.
DUMAS’ HOUSE AT VILLERS-COTTERETS
French writers, the novelists in particular, have well known and made use of this; painters and poets, too, have perpetuated it in a manner which has not been applied to any other city in the world.
To realize the conditions of the life of Paris to the full one has to go back to Rousseau—perhaps even farther. His observation that “Les maisons font la ville, mais le citoyens font la cité,” was true when written, and it is true to-day, with this modification, that the delimitation of the confines of la ville should be extended so far as to include all workaday Paris—the shuffling, bustling world of energy and spirit which has ever insinuated itself into the daily life of the people.
The love and knowledge of Alexandre Dumas père for Paris was great, and the accessory and detail of his novels, so far as he drew upon the capital, was more correct and apropos. It was something more than a mere dash of local colour scattered upon the canvas from a haphazard palette. In minutiæ it was not drawn as fine as the later Zola was wont to accomplish, but it showed no less detail did one but comprehend its full meaning.
Though born in the provincial town Villers-Cotterets,—seventy-eight kilomètres from Paris on the road to Soissons,—Dumas came early in touch with the metropolis, having in a sort of runaway journey broken loose from his old associations and finally becoming settled in the capital as a clerk in the Bureau d’Orleans, at the immature age of twenty. Thus it was that his impressions and knowledge of Paris were founded upon an experience which was prolonged and intimate, extending, with brief intervals of travel, for over fifty years.
He had journeyed meantime to Switzerland, England, Corsica, Naples, the Rhine, Belgium,—with a brief residence in Italy in 1840-42,—then visiting Spain, Russia, the Caucasus, and Germany.