Category: Biographies

Dumas' Paris

There have been many erudite works, in French and other languages, describing the antiquities and historical annals of Paris from the earliest times; and in English the mid-Victorian era turned out--there are no other words for it--innumerable "books of travel" which recounted...

Chapters

20. CHAPTER XVIII.

Dumas frequently wandered afield for his _mise-en-scene_, and with varying success; from the "Corsican Brothers," which was remarkably true to its _locale_, and "La Tulipe Noire...

6. CHAPTER V.

Dumas' real descent upon the Paris of letters and art was in 1823, when he had given up his situation in the notary's office at Crepy, and after the eventful holiday journey of...

11. CHAPTER X.

It would be impossible to form a precise topographical itinerary of the scenes of Dumas' romances and the wanderings of his characters, even in Paris itself. The area is so very...

4. CHAPTER III.

Just how far Dumas' literary ability was an inheritance, or growth of his early environment, will ever be an open question. It is a manifest fact that he had breathed something...

18. CHAPTER XVII.

Dumas' acquaintance with the French provinces was very comprehensive, though it is of the region northeast of Paris that he was most fond; of the beloved forest region around Cr...

17. CHAPTER XVI.

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 nobili...

7. CHAPTER VI.

The Paris of Dumas was Meryon's--though it is well on toward a half-century since either of them saw it. Hence it is no longer theirs; but the master romancer and the master etc...

16. CHAPTER XV.

The worshipper at the shrines made famous by Dumas--no less than history--will look in vain for the prison of La Roquette, the Bastille, the hotel of the Duc de Guise, at No. 12...

10. CHAPTER IX.

The Revolution of 1848 narrowed itself down to the issue of Bourbonism or Bonapartism. Nobody had a good word to say for the constitution, and all parties took liberties with it...

8. CHAPTER VII.

The means of communication in and about Paris in former days was but a travesty on the methods of the "Metropolitain," which in our time literally whisks one like the wings of t...

3. Chapter I., of the work in question, brings us at once on familiar ground,

and gives a description of Villers-Cotterets and its inhabitants in a manner which shows Dumas' hand so unmistakably as to remove any doubts as to the volume of assistance he ma...

5. CHAPTER IV.

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...

9. CHAPTER VIII.

The city of the ancient Parisii is the one particular spot throughout the length of the sea-green Seine--that "winding river" whose name, says Thierry, in his "Histoire des Gaul...

13. CHAPTER XII.

To-day the name still means what it always did; the Ecole de Medicine, the Ecole de Droit, the Beaux Arts, the Observatoire, and the student ateliers of the Latin Quarter, all g...

1. CHAPTER I.

There have been many erudite works, in French and other languages, describing the antiquities and historical annals of Paris from the earliest times; and in English the mid-Vict...

15. CHAPTER XIV.

It seems hardly necessary to more than mention the name of the Palais Royal, in connection with either the life or the writings of Alexandre Dumas, to induce a line of thought w...

14. CHAPTER XIII.

Upon the first appearance of "Marguerite de Valois," a critic writing in _Blackwood's Magazine_, has chosen to commend Dumas' directness of plot and purpose in a manner which ev...

12. CHAPTER XI.

It is difficult to write of La Cite; it is indeed, impossible to write of it with fulness, unless one were to devote a large volume--or many large volumes--to it alone.

19. Chapter fifty-three of the above book recounts the siege itself,--as we

"'Henri will not pay me his sister's dowry, and Margot cries out for her dear Cahors. One must do what one's wife wants, for peace's sake; therefore I am going to try to take Ca...

2. CHAPTER II.

At fifteen (1817), Dumas entered the law-office of one Mennesson at Villers-Cotterets as a _saute-ruisseau_ (gutter-snipe), as he himself called it, and from this time on he was...