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The nobles will never consent to it. I have tried my ground. The time is not yet come. I should be alone. But I will dazzle them again." I replied, "Well, we will go to Egypt;" and changed the conversation. Lanfrey, however, rather enlarges what Dumas says; see Dumas, tome iii. p. 167.
In such a moment, towards the ending of your days, you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, 'I seem to see myself set on a pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands. These sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation more solid than the rock. Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent force in modern letters.
Dumas fils retired to the country and wrote La Dame aux Camélias a four-act play in eight successive days. But he had previously told the same story in a novel; he knew everything that was to happen in his play; and the mere writing could be done in a single headlong dash. Voltaire's best tragedy, Zaïre, was written in three weeks.
Give me your blessing, or, better still, give me your assistance. Come here and lead the great hunt; we will shoot, and the hares shall fall right and left. I do not expect to reach the goal here so very soon but must prepare myself. A libretto of Scribe or Dumas I cannot set to music.
It is said that a dialogue of Dumas the elder created a revolution in the French mode of paying romance literature. Dumas, who was reckoned by the line, one day introduced, they say, into his feuilleton this thrilling passage: My son! My mother! Listen! Speak! Seest thou? What? This poniard! It is stained With blood! Whose? Thy father's. Ah!!! After that Dumas was paid by the letter.
In these works he has attempted to revive the lengthy chronicles of the elder Dumas, but without that irrepressible verve, that headlong vehemence of animal spirits, which, like the rush of a locomotive, bore the reader, breathless and interested, over rough places and smooth alike. The draught M. Claretie brews for our drinking bears no affinity to that intoxicating and sparkling champagne.
But when he was thus discounting his effect Dumas probably had in mind, not Poe, but Cooper, whose observant redskins he mightily admired and whom he frankly imitated in the 'Mohicans of Paris.
Shakespeare is an exception, and I am not Shakespeare and, as far as that goes, I am not Lamartine, nor Dumas, nor Hugo. However, opposed as I am to the doctrines of Schopenhauer and Leopardi, I will admit that the shores of the Caspian did seem rather gloomy and dispiriting. There seemed to be nothing alive on the coast; no vegetation, no birds.
She coughs and for three days has a new idea that she is going to die; prays and prostrates herself sixty times, one for each bead in her rosary, touching the floor with her forehead every time; wonders if God takes intentions into account; resolves to read the New Testament, but can not find one and reads Dumas instead.
He had apparently made one of the elder Dumas' heroes his exalted ideal, for at the period we speak of he had set the fashionable world of Gotham agog by making a romantic conquest of a Mobile belle, who, after becoming thoroughly infatuated with him, eloped to a prominent watering-place.
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