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The sacred personage introduced in Dumas's play behind a cloud, figures bodily in the piece of the Massacre of the Innocents, represented at Paris last year. She appears under a different name, but the costume is exactly that of Carlo Dolce's Madonna; and an ingenious fable is arranged, the interest of which hangs upon the grand Massacre of the Innocents, perpetrated in the fifth act.
We have been reading again Dumas's thrilling description of the "tumult of Amboise," and his pathetic picture of the young King and Queen, who shrank from witnessing the tortures and death to which their Huguenot subjects were condemned.
He it was who gave me Dumas's Dictionnaire de la Cuisine, the corner-stone of my collection of cookery books a fact in which I see so much of Henley that I feel as if the stranger to him who to-day takes the volume down from my shelves and reads on the fly-leaf the simple inscription, "To E.R.P. d.d.
The transition was sharp from Dumas's heated atmosphere of passion and crime to the quiet English rectory, its rural surroundings, and the figures of the two Englishwomen advancing towards him. Catherine was in a loose white dress with a black lace scarf draped about her head and form. Her look hardly suggested youth, and there was certainly no touch of age in it.
And among these, even if you should think me childish, I must count my d'Artagnan not d'Artagnan of the memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer a preference, I take the freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's, but Dumas's.
Plays such as Alexandre Dumas's Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, or the pseudo-historical dramas of Scribe-Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d'Eau, Les Trois Maupin, etc. are amusing toys, like those social or military tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny in the slot.
It is good, in a day of small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas's men so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen. Like M. de Rochefort in 'Vingt Ans Apres, like that prisoner of the Bastille, your genius 'n'est que d'un parti, c'est du parti du grand air.
We could hear the dash of the waves far below, as our conductor's voice sounded out clear and peremptory, uttering the timely reminder; we could hear the words of two French commis-voyageurs, coming from the ditch-sunk diligence, making some facetious remark, one to the other, about their present adventure being very much like some of Alexandre Dumas's Impressions de Voyage; we could hear the cries and calls of the men refastening the horses, and preparing to push anew at the wheels; we could distinguish a domestic party dismounting from the back portion of the other diligence, consisting of a father and mother with their baby and the bonne; we could see the little white cap covered up carefully with a handkerchief by the young mother, while the father held an umbrella over their heads, and conducted them to the counterpart portion of our diligence, where the family took refuge during the fresh attempts to drag theirs forth.
'La Traviata' is an operatic version of Dumas's famous play, 'La Dame aux Caméllias. The sickly tale of the love and death of Marguerite Gauthier, here known as Violetta, is hardly an ideal subject for a libretto, and it says much for Verdi's versatility that, after his excursions into transpontine melodrama, he was able to treat 'drawing-room tragedy' with success.
You will smile, perhaps, if I tell you that I could not resist asking Buckle if he had read Dumas's historical novels, and he said he had not, although he had felt an inclination to do so. He asked one or two questions about them, and gave a rapid generalization of the history of France at that time.
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