His closing words are not without a cynical truth, and withal a pride in Paris:
“It is true that if we can say with pride, we Parisians, ‘It was Paris which overthrew the Bastille,’ you of the provinces can say with equal pride, ‘It was we who made the Revolution.’”
As if to ease the hurt, he wrote further these two lines only:
“At this epoch the sister nations should erect a gigantic statue of Peace. This statue will be Paris, and its pedestal will represent La Province.”
His wish—it was not prophecy—did not, however, come true, as the world in general and France and poor rent Alsace et Lorraine in particular know to their sorrow; and all through a whim of a self-appointed, though weakling, monarch.
The era of the true peace of the world and the monument to its glory came when the French nation presented to the New World that grand work of Bartholdi, “Liberty Enlightening the World,” which stands in New York harbour, and whose smaller replica now terminates the Allée des Cygnes.
The grasp that Dumas had of the events of romance and history served his purpose well, and in the life of the fifties in Paris his was a name and personality that was on everybody’s lips.
How he found time to live the full life that he did is a marvel; it certainly does not bear out the theory of heredity when one considers the race of his birth and the “dark-skinned” languor which was supposedly his heritage.
One edition of his work comprises two hundred and seventy-seven volumes, and within the year a London publisher has announced some sixty volumes “never before translated.” Dumas himself has said that he was the author of over seven hundred works.
In point of time his romances go back to the days of the house of Valois and the Anglo-French wars (1328), and to recount their contents is to abstract many splendid chapters from out the pages of French history.