Scribe, and Hugo. Towards Scribe his attitude was one of admiration, mingled with a little good-natured tolerance—the smile of the gay grasshopper, as he watched the industrious ant toiling through a hot summer's day to get in his winter stock. The one had talent and amassed a fortune; the other had genius, made half a dozen fortunes, and died poor.
With the bulk of his fellow-writers Dumas was on excellent terms, and numbered amongst his friends Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Lafayette, George Sand, Rossini, Hugo, De Musset, Heine, Soulié, Béranger, Merimée, and Nodier. With Janin, it is true, he engaged in a wordy duel over "Les Demoiselles de St Cyr."[1] Mr Swinburne thinks that one of the poems in "Toute la Lyre" was addressed by Hugo to his two friends, suggesting reconciliation. We have seen that Dumas and Janin were on good terms again in 1849, and at the former's death the latter wrote a little "appreciation" of him, full of sincere affection and admiration.
We have mentioned Victor Hugo, and the friend. ship between these two men, so strangely unlike in character, played an important part in Dumas's
- ↑ The pair even met on the "field of honour." Janin would not fight with swords (so the story went) because he knew an infallible thrust; Dumas refused pistols because he could kill a fly at forty paces. So the foes embraced!
