"Monsieur, I'll drive one of them away."

"No, no, Michel; let a fourteenth come. These dogs cost me some
three pounds a month," said Dumas. "A dinner to five or six friends
would cost thrice as much, and, when they went home, they would say
my wine was good, but certainly that my books were bad." In this
fashion Dumas fared royally "to the dogs," and his Abbotsford ruined
him as certainly as that other unhappy palace ruined Sir Walter.
He, too, had his miscellaneous kennel; he, too, gave while he had
anything to give, and, when he had nothing else, gave the work of
his pen. Dumas tells how his big dog, Mouton once flew at him and
bit one of his hands, while the other held the throat of the brute.
"Luckily my hand, though small, is powerful; what it once holds it
holds long--money excepted." He could not "haud a guid grip o' the
gear." Neither Scott nor Dumas could shut his ears to a prayer or
his pockets to a beggar, or his doors on whoever knocked at them.

"I might at least have asked him to dinner," Scott was heard
murmuring, when some insufferable bore at last left Abbotsford,
after wasting his time and nearly wearing out his patience. Neither
man PREACHED socialism; both practised it on the Aristotelian
principle: the goods of friends are common, and men are our
friends.


The death of Dumas' father, while the son was a child, left Madame
Dumas in great poverty at Villers Cotterets. Dumas' education was
sadly to seek. Like most children destined to be bookish, he taught
himself to read very young: in Buffon, the Bible, and books of