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Dumas' Paris. Mansfield Milburg Francisco
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Автор произведения Mansfield Milburg Francisco
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Many stories are rife of Dumas the prodigal. Some doubtless are true, many are not. Those which he fathers himself, we might well accept as being true. Surely he himself should know.
The following incident which happened in the last days of his life certainly has the ring of truth about it.
When in his last illness he left Paris for his son’s country house near Dieppe, he had but twenty francs, the total fortune of the man who had earned millions.
On arriving at Puys, Dumas placed the coin on his bedroom chimneypiece, and there it remained all through his illness.
One day he was seated in his chair near the window, chatting with his son, when his eye fell on the gold piece.
A recollection of the past crossed his mind.
“Fifty years ago, when I went to Paris,” he said, “I had a louis. Why have people accused me of prodigality? I have always kept that louis. See – there it is.”
And he showed his son the coin, smiling feebly as he did so.
CHAPTER IV.
DUMAS’ CONTEMPORARIES
Among those of the world’s great names in literature contemporary with Dumas, but who knew Paris ere he first descended upon it to try his fortune in its arena of letters, were Lamartine, who already, in 1820, had charmed his public with his “Meditations;” Hugo, who could claim but twenty years himself, but who had already sung his “Odes et Ballades,” and Chateaubriand.
Soulié and De Vigny won their fame with poems and plays in the early twenties, De Musset and Chénier followed before a decade had passed, and Gautier was still serving his apprenticeship.
It was the proud Goethe who said of these young men of the twenties, “They all come from Chateaubriand.” Béranger, too, “the little man,” even though he was drawing on toward the prime of life, was also singing melodiously: it was his chansons, it is said, that upset the Bourbon throne and made way for the “citizen-king.” Nodier, of fanciful and fantastic rhyme, was already at work, and Mérimée had not yet taken up the administrative duties of overseeing the preserving process which at his instigation was, at the hands of a paternal government, being applied to the historical architectural monuments throughout France; a glory which it is to be feared has never been wholly granted to Mérimée, as was his due.
Guizot, the bête noire of the later Louis-Philippe, was actively writing from 1825 to 1830, and his antagonist, Thiers, was at the same period producing what Carlyle called the “voluminous and untrustworthy labours of a brisk little man in his way;” which recalls to mind the fact that Carlylean rant – like most of his prose – is a well-nigh insufferable thing.
At this time Mignet, the historian, was hard at work, and St. Beauve had just deserted materia medica for literature. Michelet’s juvenile histories were a production of the time, while poor, unhonoured, and then unsung, Balzac was grinding out his pittance – in after years to grow into a monumental literary legacy – in a garret.
Eugène Sue had not yet taken to literary pathways, and was scouring the seas as a naval surgeon.
The drama was prolific in names which we have since known as masters, Scribe, Halévy, and others.
George Sand, too, was just beginning that grand literary life which opened with “Indiana” in 1832, and lasted until 1876. She, like so many of the great, whose name and fame, like Dumas’ own, has been perpetuated by a monument in stone, the statue which was unveiled in the little town of her birth on the Indre, La Châtre, in 1903.
Like Dumas, too, hers was a cyclopean industry, and so it followed that in the present twentieth century (in the year 1904), another and a more glorious memorial to France’s greatest woman writer was unveiled in the Garden of the Luxembourg.
Among the women famous in the monde of Paris at the time of Dumas’ arrival were Mesdames Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu, and Delphine Gay.
“For more than half a century this brilliant group of men and women sustained the world of ideas and poetry,” said Dumas, in his “Mémoires,” “and I, too,” he continued, “have reached the same plane … unaided by intrigue or coterie, and using none other than my own work as the stepping-stone in my pathway.”
Dumas cannot be said to have been niggardly with his praise of the work of others. He said of a sonnet of Arnault’s – “La Feuille” – that it was a masterpiece which an André Chénier, a Lamartine, or a Hugo might have envied, and that for himself, not knowing what his “literary brothers” might have done, he would have given for it “any one of his dramas.”
It was into the office of Arnault, who was chief of a department in the Université, that Béranger took up his labours as a copying-clerk, – as did Dumas in later years, – and it was while here that Béranger produced his first ballad, the “Roi d’Yvetot.”
In 1851 Millet was at his height, if one considers what he had already achieved by his “great agrarian poems,” as they have been called. Gautier called them “Georgics in paint,” and such they undoubtedly were. Millet would hardly be called a Parisian; he was not of the life of the city, but rather of that of the countryside, by his having settled down at Barbizon in 1849, and practically never left it except to go to Paris on business.
His life has been referred to as one of “sublime monotony,” but it was hardly that. It was a life devoted to the telling of a splendid story, that of the land as contrasted with that of the paved city streets.
Corot was a real Parisian, and it was only in his early life in the provinces that he felt the bitterness of life and longed for the flagstones of the quais, for the Tuileries, the Seine, and his beloved Rue de Bac, where he was born on 10th Thermidor, Year IV. (July 28, 1796). Corot early took to painting the scenes of the metropolis, as we learn from his biography, notably at the point along the river bank where the London steamer moors to-day. But these have disappeared; few or none of his juvenile efforts have come down to us.
Corot returned to Paris, after many years spent in Rome, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, when affairs were beginning to stir themselves in literature and art. In 1839 his “Site d’Italie” and a “Soir” were shown at the annual Salon, – though, of course, he had already been an exhibitor there, – and inspired a sonnet of Théophile Gautier, which concludes:
“Corot, ton nom modest, écrit dans un coin noir.”
Corot’s pictures were unfortunately hung in the darkest corners – for fifteen years. As he himself has said, it was as if he were in the catacombs. In 1855 Corot figured as one of the thirty-four judges appointed by Napoleon III. to make the awards for paintings exhibited in the world’s first Universal Exhibition. It is not remarked that Corot had any acquaintance or friendships with Dumas or with Victor Hugo, of whom he remarked, “This Victor Hugo seems to be pretty famous in literature.” He knew little of his contemporaries, and the hurly-burly knew less of him. He was devoted, however, to the genius of his superiors – as he doubtless thought them. Of Delacroix he said one day, “He is an eagle, and I am only a lark singing little songs in gray clouds.”
A literary event of prime importance during the latter years of Dumas’ life in Paris, when his own purse was growing thin, was the publication of the “Histoire de Jules César,” written by Napoleon III.
Nobody ever seems to have taken the second emperor seriously in any of his finer expressions of sentiment, and, as may be supposed, the publication of this immortal literary effort was the occasion of much sarcasm, banter, violent philippic, and sardonic criticism.
Possibly the world was not waiting for this work, but royalty, no less than other great men, have their hobbies and their fads; Nero fiddled, and the first Napoleon read novels and threw them forthwith out of the carriage window, so it was quite permissible that Napoleon III. should