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Dumas' Paris. Mansfield Milburg Francisco
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Автор произведения Mansfield Milburg Francisco
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In 1844 Dumas participated in a sort of personally-conducted Bonapartist tour to the Mediterranean, in company with the son of Jerome Napoleon. On this journey Dumas first saw the island of Monte Cristo and the Château d’If, which lived so fervently in his memory that he decided that their personality should be incorporated in the famous tale which was already formulating itself in his brain.
Again, this time in company with the Duc de Montpensier, he journeyed to the Mediterranean, “did” Spain, and crossed over to Algiers. When he returned he brought back the celebrated vulture, “Jugurtha,” whose fame was afterward perpetuated in “Mes Bêtes.”
That there was a deal of reality in the characterization and the locale of Dumas’ romances will not be denied by any who have acquaintance therewith. Dumas unquestionably took his material where he found it, and his wonderfully retentive memory, his vast capacity for work, and his wide experience and extensive acquaintance provided him material that many another would have lacked.
M. de Chaffault tells of his having accompanied Dumas by road from Sens to Joigny, Dumas being about to appeal to the republican constituency of that place for their support of him as a candidate for the parliamentary elections.
“In a short time we were on the road,” said the narrator, “and the first stage of three hours seemed to me only as many minutes. Whenever we passed a country-seat, out came a lot of anecdotes and legends connected with its owners, interlarded with quaint fancies and epigrams.”
Aside from the descriptions of the country around about Crépy, Compiègne, and Villers-Cotterets which he wove into the Valois tales, “The Taking of the Bastille,” and “The Wolf-Leader,” there is a strong note of personality in “Georges;” some have called it autobiography.
The tale opens in the far-distant Isle of France, called since the English occupation Mauritius, and in the narrative of the half-caste Georges Munier are supposed to be reflected many of the personal incidents of the life of the author.
This story may or may not be a mere repetition of certain of the incidents of the struggle of the mulatto against the barrier of the white aristocracy, and may have been an echo in Dumas’ own life. It is repeated it may have been this, or it may have been much more. Certain it is, there is an underlying motive which could only have been realized to the full extent expressed therein by one who knew and felt the pangs of the encounter with a world which only could come to one of genius who was by reason of race or creed outclassed by his contemporaries; and therein is given the most vivid expression of the rise of one who had everything against him at the start.
This was not wholly true of Dumas himself, to be sure, as he was endowed with certain influential friends. Still it was mainly through his own efforts that he was able to prevail upon the old associates and friends of the dashing General Dumas, his father, to give him his first lift along the rough and stony literary pathway.
In this book there is a curious interweaving of the life and colour which may have had not a little to do with the actual life which obtained with respect to his ancestors, and as such, and the various descriptions of negro and Creole life, the story becomes at once a document of prime interest and importance.
Since Dumas himself has explained and justified the circumstance out of which grew the conception of the D’Artagnan romances, it is perhaps advisable that some account should be given of the original D’Artagnan.
Primarily, the interest in Dumas’ romance of “Les Trois Mousquetaires” is as great, if not greater, with respect to the characters as it is with the scenes in which they lived and acted their strenuous parts. In addition, there is the profound satisfaction of knowing that the rollicking and gallant swashbuckler has come down to us from the pages of real life, as Dumas himself recounts in the preface to the Colman Lévy edition of the book. The statement of Dumas is explicit enough; there is no mistaking his words which open the preface:
The contemporary facts which connect the real Comte d’Artagnan with romances are as follows:
Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Comte d’Artagnan, received his title from the little village of Artagnan, near the Gascon town of Orthez in the present department of the Hautes-Pyrénées. He was born in 1623. Dumas, with an author’s license, made his chief figure a dozen years older, for the real D’Artagnan was but five years old at the time of the siege of La Rochelle of which Dumas makes mention. On the whole, the romance is near enough to reality to form an ample endorsement of the author’s verity.
The real D’Artagnan made his way to Paris, as did he of the romance. Here he met his fellow Béarnais, one M. de Treville, captain of the king’s musketeers, and the illustrious individuals, Armand de Sillegue d’Athos, a Béarnais nobleman who died in 1645, and whose direct descendant, Colonel de Sillegue, commanded, according to the French army lists of a recent date, a regiment of French cavalry; Henry d’Aramitz, lay abbé of Oloron; and Jean de Portu, all of them probably neighbours in D’Artagnan’s old home.
D’Artagnan could not then have been at the siege of La Rochelle, but from the “Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan,” of which Dumas writes in his preface, we learn of his feats at arms at Arras, Valenciennes, Douai, and Lille, all places where once and again Dumas placed the action of the novels.
The real D’Artagnan died, sword in hand, “in the imminent deadly breach” at Maestricht, in 1673. He served, too, under Prince Rupert in the Civil War, and frequently visited England, where he had an affaire with a certain Milady, which is again reminiscent of the pages of Dumas.
This D’Artagnan in the flesh married Charlotte Anne de Chanlecy, and the last of his direct descendants died in Paris in the latter years of the eighteenth century, but collateral branches of the family appear still to exist in Gascony, and there was a certain Baron de Batz, a Béarnais, who made a daring attempt to save Marie Antoinette in 1793.
The inception of the whole work in Dumas’ mind, as he says, came to him while he was making research in the “Bibliothèque Royale” for his history of Louis XIV.
Thus from these beginnings grew up that series of romances which gave undying fame to Alexandre Dumas, and to the world of readers a series of characters and scenes associated with the mediæval history of France, which, before or since, have not been equalled.
Alexandre Dumas has been described as something of the soldier, the cook, and the traveller, more of the journalist, diplomatist, and poet, and, more than all else, the dramatist, romancer, and raconteur. He himself has said that he was a “veritable Wandering Jew of literature.”
His versatility in no way comprised his abilities, and, while conceit and egoism played a not unimportant share in his make-up, his affability – when he so chose – caused him to be ranked highly in the estimation of his equals and contemporaries. By the cur-dogs, which always snap at the heels of a more splendid animal, he was not ranked so high.
Certain of these were for ever twitting him publicly of his creed, race, and foibles. It is recorded by Theodore de Bauville, in his “Odes,” that one Jacquot hailed Dumas in the open street with a ribald jeer, when, calmly turning to his detractor, Dumas said, simply: “Hast thou dined to-day, Jacquot?” Then it was that this said Jacquot published the slanderous brochure, “La Maison Dumas et Cie,” which has gone down as something considerable of a sensation in the annals of literary history; so much so, indeed, that most writers who have had occasion to refer to Dumas’ literary career have apparently half-believed its accusations, which, truth to tell, may have had some bearing on “things as they were,” had they but been put forward as a bit of temperate criticism rather than as a sweeping condemnation.
To give the reader an idea of the Dumas of 1840, one can scarcely do better than present his portrait as sketched by De Villemessant, the founder and brilliant editor of the Figaro, when Dumas was at the height of his glory, and a