Smithson (afterwards Mme Berlioz) and an English company that the romantic drama of Christine was written. The subject was suggested by a bas relief of the murder of Monaldeschi exhibited at the Salon of 1827. The piece was accepted by Baron Taylor and the members of the Comédie Française with the stipulation that it should be subject to revision by another dramatist because of its innovating tendencies. But the production of the piece was deferred. Meanwhile Dumas had met with the story of the ill-fated Saint-Mégrin and the duchess of Guise in Anquetil’s history, and had written, in prose, Henri III. et sa cour, which was immediately accepted by the Comédie Française and produced on the 11th of February 1829. It was the first great triumph of the romantic drama. The brilliant stagecraft of the piece and its admirable historical setting delighted an audience accustomed to the decadent classical tragedy, and brought him the friendship of Hugo[1] and Vigny. His literary efforts had met with marked disapproval from his official superiors, and he had been compelled to resign his clerkship before the production of Henri III. The duke of Orleans had, however, been present at the performance, and appointed him assistant-librarian at the Palais Royal. Christine was now recast as a romantic trilogy in verse in five acts with a prologue and epilogue, with the sub-title of Stockholm, Fontainebleau, Rome, and was successfully produced by Harel at the Odéon in March 1830.
The revolution of 1830 temporarily diverted Dumas from letters. The account of his exploits should be read in his Mémoires, where, though the incidents are true in the main, they lose nothing in the telling. During the fighting in Paris he attracted the attention of La Fayette, who sent him to Soissons to secure powder. With the help of some inhabitants he compelled the governor to hand over the magazine, and on his return to Paris was sent by La Fayette on a mission to raise a national guard in La Vendée. The advice he gave to Louis Philippe on this subject was ill-received, and after giving offence by further indiscretions he finally alienated himself from the Orleans government by being implicated in the disturbances which attended the funeral of General Lamarque in June 1832, and he received a hint that his absence from France was desirable. A tour in Switzerland undertaken on this account furnished material for the first of a long series of amusing books of travel. Dumas remained, however, on friendly and even affectionate terms with the young duke of Orleans until his death in 1842.
Meanwhile he had produced Napoléon Bonaparte (Odéon, 10th of Jan 1831), his unwillingness to make a hero of the man who had slighted his father having been overcome by Harel, who put him under lock and key until the piece was finished. His next play, Antony, had a real importance in the history of the romantic theatre. It was put in rehearsal by Mlle Mars, but so unsatisfactorily that Dumas transferred it to Bocage and Mme Dorval, who played it magnificently at the Porte Saint-Martin theatre on the 3rd of May 1831. The Byronic hero Antony was a portrait of himself in his relations with Mme Mélanie Waldor, the wife of an officer, and daughter of the journalist M. G. T. de Villenave, except of course in the extravagantly melodramatic dénouement, when Antony, to save his mistress’s honour, kills her and exclaims, “Elle me résistait, je l’ai assassinée.” He produced more than twenty more plays alone or in collaboration before 1845, exclusive of dramatizations from his novels. Richard Darlington (Porte Saint Martin, 10th of Dec 1831), the first idea of which was drawn from Sir Walter Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate, owed part of its great success to the admirable acting of Frédérick Lemaître. La Tour de Nesle (Porte Saint-Martin, 29th of May 1832), announced as by MM. × × × and Gaillardet, was the occasion of a duel and a law-suit with the original author, Frédéric Gaillardet, whose MS. had been revised, first by Jules Janin and then by Dumas. In rapidity of movement, and in the terror it inspired, the piece surpassed Henri III. and Antony. A lighter drama, Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (Théâtre Français, 2nd of April 1839), still remains in the repertory.
In 1840 Dumas married Ida Ferrier, an actress whom he had imposed on the theatres that took his pieces. The amiable relations which had subsisted between them for eight years were disturbed by the marriage, which is said to have been undertaken in consequence of a strong hint from the duke of Orleans, and Mme Dumas lived in Italy separated from her husband.
As a novelist Dumas began by writing short stories, but his happy collaboration with Auguste Maquet,[2] which began in 1839, led to the admirable series of historical novels in which he proposed to reconstruct the whole course of French history. In 1844 he produced, with Maquet’s help, that most famous of “cloak and sword” romances, Les Trois Mousquetaires (8 vols.), the material for which was discovered in the Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan (Cologne, 1701–1702) of Courtils de Sandras. The adventures of d’Artagnan and the three musketeers, the gigantic Porthos, the clever Aramis, and the melancholy Athos, who unite to defend the honour of Anne of Austria against Richelieu and the machinations of “Milady,” are brought down to the murder of Buckingham in 1629. Their admirers were gratified by two sequels, Vingt ans après (10 vols., 1845) and Dix ans plus tard, ou le vicomte de Bragelonne (26 pts., 1848–1850), which opens in 1660, showing us a mature d’Artagnan, a respectable captain of musketeers, and contains the magnificent account of the heroic death of Porthos. The three musketeers are as famous in England as in France. Thackeray could read about Athos from sunrise to sunset with the utmost contentment of mind, and R. L. Stevenson and Andrew Lang have paid tribute to the band in Memories and Portraits and Letters to Dead Authors. Before 1844 was out Dumas had completed a second great romance in 12 volumes, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, in which he had help from Fiorentino as well as from Maquet. The idea of the intrigue was suggested by Peuchet’s Police dévoilée, and the stress laid on the earlier incidents, Dantès, Danglars and the Château d’If, is said to have been an afterthought. Almost as famous as these two romances is the set of Valois novels of which Henri IV. is the central figure, beginning with La Reine Margot (6 vols., 1845), which contains the history of the struggle between Catherine of Medicis and Henry of Navarre; the history of the reign of Henry III. is told in La Dame de Monsoreau (8 vols., 1846), generally known in English as Chicot the Jester, from its principal character; and in Les Quarante-cinq (10 vols., 1847–1848), in which Diane de Monsoreau avenges herself on the duke of Anjou for the death of her former lover, Bussy d’Amboise.
Much has been written about the exact share which Dumas had in the novels which bear his name. The Dumas-Maquet series is undoubtedly the best, but Maquet alone never accomplished anything to approach them in value. The MSS. of the novels still exist in Dumas’s handwriting, and the best of them bear the unmistakable stamp of his unrivalled skill as a narrator. The chief key to his enormous output is to be found in his untiring industry and amazing fertility of invention, not in the system of wholesale collaboration which was exposed with much exaggeration by Quérard in his Superchéries littéraires and by “Eugène de Mirecourt” (C. B. J. Jacquot) in his misleading Fabrique de romans, maison Alexandre Dumas et cie (1845). His assistants, in fact, supplied him with outlines of romances on plans drawn up by himself, and he then rewrote the whole thing. That this method was never abused it would be impossible to say; Les Deux Diane, for instance, a prelude to the Valois novels, is said to have been written entirely by Paul Meurice, although Dumas’s name appears on the title-page.
The latter part of Dumas’s life is a record of excessive toil to meet prodigal expenditure and accumulated debts. His disasters began with the building of a house in the Renaissance style, with a Gothic pavilion and an “English” park, at Saint Germain-
- ↑ His friendship with Victor Hugo was interrupted in 1833–1834 by the articles contributed to the Journal des débats by a friend and protégé of the poet, Granier de Cassagnac, who brought against Dumas charges of wholesale plagiarism from other dramatists.
- ↑ The details of this collaboration were brought to light in a suit brought against Dumas by Maquet with regard to his share in the profits. See the Gazette des tribunaux (January 21, 22, 28, and February 4, 1858).
