But the money disappeared as fast as if Monte Cristo had really been
palatial, and worthy of the fantasy of a Nero. He got into debt,
fled to Belgium, returned, founded the Mousquetaire, a literary
paper of the strangest and most shiftless kind. In "Alexandre Dumas
e la Maison d'Or," M. Philibert Audebrand tells the tale of this
Micawber of newspapers. Everything went into it, good or bad, and
the name of Dumas was expected to make all current coin. For Dumas,
unluckily, was as prodigal of his name as of his gold, and no
reputation could bear the drafts he made on his celebrity. His son
says, in the preface to Le Fils Naturel: "Tragedy, dramas, history,
romance, comedy, travel, you cast all of them in the furnace and the
mould of your brain, and you peopled the world of fiction with new
creations. The newspaper, the book, the theatre, burst asunder, too
narrow for your puissant shoulders; you fed France, Europe, America
with your works; you made the wealth of publishers, translators,
plagiarists; printers and copyists toiled after you in vain. In the
fever of production you did not always try and prove the metal which
you employed, and sometimes you tossed into the furnace whatever
came to your hand. The fire made the selection: what was your own
is bronze, what was not yours vanished in smoke."

The simile is noble and worthy of the Cyclopean craftsman, Dumas.
His great works endured; the plays which renewed the youth of the
French stage, the novels which Thackeray loved to praise, these
remain, and we trust they may always remain, to the delight of
mankind and for the sorrow of prigs.


So much has been written of Dumas' novels that criticism can hardly
hope to say more that is both new and true about them. It is