M. F. Mansfield

“ This imaginary garden owed to George Sand a blue chrysanthemum, to Victor Hugo a Bengal rose without thorns, to Balzac a climbing azalea, to Jules Janin a blue pink, to Madame de Genlis a green rose, to Eugene Sue a variety of cactus growing in Paris in the open air, to Paul Féval a variety of larch which retained its leaves during winter, to Forgues a pretty little pink clematis which flourished around the windows in the Latin quarter, to Rolle a scented camellia, and to Dumas the black tulip and a white lotus. ”

“ Denis
Thus the centuries have done their work of extending and mingling,—“le jeu est fait,” so to speak,—but Paris, by the necessities of her growth and by her rather general devotion to one stately, towering form of domestic architecture, has often made the separation of old from new peculiarly difficult to a casual eye. It is indeed her way to be new and splendid, to be always the bride of cities, espousing human destiny. And, truly, it is in this character that we do her homage with our visits, our money, and our admiration. ”

“ There is something more than a morbid interest which attaches itself to the former homes and haunts of a great author or artist. The emotion is something akin to sentiment, to be sure, but it is pardonable; far more so than the contemplation of many more popular and notorious places.
He who would follow the footsteps of Alexandre Dumas about Paris must either be fleet of foot, or one who can sustain a long march. ”

“ If so, it will be the work of some ardent Frenchman of a generation following that in which Alexandre Dumas lived, and not by one of the contemporaries of even his later years. Albert Vandam, perhaps, might have done it as it should have been done; but he did not do so, and so an intimate personal record has been lost.
Paris has ever been written down in the book of man as the city of light, of gaiety, and of a trembling vivacity which has been in turn profligate, riotous, and finally criminal. ”

“ No popularity of the past century has equalled that of Alexandre Dumas. His successes were more than successes: they were triumphs.... The name of Alexandre Dumas is more than ‘Français, il est Européen;’ and it is more than European, it is universal. His theatre has been given publicity in all lands, and his romances have been translated into all tongues. Alexandre Dumas was one of those men we can call the sowers of civilization.... Alexandre Dumas is seducing, fascinating, interesting, amusing, and informing.... ”

“ If all other dramatists had died, Alexandre Dumas could have occupied every stage; his magic name on a playbill or affixed to a newspaper feuilleton ensured the sale of that issue or a full house at the theatre. He was king of the stage, prince of feuilletonists, the literary man par excellence, in that Paris then so full of intellect. When he opened [Pg 53] his lips the most eloquent held their breath to listen; when he entered a room the wit of man, the beauty of woman, the pride of life, grew dim in the radiance of his glory ”

“ The real Paris which Dumas knew—the Paris of the Second Empire—exists no more. The order of things changeth in all but the conduct of the stars, and Paris, more than any other centre of activity, scintillates and fluctuates like the changings of the money-markets. ”

“ At no time and among no people had it till then been granted to a writer to achieve fame in every direction; in serious drama and in comedy, and novels of adventure and of domestic interest, in humourous stories and in pathetic tales, Alexandre Dumas had been alike successful. The frequenters of the Théâtre Français owed him evenings of delight, but so did the general public as well. Dumas alone had had the power to touch, interest, or amuse, not only Paris or France, but the whole world. ”

“ But the history of the Bohemia of arts and letters—which rose to its greatest and most prophetic heights in the Paris of the nineteenth century—would no doubt prove to be as extensive a work as Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” though the recitation of tenets and principles of one would be the inevitable reverse of the other.
The intellectual Bohemian—the artist, or the man of letters—has something in his make-up of the gipsy’s love of the open road; the vagabond who instinctively rebels against the established rules of society, more because they are established than for any other reason. ”

“ By favour of these efforts of all the reigns and governments which have gone before, the Paris of to-day in its architectural glories, its monuments in stone, and the very atmosphere of its streets, places, and boulevards, is assuredly the most marvellous of all the cities of Europe.
It may not be an exceedingly pleasant subject, but there is, and always has been, a certain fascination about a visit to a cemetery which ranks, in the minds of many well-informed and refined persons, far above even the contemplation of great churches themselves. ”

“ And so Paris has grown,—beautiful and great,—and the stranger within her gates, whether he come by road or rail, by automobile or railway-coach, is sure to be duly impressed with the fact that Paris is for one and all alike a city founded of and for the people. ”

“ His observation that “Les maisons font la ville, mais le citoyens font la cité,” was true when written, and it is true to-day, with this modification, that the delimitation of the confines of la ville should be extended so far as to include all workaday Paris—the shuffling, bustling world of energy and spirit which has ever insinuated itself into the daily life of the people.
The love and knowledge of Alexandre Dumas père for Paris was great, and the accessory and detail of his novels, so far as he drew upon the capital, was more correct and apropos. ”

“ New harbour works have been constructed, and sailing-ships have mostly given way to great steamers, but the channel winds and twists as of old under the lofty brow, capped by the sailors’ church of Notre Dame de la Garde, which is to-day a tawdry, bizarre shrine, as compared with the motive which inspired the devout to ascend its heights to pray for those who go down to the sea in ships.
Marseilles, of all cities of France, more even than Bordeaux or Lyons, is possessed of that individuality which stands out strong on the background of France—the land and the nation. ”

“ When his characters represent the poverty of a tatterdemalion, they do it with a sincerity that is inimitable, and the lusty throatings of a D’Artagnan are never a hollow mockery of something they are not.
Dumas drew his characters of the stage and his personages of the romances with the brilliance and assurance of a Velasquez, rather than with the finesse of a Praxiteles, and for that reason they live and introduce themselves as cosmopolitans, and are to be appreciated only as one studies or acquires something of the spirit from which they have been evolved. ”

“ The Paris of to-day is a reconstructed Paris; its old splendours not wholly eradicated, but changed in all but their associations. The life of Paris, too, has undergone a similar evolution, from what it was even in Dumas’ time.
The celebrities of the Café de Paris have mostly, if not quite all, passed away. No more does the eccentric Prince Demidoff promulgate his eccentricities into the very faces of the onlookers; no more does the great Dumas make omelettes in golden sugar-bowls ”

“ Paris-wards one sees a panorama—a veritable vol-d’oiseaux—of the slender, silvery loops of the Seine as it bends around Port Marly, Argenteuil, Courbevoie, St. Denis, and St. Cloud; while in the dimmest of the dim distance the Eiffel Tower looms all its ugliness up into the sky, and the domed heights of Montmartre and the Buttes Chaumont look really beautiful—which they do not on closer view.
The height of St. Germain itself—the ville and the château—is not so very great, and it certainly is not giddy, which most of its frequenters, for one reason or another, are ”

“ Since the romances of Dumas deal so largely with Paris, it is but natural that much of their action should take place at the near-by country residences of the royalty and nobility who form the casts of these great series of historical tales.
To-day Fontainebleau, St. Germain, Versailles, and even Chantilly, Compiègne, and Rambouillet are but mere attractions for the tourist of the butterfly order. The real Parisian never visits them or their precincts, save as he rushes through their tree-lined avenues in an automobile ”

“ To-day one sees only the ornate space, the voitures and automobiles, the tricolour floating high on the Louvre, and this forgetful Paris, brilliant with sunlight, green with trees, beautified by good government, which offers in its kiosks, cafés, and theatres the fulness of the moment at every turn. Paris itself truly forgets, if one does not. ”

“ Paris was a vast atelier of construction, where agile minds conceived, and the artisan and craftsman executed, monumental glories and improvements which can only be likened to the focusing of the image upon the ground glass.
The prolongation of the Rue de Rivoli was put through; the Boulevards Sebastopol, Malesherbes,—where in the Place Malesherbes is that appealing monument to Dumas by Gustave Doré,—du Prince Eugène, St. Germain, Magenta, the Rue des Écoles, and many others. All of which tended to change the very face and features of the Paris the world had known hitherto. ”

“ We have had, too, the works of Zola, who, indomitable, industrious, and sincere as he undoubtedly was, will have been long forgotten when the masterpieces of Dumas are being read and reread. The Mousquetaire cycle, the Valois romances, and “Monte Cristo” stand out by themselves above all others of his works, and have had the approbation of such discerning fellow craftsmen as George Sand, Thackeray, and Stevenson, all of whom may be presumed to have judged from entirely different points of view. ”

“ Dumas was ever fond of, and familiar with, the road from Paris to Calais. The National Route ran through Crépy, and the byroad through his native Villers-Cotterets. In the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” he calls the region “The Land of God,” a sentiment which mostly has not been endorsed by other writers; still, it is a beautiful country, and with its thickly wooded plantations, its industrious though conglomerate population, it is to-day—save for the Cantal and the Auvergne—that part of France of which English-speaking folk know the least. And this, too, on the direct road between London and Paris! ”

“ 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 ”

“ The Pont de Sèvres is there, linking [Pg 303] one of those thumblike peninsulas made by the windings of the Seine with the Bois de Meudon, and the traffic inward and outward from Paris is as great and varied as it always was, probably greater, but there is no inn to suggest that which Dumas had in mind. The rural aspect is somewhat changed, the towering stacks of the china-factory chimneys, the still more towering—though distant—Tour Eiffel, which fortunately is soon to be razed, and the iron rails of the “Ceinture” and the “Quest,” all tend to estrange one’s sentiments from true romance. ”

“ The fabric itself—the work of many hands, at the instigation of so many minds—is an enduring monument to the fame of those who projected it, or who were memorialized thereby: Philippe-Auguste, Marie de Medici, François I., Charles IX., Henri IV., Louis XIV., Napoleon I.,—who did but little, it is true,—and Napoleon III.—who did much, and did it badly. ”

“ Paris is divided into practically two equal parts by the swift-flowing current of the Seine, which winds its way in sundry convolutions from its source beyond Chatillon-sur-Seine to the sea at Honfleur.
The praises of the winding river which connects Havre, Rouen, Vernon, Mantes, and Paris has often been sung, but the brief, virile description of it in the eighty-seventh chapter of Dumas’ “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne” has scarcely been equalled. ”