Part 7

Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, from the inn in Rue du Bouloi to another of the same sort just around the corner, Hôtel des Vieux-Augustins, in the street of the same name--now widened and renamed Rue Hérold. In the widening they have cut away his inn, at present No. 12, and that of "_La Providence_," next door at No. 14, where Charlotte Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of the two hotels are covered by the rear buildings of the Caisse d'Epargne, which fronts on Rue du Louvre. One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was born, on January 28, 1791, the musician Hérold, composer of "Zampa" and "Pré-aux-Clercs." Dumas lived for a while later at No. 1 Place des Italiens, now Place Boïeldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought his good mother to town, and took rooms on the second floor of No. 53 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, next door to the old _cabaret_, "_Au Lion d'Argent_." Mother and son soon after moved across the river, where he found for her a home in Rue Madame, and found for himself an apartment at No. 25 Rue de l'Université, on the southeastern corner of Rue du Bac. There had been an illustrious tenant of this house, in 1816 and 1817, who was named Châteaubriand. Dumas, in his "Mémoires," gives both the third and the fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to feel like fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and he fitted up the rooms "with a certain elegance." Shoppers at the big establishment, "_Au petit Saint-Thomas_," may explore its annex and mount to Dumas's rooms in the house that now hides its stately façade and its entrance _perron_ in the court behind modern structures. Here he remained from 1824 to 1833, making a longer stay than in any of the many camping-places of his migratory career. And here he gave his name to his most memorable endowment to the French drama, in the person of his only son, born on July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother, Marie-Catherine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. 1 Place des Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 17, 1831, the father formally owned the son by _l'acte de reconnaissance_, signed and recorded at the office of the mayor of the Second Arrondissement, May 6, 1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Dumas, _fils_."

Portions of the child's early life were passed with his father, but separations became more frequent and more prolonged, as the boy developed his own marked character--in striking contrast with that of the elder. Their mutual attitude came, before many years, to be as queer and as tragi-comic as any attitudes invented by either of them for the stage. The son used to say, in later life, that he seemed to be the elderly guardian and counsellor of the father--a happy-go-lucky, improvident, chance child. For the son of the Parisienne had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his father's dramatic range, and this happy commingling of the stronger qualities of the parents gave him his special powers.

The doings of the elder Dumas during the famous three days of July, 1830, would make an amusing chapter. Eager to play the part of his own boisterous heroes, he flung himself, with hot-headed and bombastic ardor, into throne-upsetting and throne-setting-up. Of course he allied himself with the opponents of Louis-Philippe--possibly in keen memory of his monthly hundred francs worth of drudgery--and of course the success of the Orleanists left him with no further chance for place or patronage.

So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved itself to be no broken reed, but a strong staff for support. Strong as it was and unresting, no one pen could do even the manual labor required by the endless volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having finished "Monte-Cristo," he followed it by "The Three Musketeers," and then he put out no less than forty volumes in that same year; each volume bearing his name as sole author. But this sturdy and undaunted toiler was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he was surrounded by clerks for research, secretaries for writing, young and unknown authors for collaborating; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling touches that give warmth and color to the canvas signed by him. His "victims," as they are described in the "Fabrique de Romans, Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie," a malicious exposure, are hardly subjects for sympathy; they earned money not otherwise within their power to earn, and not one of them produced, before or after, any work of individual distinction. In his historical romances, their work is evident in the study and research that give an accuracy not commonly credited to Dumas and about which he never bothered. The _belle insouciance_ of his touch is to be seen in the dash of the narrative, and above all in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he was paid by the line at a royal rate, and he learned the trick of making his lines too short and his dialogues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as he went on, it must be owned that he used his name in unworthy ways, not only for books of no value and for journalistic paltriness, but for shameless signature to shopkeepers' puffs, composed for coin.

As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and poured out again as freely. For he was a spendthrift of the old _régime_, spending not only for his own caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and hangers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such as building his own theatre and running it; and he squandered fabulous sums in his desire to make real, at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for Monte-Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until his favorite servant, under pretence of fear of the unlucky number thirteen, to which they had come, begged to be allowed to send some of them away. He gave up his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas ordered him to find a fourteenth dog! He would have drained dry a king's treasury, and have bankrupted Monte-Cristo's island of buried millions. Yet with all his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous tomfoolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a manly joy in giving, that disarm stingy censure. The lover of the romancer must mourn for the man, growing poorer as he grew older, and must regret the degrading shifts at which he snatched for money, by which he sank to be a mountebank in his declining years. Toward the last his purse held fewer _sous_ than it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them.

From his eight years' home in Rue de l'Université, Dumas crossed the Seine, preferring always thereafter the flashily fashionable quarters of the northern side; and none of his numerous dwellings henceforward are worth visiting for their character or color. For nearly two years he lived in a great mansion, No. 40 Rue Saint-Lazare, in other rooms of which George Sand lived a little later. His next home, from 1835 to 1837, at 30 Rue Bleue, has been cut away by Rue Lafayette. From 1838 to 1843 he had an apartment, occasionally shared by his son, at No. 22 Rue de Rivoli, between Place des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Roch.

Twenty-five years after the death of the father, when the son, as he says, was older and grayer than his father had ever grown to be, a letter to him was written by that son. It is an exquisite piece of literature. He brings back their life in this apartment, when, twenty-two years apart in their birth, they were really of the same age. He tells how he, a young man going early to his studies, left the elder at his desk, already at work at seven in the morning, clad only in trousers and shirt, the latter with open neck and rolled-up sleeves. At seven in the evening his son would find him planted there still at work, his mid-day breakfast often cold at his side, forgotten and untouched! Then these two would dine, and dine well, for the father loved to play the cook, and he was a master of that craft. All the while he was preparing the _plats_ he would prattle of his heroes, what they'd done that day, and what he imagined they might do on the next day. And then the letter calls back to the father that evening, a little later, when he was found by his son sunk in an armchair, red-eyed and wretched, and mournfully explained: "Porthos is dead! I've just killed him, and I couldn't help crying over him!" It must have been at this period that the romancer tried to secure his son as his permanent paid critic, offering him 25,000 francs a year, and "you'll have nothing to do but to make objections." The offer was declined, and rightly declined.

It was in this and in his succeeding residences--Rue de Richelieu, 109, in 1844, and Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 45, in 1845--that he brought out in newspaper _feuilletons_ "The Count of Monte-Cristo," and "The Three Musketeers," these amazing successes written from day to day to keep pace with the press. In 1846, while his address was at No. 10 Rue Joubert, he was in Spain with the Duc de Montpensier, one of his many companions among princes. They, along with other cronies, male and female, more or less worthy, found Dumas at Saint-Germain from 1847 to 1854. Then, suddenly, he disappeared into Belgium, "for reasons not wholly unconnected with financial reverses," as he and his only peer in fiction, Micawber, would have put it. He was in town again in 1856, at No. 77 Rue d'Amsterdam, and there remained until 1866, when he rushed off to the head-quarters of the "Dictator of Sicily," Garibaldi, to whom Dumas appointed himself aide and messenger. Between 1866 and 1870 his residence was at 107 Boulevard Malesherbes. On the coming of the Prussians, he was carried, ailing and feeble, to his country-place at Puys, near Dieppe, where he died December 5, 1870. His public burial was delayed until the close of the war, and then, in 1872, was solemnized in the presence of all that was notable in French art and literature, at his birthplace and his boyhood-home, Villers-Cotterets.

When Dumas was asked how a monument might be erected in memory of a dead pen-worker, who in life had been misunderstood and maligned, he replied: "Use the stones thrown at him while he lived, and you'll have a tremendous monument." The lovers in all lands of the great romancer could well have brought together more telling stones than those that make Doré's monument in Place Malesherbes, near his last Paris home. And yet, curiously weak in its general impression, its details are effective. The group in front is well imagined: a girl is reading to a young student, and to an old, barefooted workman; on the other side is our hero d'Artagnan. The seated statue of Dumas, on too tall a pedestal, is an admirable portrait, with his own vigorous poise of head and gallant regard.

In 1864 the American Minister to France, Mr. John Bigelow, breakfasted with Dumas at Saint-Gratien, near Paris, where the romancer was temporarily sojourning. It was toward the close of our Civil War, and he had a notion of going to the United States as war-correspondent for French papers, and to make another book, of course. Mr. Bigelow gives an accurate and admirable description of the host, as he greeted him at the entrance of his villa; over six feet in height, corpulent, but well proportioned; a brown skin, a head low and narrow in front, enlarging as it receded, covered with crisp, bushy hair growing gray, thick lips, a large mouth, and enormous neck. Partly African and wholly stalwart, from his negress grandmother, he would have been a handsome creature but for his rapidly retreating forehead. But in his features and his expression nothing showed that was sordid or selfish, and his smile was very sweet.

[Illustration: Alexandre Dumas.]

Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love strength and daring, loyalty and generosity, good love-making and good fighting. He has put his own tenderness and frankness and vivacity into the real personages, whom he has reanimated and refined; and into the ideal personages, whom he has made as real as the actual historic men and women who throng his thrilling pages. His own virility and lust of life are there, too, without one prurient page in all his thousands. And he tells his delightful stories not only with charm and wit, but in clean-cut, straightforward words, with no making of phrases.

Very little of the Valois Paris is left to-day, and the searcher for the scenery familiar to Margot and to Chicot must be content with what is left of the Old Louvre, and of the then new Renaissance Louvre as it was known to the grandchildren of its builder, François I. Of the old, the outer walls and the great central tower are outlined by light stones in the darker pavement of the southwest corner of the present court. Of the new structure, as we see it, the cold and cheerless Salle des Caryatides lights up unwillingly to us with the brilliancy of the marriage festival of Marguerite de France and Henri de Navarre, as it is pictured by Dumas. This festivity followed the religious ceremony, that had taken place under the grand portal of Notre-Dame, for Henry's heresy forbade his marriage within. He and his _suite_ strolled about the cloisters while she went in to mass. In this hall of the Caryatides his body, in customary effigy, lay in state after the assassination. There is no change in these walls since that day, except that a vaulted ceiling took the place, in 1806, of the original oaken beams, which had served for rare hangings, not of tapestries, but of men. The long corridors and square rooms above, peopled peaceably by pictures now, echoed to the rushing of frightened feet on the night of Saint Bartholomew, when Margot saved the life of her husband that was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden within the massive walls of Philippe-Auguste's building is a spiral stairway of his time, connecting the Salle des Sept Cheminées with the floor below, and beneath that with the cumbrous underground portions of his Old Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around the sharp turns deep below the surface, visions appear of Valois conspiracy and of the intrigues of the Florentine Queen-Mother.

Here the wily creature had triumphed at last after waiting through weary years of humiliated wifehood; passed, such of them as Henri II. was willing to waste in Paris far from his beloved Touraine, in the old Palais des Tournelles. We shall visit, in another chapter, that residence of the early kings of France, when they had become kings of France in more than name.

After the accidental killing of Henry at the hand of Montmorency in the lists of this palace, his widow urged its immediate destruction, and this was accomplished within a few years. One portion of the site became a favorite duelling-ground, and it was here--exactly in the southeastern corner of Place des Vosges, where now nursemaids play with their charges and romping schoolboys raise the dust--that was fought, on Sunday, April 27, 1578, the duel, as famous in history as in the pages of Dumas, between the three followers of the Duc de Guise and the three _mignons_ of Henri III. Those of the six who were not left dead on the ground were borne away desperately wounded. The instigator of the duel, Quélus--"_un des grands mignons du roy_"--lay for over a month, slowly dying of his nineteen wounds, in the Hôtel de Boissy, hard by in Rue Saint-Antoine, which the King had had closed to traffic with chains. By his bedside Henri spent many hours every day, offering, with sobs, 100,000 francs to the surgeon who should save him.

Not far from this house of death, in Rue Saint-Antoine too, was a little house, very much alive, for it belonged to Marguerite--Navarre only in name--to which none may follow her save the favored one to whom her latest caprice has given a nocturnal meeting. She is carried there, under cover of her closed litter, whenever her mother, never her husband, shows undue solicitude concerning her erratic career.

In the same street, on the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine, now Sévigné--where stand new stone and brick structures--was the town house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantôme, Bussy d'Amboise, done with Margot, was lured by a note written by the countess, under her husband's orders and eyes, giving her lover, Bussy, his usual _rendezvous_ during the count's absence. _This_ time the count was at home, with a gang of his armed men; and on this corner, on the night of August 19, 1579, the gallant was duly and thoroughly done to death, not quite so dramatically as Dumas narrates it in one of his magnificent fights.

This Rue Saint-Antoine was, in those days, hardly less of a bustling thoroughfare than in our days, albeit it was then a country road, unpaved, unlighted, bordered by great gardens with great mansions within them, or small dwellings between them. Outside Porte Saint-Antoine--that gate in the town wall alongside the Bastille where now is the end of Rue de la Bastille--on the road to Vincennes, was La Roquette, a _maison-de-plaisance_ of the Valois kings. Hence the title of the modern prisons, on the same site. It was a favorite resort of the wretched third Henry, that shameless compound of sensuality and superstition; and it was on his way there, at the end of Rue de la Roquette, that the vicious little lame Duchesse de Montpensier had plotted to waylay him, and to cut his hair down to a tonsure with the gold scissors she carried so long at her girdle for that very use. He had had two crowns, she said--of Poland and of France--and she meant to give him a third, and make a monk of him, for the sake of her scheming brother, the Duc de Guise. The plot was betrayed, just as Dumas details, by one Nicolas Poulain, a lieutenant of the Prévôt of the Île de France, in the service of the League.

Gorenflot's priory--a vast Jacobin priory--was on the same road, just beyond the Bastille. To visit him out here came Chicot, almost as vivid a creation in our affections as d'Artagnan. Once, when the fat and esurient monk was fasting, Chicot tormented him with a description of their dinner awhile ago, near Porte Montmartre, when they had teal from the marshes of the Grange Batelière--where runs now the street of that name--washed down with the best of Burgundy, _la Romanée_. These two dined most frequently and most amply, at "_La Corne d'Abondance_"--a _cabaret_ on the east side of Rue Saint-Jacques, opposite the cloisters and the gardens of Saint-Benoît, where the boy François Villon had lived more than a century before. Either of the two shabby, aged hotels, still left at one corner of the old street may serve for Chicot's pet eating-place. His dwelling was in Rue des Augustins, now Rue des Grands-Augustins. Where that street meets the quay of the same name, is a restaurant dear to legal and medical and lay _gourmets_, where those two noble diners would be enchanted to dine to-day. Near Chicot's later dwelling in Rue de Bussy--now spelt "Buci"--was the inn, "The Sword of the Brave Chevalier," which served as the meeting-place of the Forty-five Guardsmen, on their arrival in Paris. You may find, in that same street, the lineal descendant of that inn, dirty and disreputable and modernized as to name, but still haunted for us by those forty-five gallant Gascon gentlemen.

The striking change of atmosphere, from the Valois court to the regency of Marie de' Medici and the reign of the two great cardinals, is shown clearly in the pages of Dumas, with his perhaps unconscious subtlety of intuition. We greet with delight the entrance into Paris of a certain raw Gascon youth mounted on his ludicrously colored steed, and we are eager to follow him to the _hôtel_ of the Duc de Tréville in Rue du Vieux-Colombier. This street stretches now, as then, between Place de Saint-Sulpice and Place de la Croix-Rouge, but it has been widened and wholly rebuilt, and the courtyard that bustled with armed men, and every stone of de Tréville's head-quarters, have vanished.

The _hôtel_ of his temporary enemy, Duc de La Trémouille, always full of Huguenots, the King complained, was in Rue Saint-Dominique, at No. 63, in that eastern end cut away by Boulevard Saint-Germain. This had been the Trémouille mansion for only about a century, since the original family home had been given over to Chancellor Dubourg. Built by the founder of the family, Gui de La Trémoille--as it was then spelt--the great fighter who died in 1398, that superb specimen of fourteenth-century architecture, with additions late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth centuries, stood at the corner of Rues des Bourdonnais and de Béthisy--two of the oldest streets on the north bank--until the piercing of Rue de Rivoli in 1844 compelled its destruction. Fragments of its fine Gothic carvings are set in the wall of the court of No. 31 Rue des Bourdonnais, a building which occupies a portion of the original site. On the front of this house is an admirable iron balcony of later date. And just above, at No. 39 of this street, over the entrance gate of the remaining wing of another mediæval mansion, is a superbly carved stone mask of an old man with a once gilded beard.

It was the new Hôtel La Trémouille, on the south side of the river, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, that was nearly wrecked by de Tréville's guardsmen, running to the rescue of d'Artagnan on that morning of his duel with Bernajoux, and of his danger from the onslaught of de La Trémouille's retainers.