(F. T. M.)
DUMAS, GUILLAUME MATHIEU, Count (1753-1837), French general, was born at Montpellier, of a noble family, on the 23rd of November 1753. He joined the army in 1773, and entered upon active service in 1780, as aide-de-camp to Rochambeau in the American War. He had a share in all the principal engagements that occurred during a period of nearly two years. On the conclusion of peace in 1783 he returned to France as a major. He was engaged from 1784 to 1786 in exploring the archipelago and the coasts of Turkey. He was present at the siege of Amsterdam in 1787, where he co-operated with the Dutch against the Prussians. At the Revolution he acted with Lafayette and the constitutional liberal party. He was entrusted by the Assembly with the command of the escort which conducted Louis XVI. to Paris from Varennes. In 1791 as a maréchal de camp he was appointed to a command at Metz, where he rendered important service in improving the discipline of the troops. Chosen a member of the Legislative Assembly in the same year by the department of Seine-et-Oise, he was in the following year elected president of the Assembly. When the extreme republicans gained the ascendancy, however, he judged it prudent to make his escape to England. Returning after a brief interval, under the apprehension that his father-in-law would be held responsible for his absence, he arrived in Paris in the midst of the Reign of Terror, and had to flee to Switzerland. Soon after his return to France he was elected a member of the Council of Ancients. After the 18th Fructidor (1797) Dumas, being proscribed as a monarchist, made his escape to Holstein, where he wrote the first part of his Précis des événements militaires (published anonymously at Hamburg, 1800).
Recalled to his native country when Bonaparte became First Consul, he was entrusted with the organization of the “Army of Reserve” at Dijon. In 1801 he was nominated a councillor of state. He did good service at Austerlitz, and went in 1806 to Naples, where he became minister of war to Joseph Bonaparte. On the transfer of Joseph to the throne of Spain, Dumas rejoined the French army, with which he served in Spain during the campaign of 1808, and in Germany during that of 1809. After the battle of Wagram, Dumas was employed in negotiating the armistice. In 1810 he became grand officer of the Legion of Honour and a count of the empire. In the Russian campaign of 1812 he held the post of intendant-general of the army, which involved the charge of the administrative department. The privations he suffered in the retreat from Moscow brought on a dangerous illness. Resuming, on his recovery, his duties as intendant-general, he took part in the battles of 1813, and was made prisoner after the capitulation of Dresden. On the accession of Louis XVIII., Dumas rendered his new sovereign important services in connexion with the administration of the army. When Napoleon returned from Elba, Dumas at first kept himself in retirement, but he was persuaded by Joseph Bonaparte to present himself to the emperor, who employed him in organizing the National Guard. Obliged to retire when Louis XVIII. was restored, he devoted his leisure to the continuation of his Précis des événements militaires, of which nineteen volumes, embracing the history of the war from 1798 to the peace of 1807, appeared between 1817 and 1826. A growing weakness of sight, ending in blindness, prevented him from carrying the work further, but he translated Napier’s Peninsular War as a sort of continuation to it. In 1818 Dumas was restored to favour and admitted a member of the council of state, from which, however, he was excluded in 1822. After the revolution of 1830, in which he took an active part, Dumas was created a peer of France, and re-entered the council of state. He died at Paris on the 16th of October 1837.
Besides the Précis des événements militaires, which forms a valuable source for the history of the period, Dumas wrote Souvenirs du lieut.-général Comte Mathieu Dumas (published posthumously by his son, Paris, 1839).
DUMAS, JEAN BAPTISTE ANDRÉ (1800-1884), French chemist, was born at Alais (Gard) on the 15th of July 1800. Disappointed in his early hope of entering the navy, he became apprentice to an apothecary in his native town; but seeing little prospect of advancement in that calling, he soon moved to Geneva (in 1816). There he attended the lectures of such men as M.A. Pictet in physics, C.G. de la Rive in chemistry, and A.P. de Candolle in botany, and before he had reached his majority he was engaged with Pierre Prévost in original work on problems of physiological chemistry, and even of embryology. In 1823, acting on the advice of A. von Humboldt, he left Geneva for Paris, which he made his home for the rest of his life. There he gained the acquaintance of many of the foremost scientific men of the day, and quickly made a name for himself both as a teacher and an investigator, attaining within ten years the honour of membership of the Academy of Sciences. When approaching his fiftieth year he entered political life, and became a member of the National Legislative Assembly. He acted as minister of agriculture and commerce for a few months in 1850-1851, and subsequently became a senator, president of the municipal council of Paris, and master of the French mint; but his official career came to a sudden end with the fall of the Second Empire. He died at Cannes on the 11th of April 1884. Dumas is one of the most prominent figures in the chemical history of the middle part of the 19th century. He was one of the first to criticize the electro-chemical doctrines of J.J. Berzelius, which at the time his work began were widely accepted as the true theory of the constitution of compound bodies, and opposed a unitary view to the dualistic conception of the Swedish chemist. In a paper on the atomic theory, published so early as 1826, he anticipated to a remarkable extent some ideas which are frequently supposed to belong to a later period; and the continuation of these studies led him to the ideas about substitution (“metalepsis”) which were developed about 1839 into the theory (“Older Type Theory”) that in organic chemistry there are certain types which remain unchanged even when their hydrogen is replaced by an equivalent quantity of a haloid element. Many of his well-known researches were carried out in support of these views, one of the most important being that on the action of chlorine on acetic acid to form trichloracetic acid—a derivative of essentially the same character as the acetic acid itself. In the 1826 paper he described his famous method for ascertaining vapour densities, and the redeterminations which he undertook by its aid of the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen proved the forerunners of a long series which included some thirty of the elements, the results being mostly published in 1858-1860. He also devised a method of great value in the quantitative analysis of organic substances for the estimation of nitrogen, while the classification of organic compounds into homologous series was advanced as one consequence of his researches into the acids generated by the oxidation of the alcohols. Dumas was a prolific writer, and his numerous books, essays, memorial addresses, &c., show him to have been gifted with a clear and graceful style. His earliest large work was a treatise on applied chemistry in eight volumes, the first of which was published in 1828 and the last twenty years afterwards. In the Essai de statique chimique des êtres organisés (1841), written jointly with J.B.J.D. Boussingault (1802-1887), he treated the chemistry of life, both plant and animal; this book brought him into conflict with Liebig, who conceived that some of his prior work had been appropriated without due acknowledgment. In 1824, in conjunction with J.V. Audouin and A.T. Brongniart, he founded the Annales des sciences naturelles, and from 1840 he was one of the editors of the Annales de chimie et de physique. As a teacher Dumas was much sought after for his lectures at the Sorbonne and other institutions both on pure and applied science; and he was one of the first men in France to realize the importance of experimental laboratory teaching.
DU MAURIER, GEORGE LOUIS PALMELLA BUSSON (1834-1896), British artist and writer, was born in Paris. His father, a naturalized British subject, was the son of émigrés who had left France during the Reign of Terror and settled in London. In Peter Ibbetson, the first of the three books which won George Du Maurier late in life a reputation as novelist almost as great as he had enjoyed as artist and humorist for more than a generation, the author tells in the form of fiction the story of his singularly happy childhood. He was brought to London, indeed, when three or four years old, and spent in Devonshire Terrace and elsewhere two colourless years; but vague memories of this period were suddenly exchanged one beautiful day in June—“the first day of his conscious existence”—for the charming realities of a French garden and “an old yellow house with green shutters and mansard roofs of slate.” Here, at Passy, with his “gay and jovial father” and his young English mother, the boy spent “seven years of sweet priceless home-life—seven times four changing seasons of simple genial prae-Imperial Frenchness.” The second chapter of Du Maurier’s life had for scene a Paris school, very much in the style of that “Institution F. Brossard” which he describes, at once so vividly and so sympathetically, in The Martian; and like “Barty Josselin’s” schoolfellow and biographer, he left it (in 1851) to study chemistry at University College, London, actually setting up as an analytical chemist afterwards in Bucklersbury. But this was clearly not to be his métier, and the year 1856 found him once more in Paris, in the Quartier Latin this time, in the core of that art-world of which in Trilby, forty years later, he was to produce with pen and pencil so idealistic and fascinating a picture. Then, like “Barty Josselin” himself, he spent some years in Belgium and the Netherlands, experiencing at Antwerp in 1857, when he was working in the studio of van Lerius, the one great misfortune of his life—the gradual loss of sight in his left eye, accompanied by alarming symptoms in his right. It was a period of tragic anxiety, for it seemed possible that the right eye might also become affected; but this did not happen, and the dismal cloud was soon to show its silver lining, for, about Christmastime 1858, there came to the forlorn invalid a copy of Punch’s Almanac, and with it the dawn of a new era in his career.
There can be little doubt that the study of this Almanac, and especially of Leech’s drawings in it, fired him with the ambition of making his name as a graphic humorist; and it was not long after his return to London in 1860 that he sent in his first contribution (very much in Leech’s manner) to Punch. Mark Lemon, then editor, appreciated his talent, and on Leech’s death in 1865 appointed him his successor, counselling him with wise discrimination not to try to be “too funny,” but “to undertake the light and graceful business” and be the “romantic tenor” in Mr Punch’s little company, while Keene, as Du Maurier puts it, “with his magnificent highly-trained basso, sang the comic songs.” These respective rôles the two artists continued to play until the end, seldom trespassing on each other’s province; the “comic songs” finding their inspiration principally in the life of the homely middle and lower middle classes, while the “light and graceful business” enacted itself almost exclusively in “good Society.” To a great extent, also, Du Maurier had to leave outdoor life to Keene, his weak sight making it difficult for him to study and sketch in the open air and sunshine, thus cutting him off, as he records regretfully, from “so much that is so popular, delightful and exhilarating in English country life”—hunting and shooting and fishing and the like. He contrived, however, to give due attention to milder forms of outdoor recreation, and turned to good account his familiarity with Hampstead Heath and Rotten Row, and his holidays with his family at Whitby and Scarborough, Boulogne and Dieppe.