For recollections and reminders of the author’s contemporaries, there are countless other localities too numerous to mention. In the Rue Pigalle, at No. 12, died Eugene Scribe; in the Rue de Douai lived Edmond About, while in the Rue d’Amsterdam, at No. 77, lived Dumas himself, and in the Rue St. Lazare, Madame George Sand. Montmartre is sacred to the name of Zola in the minds of most readers of latter-day French fiction, while many more famous names of all ranks, of litterateurs, of actors, of artists and statesmen,—all contemporaries and many of them friends of Dumas,—will be found on the tombstones of Père la Chaise.
The motive, then, to be deduced from these pages is that they are a record of many things associated with Alexandre Dumas, his life, and his work. Equally so is a fleeting itinerary of strolls around and about the Paris of Dumas’ romances, with occasional journeys into the provinces.
77 Rue d’Amsterdam
Rue de St. Denis
Thus the centuries have done their work of extending and mingling,—“le jeu est fait,” so to speak,—but Paris, by the necessities of her growth and by her rather general devotion to one stately, towering form of domestic architecture, has often made the separation of old from new peculiarly difficult to a casual eye. It is indeed her way to be new and splendid, to be always the bride of cities, espousing human destiny. And, truly, it is in this character that we do her homage with our visits, our money, and our admiration. Out of gray, unwieldy, distributed London one flies from a vast and romantic camp to a city exact and beautiful. So exact, so beautiful, so consistent in her vivacity, so neat in her industry, so splendid in her display, that one comes to think that the ultimate way to enjoy Paris is to pass unquestioning and unsolicitous into her life, exclaiming not “Look here,” and “Look there” in a fever of sightseeing, but rather baring one’s breast, like Daudet’s ouvrier, to her assaults of glistening life.
The Paris of to-day is a reconstructed Paris; its old splendours not wholly eradicated, but changed in all but their associations. The life of Paris, too, has undergone a similar evolution, from what it was even in Dumas’ time.
The celebrities of the Café de Paris have mostly, if not quite all, passed away. No more does the eccentric Prince Demidoff promulgate his eccentricities into the very faces of the onlookers; no more does the great Dumas make omelettes in golden sugar-bowls; and no more does he pass his criticisms—or was it encomiums?—on the veau sauté.