“‘Insane to a degree; his head becomes weaker. Sometimes he weeps bitterly, sometimes laughs boisterously; at other times he passes hours on the seashore, flinging stones in the water, and when the flint makes “ducks and drakes” five or six times, he appears as delighted as if he had gained another Marengo or Austerlitz. Now, you must agree these are indubitable symptoms of weakness?’
“‘Or of wisdom, M. le Baron—or of wisdom,’ said Louis XVIII., laughing; ‘the greatest captains of antiquity recreated themselves with casting pebbles into the ocean—see Plutarch’s life of Scipio Africanus.’”
Again, from the same work, the following estimate of Napoleon’s position at Elba was, if not original, at least opinionated:
“The emperor, now king of the petty isle of Elba, after having held sovereign sway over one-half of the world, counting us, his subjects, a small population of twenty millions,—after having been accustomed to hear the ‘Vive Napoléons’ of at least six times that number of human beings, uttered in nearly every language of the globe,—was looked upon among the haute société of Marseilles as a ruined man, separated for ever from any fresh connection with France or claim to her throne.”
Firstly the Faubourg St. Denis is associated with Dumas’ early life in Paris. He lived at No. 53 of the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis in 1824.
When one walks past the Porte St. Denis and looks up at that seventeenth-century arch of triumph, built to commemorate the German victories of Louis Quatorze, one just misses the historical significance and architectural fitness of the arch. It is not merely an incident in the boulevard. It belongs not so much to the newer boulevard, as to the ancient Rue St. Denis, and it is only by proceeding some distance up this street, the ancient route of the pilgrims to the tomb of the saint, that the meaning of the Porte St. Denis can truly be appreciated. The arch may be heavy,—it has been described as hideous, and it truly is,—but seen in the Rue St. Denis, whose roadway passes under it, it forms a typical view even to-day of Old Paris, and of the Paris which entered so largely into Dumas’ romances of the Louis.
The more ancient Porte St. Denis, the gateway which lay between the faubourg, the plain, and the ville, performed a function quite different from that of the Renaissance gateway which exists to-day; in just what manner will be readily inferred when it is recalled that, with the Porte St. Antoine, the Porte St. Denis was the scene of much riot and bloodshed in the early history of Paris.
109 RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. DENIS (DÉSCAMPS’ STUDIO)