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As Beaujeu fell, Dumas, who succeeded him, thought that the steady front of the red-skins was going to carry the day, until he saw his Canadians fly, followed by the Indians, after Gage had wheeled his cannon on the woods. A little time, however, changed all this. The Indians rallied and poured their bullets into the massed and very soon confused British troops.
Gage brought up his two cannon and opened fire, and the Indians, who had a horror of artillery, began also to fall back. The English advanced in regular lines, cheering loudly. Beaujeu fell dead; but Captain Dumas, who succeeded him in command, advanced at the head of his small party of French soldiers, and opened a heavy fire.
What would have been poor Dore's feelings had he lived to see such a guinea's worth, and cheap at the price, gladly sold, rather got rid of, for three shillings! Dore's last work, the unconventional monument to the elder Dumas, was left unfinished. Completed by another hand, the group now forms a conspicuous object in the Avenue Villiers, Paris.
As for Pixerecourt, whose fame lasted until the Romantic drama of the older Dumas, Alfred de Vigny, and Victor Hugo eclipsed it, he wrote over a hundred plays, each of which was performed some five hundred times, while two at least ran for more than a thousand nights.
Alexandre Dumas describes himself, when inventing the plan of a work, as lying silent on his back for two whole days on the deck of a yacht in a Mediterranean port. At the end of the two days he arose and called for dinner. In those two days he had built his plot. He had moulded a mighty clay, to be cast presently in perennial brass.
He will bring two men on the stage, and will let them talk together for half an hour without moving a muscle. They say wonderfully wise and witty things, it is true. But such dramatic writing is not exactly in the manner of Shakespeare. M. Dumas evidently dreams that his mission is to regenerate French society, but, apparently, he has as yet found the task beyond his powers.
It was revived, however, about 1840, by Dumas, whose great authority secured it a respectful hearing, and whose careful redetermination of the weight of carbon, making it exactly twelve times that of hydrogen, aided the cause. Subsequently Stas, the pupil of Dumas, undertook a long series of determinations of atomic weights, with the expectation of confirming the Proutian hypothesis.
And this is the particular crown and triumph of the artist not to be true merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant. There is yet another point in the "Vicomte" which I find incomparable. I can recall no other work of the imagination in which the end of life is represented with so nice a tact. I was asked the other day if Dumas ever made me either laugh or cry.
When I speak of renouncing society, of course I only mean renouncing the best. There will always be some people to Well, you remember Dumas' comparison of the sixpenny and the six-shilling peaches. If you can't have the latter, you will be able to afford the former." They walked on in silence to the end of the terrace, and it was not till after they had turned that the young man spoke again.
It was later that one fell under the power of two more mature and exacting charmers, Mayne Reid's Rifle Rangers and Dumas' Monte Christo.
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