HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE

1870-1900

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BOOK I 1870-1873

BOOK II 1873-1875

BOOK III (1875-1877)

BOOK IV 1877-1890

 

The men of the Third Republic:

M. ALEXANDRE DUMAS

(1825-1894).

ABOUT five-and-thirty years ago there began to be seen in the house of that famous spendthrift of money and genius, called Alexandre Dumas, a boy who now describes himself as having been vivacious and playful, but whom his contemporaries state to have been a reserved lad—proud, and precociously sharp at retorting whenever his vanity was hurt. He was ten years old, and came home from his school on Sundays and holidays to be shaken hands with by his father, and then left to fill up his time as he pleased, or as he could. The house was full of literary toadies, Bohemians and impecunious artists. These formed the great Dumas' court, burned incense under his face, ate his dinners, borrowed his money, and forgot to repay it ; and passed his boy about from hand to hand as an artistic curiosity that was to be admired, or as a pet-dog that was to be spoilt.

No youth, as the author of La Dame aux Camelias has since acknowledged, could have been worse brought up. At school, the colossal popularity of his father—for it was colossal at that period—threw its reflex on him, and made him as distinctive an object for curiosity and importunate questions as if he had always been dressed in scarlet. At home, the very unedifying scenes he witnessed, the easy manners of the ladies in whose company he was thrown, and the base cringing of the male crew who lived on his father's prodigalities, early tinged his thoughts with a streak of that bitterness which time never quite removes. In this fashion the lad grew up until he was eighteen, at which age his father placed a roll of bank notes in his hands and spoke in this paternal wise : "When a man inherits the name of Alexandre Dumas he should lead the life of a prince, dine at the Cafe Anglais, and be generous with his money. Go and amuse yourself. When you have spent that you shall have more. If you contract debts I will pay them."

Nothing could be plainer or more conducive to morality. Young Dumas threw himself headlong into the torrent of Parisian life, ran obediently into debt, drew, without stint or scruple, on bis well-pleased father, and was never lectured by the father save on the meanness of parsimony. But this healthy sort of existence must necessarily experience checks when father and son both lead it together. The elder Dumas practised all he preached ; and by degrees the cash-bowls on his desk (his money was never locked up in drawers, but lay in bowls, open to all comers) began to be more and more often empty. One day when the son came to levy supplies from them he found they were in possession of the bailiffs, along with the rest of the house's furniture ; and though his father cried to him with one of his hearty laughs that this was nothing, and that money was as fast earned as spent, yet this little episode set young Dumas thinking that if he should suddenly become an orphan he should find himself face to face with his own debts and his father's, possessed of no assets and no profession, and, besides all this, having a sister to support.

It may be that some less material thoughts mingled with these, and told him that the life he had been spending was not a very noble one, and that a man has other missions to fulfil than those of rolling about Boulevards in a phaeton and signing his name to I O U's. Anyhow, the resolution he took in the course of one day, and unflinchingly adhered to during several years, revealed in him a firmness of character and an honesty of purpose which could not have come from parental example, and must have been innate. He severed himself completely from his former mode of living, his friends, and associations. He discarded his phaeton and grooms, sublet his fine lodgings, sold off his furniture, dressed plainly ; and having convoked his creditors, told them with frankness that he was unable to pay them then, but that, if they would give him time, he would work till he had discharged his obligations to the last farthing. One would have been glad to record that the creditors met this assurance in a believing spirit ; but the fact is, they tried to lodge him in Clichy. He eluded them, however ; took refuge at Fontainebleau in a small inn room, for which he paid 30 sous a day, and there during two years worked like a man. He had already written a novel, an absurd book, called Les Aventures de Quatre Femmes et d'un Perroquet.

He now changed his style, and, perceiving that he had not imagination enough to compose sensational novels like his father, set himself to the minute, analytical pourtrayal of such social manners as he had observed. As his lot had been cast in the very loosest of social spheres, La Dame aux Camelias was the first result of his observations. This novel was a fair success. Then he wrote the dramatised version of the tale and submitted it to his father, who, not suspecting him of having much brains, was startled at the dramatic power of the work, and, with tears of pride, as he himself often repeated, accepted it for the Theatre Historique. That theatre, however, like many other undertakings of the great man's, was at this time on the eve of bankruptcy, and young Dumas was soon obliged to set off with his piece on a round of managerial visits, which lasted two years. Oddly enough, it was in most cases his name which damaged him. Alexandre Dumas the elder, having been the most successful author of twenty preceding years, had naturally accumulated a very satisfactory collection of rivals, and it was feared that some of these would be only too delighted to hit a blow at the father by organizing a cabal against the son. Other managers took alarm at the immorality of the drama, and this immorality also disquieted the authorities, for when La Dame aux Camelias was eventually accepted by the Vaudeville its performance was prohibited by the Home Minister, M. Leon Faucher. Is it to this that we must attribute M. Dumas' distaste for Republican institutions ?

Certain it is that the following year, when the Empire had been esta- blished, M. de Morny actively bestirred himself to get the piece licensed, and, of course, succeeded. He had a nice little theory of his own, this M. de Morny, on the morality of stage pieces. Every piece was acceptable according to his notions, so long as it excited the public to talk on other topics than politics ; thus La Dame aux Camelias would be moral, and Ruy Blas not so. The moral piece was therefore performed in 1852, and took the actors who played it, the manager, the audience, and soon the whole town by storm. It was the most startling success on record. M. Dumas' astonished creditors emerged from their lairs, pounced upon him, and had him arrested eight times within a fortnight. But the manager was there to pay, for the young author had become in one evening almost as famous a man as his father in thirty years.

There is not a Parisian but knows the "Dumas Fils," who then took his place among the half- dozen princes of French dramatic art. A tall, strongly-built man, with a bald forehead, woolly hair, moustaches with wax to them, and keen grey eyes, he was not unlike his father in face, but seemed to have no single mental characteristic in common with him. Cold and rather haughty in his manner, he wielded a species of wit which fell upon its victims like the thwacks of a well-made riding-whip. When he paid his father one of those occasional visits which filial duty commanded, the greater Dumas' sycophantic familiars all shrunk away, not liking to risk a weal from that terrible tongue, and even Dumas Père himself felt uncomfortable in the presence of this son who had grown up to be so unlike him, and whose domesticated, orderly ways now began to strike him constantly in the light of a reproach.

It was often said that father and son had quarrelled, but this was never true. The elder Dumas had too warm a heart, and the younger was too good a son, for a collision to be possible. Only they saw but little of each other, because when one man in a family has banned debt as a pestilence, whilst the other persists in looking upon it as the natural state of man—when one picks his society, and the other admits all men to his fellowship—when one is all sentiment, and the other all sense, intercourse is apt to be unprofitable. So young Dumas kept to his own set of friends— a brilliant artistic set, in whose company all the superficial ice in his nature thawed—and he worked. This point must be dwelt on, that the highest of his productions is and always has been the result of thought and labour. He does not, as his father did, sit down of a morning with six-and-thirty blank pages quarto size before him, and make it his duty to cover them with writing of some sort before going out. Having got an idea—or a paradox, for to his essentially French mind it is all one—into his head, he turns the same over patiently by himself, discusses it with his friends, and after twelve months, sometimes two years, of this mental incubating, produces Diane de Lys, Le Demi Monde, Le Fils Naturel, or La Question d'Argent.

Whilst the Empire flourished it was the younger Dumas' great good fortune to be free from any fear lest his pieces should not attract attention enough. Politics being hushed, the starting of any emotional social problem was like the firing of a shell amid perfect stillness; and as each new piece of Scribe's successor at the Gymnase was brought out, the author had the inexpressible satisfaction of seeing society wrangle fiercely as to whether he were an earnest censor of social abuses or a corrupter of public morals. This is always pleasant; indeed, fortune can do nothing more for one. But, yes; it can make of one an homme serieux, as M, Alexandre Dumas aspires to be thought at this hour. Having played under the Empire something of the part which Alcibiades's tailless dog is popularly supposed to have filled at Athens, he now seeks to be one of the oracles of the day,—to rank, in fact, among the "Men of the Third Republic."

Since M. Thiers has guided France, M. Dumas has launclied two new "psychological" comedies and three pamphlets, all of which tend, as he asserts, to the regeneration of France; and the latest of which (the pamphlets) has been in most Parisians' hands for the last month, and is likely to linger in Parisian women's memories for yet some weeks to come. But it may be doubted whether anything that M. Dumas writes in his present frame of mind can evoke results deeper than a succes de curiosité, or will survive him ; and this for the reason that, falling into an error very common with professed censors, he has got to paint his countrymen much blacker than they really are.

M. Dumas fancies himself still under the Empire. He forgets what bereavement and distress have passed through most French homes. Taking cases of crime and depravity that were monstrous, and exceptional even at the worst of times, he holds them up to his countrymen, and bids them see themselves as in a mirror ; so that if one were to collect M. Dumas' verdicts on his countrymen from the plays and pamphlets recently published, one would learn that the French were politically and socially, morally and intellectually, the most flippant, unprincipled, debauched, and ignorant people under heaven. Against this judgment one may be allowed to protest. There are really few countries where honesty is more common, practical morality more deep-rooted, and respect for the law more general than in France. To ignore this argues either a very cursory study of the national character, or a cynicism grown chronic, and incapacitating its owner from seeing things as they are. But perhaps M. Dumas is aware that the French love to see their foibles scoffed at by one of themselves, and possibly the object of his numerous bits of psychology is merely to gratify their passion. If so, some friend should warn M. Dumas that a doctor who would prescribe a reckless course of astringents, even when pressed by his patient to do it, would conduce neither to that patient's health, nor to his own good fame as a physician.

Many different accounts are given of M. Dumas' birth. His father announced it thus : —"On the 29th of July, 1824, while the Duke de Montpensier was coming into the world, was born to me a Duke de Chartres, Place des Italiens, No. 1." As soon as he was old enough to go to school, Alexandre Dumas was sent to the establishment of a M. Goubaux, who conducted two kinds of business at the same time ; and manufactured a scene in a broad farce for the Ambigu Comique, on the margin of a page of Cicero. The leisure he could steal from his duties as an instructor of youth was also frequently devoted to the task of putting in a dramatic form the honest socialist romances of Eugene Sue. From the custody of this lively pedagogue, the boy was transferred to the College Bourbon, where he distinguished himself as a silent and laborious student. He read everything that came in his way, and one day his father found him diligently perusing M. Gerardin's novel, "Emile."

"What do you think of the book?" asked the elder Dumas.

"I think," answered the lad slowly, "that when a father refuses to give his name to his own...

"Well?"

"The son should take it."

"Take mine, then, at once," returned his father, and henceforth he was formally acknowledged, and unceasingly bragged about, by that prolific writer.

Indeed, they both bragged about each other. The father called his son "a Wonder of Nature;" the son called his father "a Prodigy." They felt the gayest and most good-humoured affection for each other, that of the younger man being very tender and protecting. "My father," he used to say, "is a great child I had when I was little."

M. Alexandre Dumas first presented his celebrated piece, Le Demi Monde, to the Comédie Française, where it was well received, and well paid for; but Mademoiselle Rachel having taken a dislike to him, she used her influence to have its performance indefinitely postponed. M. Dumas immediately bought back his play, with money borrowed from M. Montigny, and now writes almost exclusively for the Gymnase. The amount of his gains as a dramatic author is very large, and probably every work he produces can hardly be worth less than ten or twelve thousand pounds to him ; besides which, nearly all his plays keep permanent possession of the French stage, at Lome and abroad, and bring him in a fine income, from his rights of authorship. He is therefore very rich, and, it is pleasing to add, very generous and very charitable.