ALEXANDRE DUMAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 April 1939, Page 9

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

MUSEUM AT VILLERS-COTTERETS.

Documents and personal souvenirs of the three Dumas, the father, who was a general with Bonaparte in Egypt, the writer of “The Three Musketeers,” “Twenty Years After,” “Monte Cristo,” etc., and his son, author of “The Lady With the Camelias,” have been gathered together in the house where the author was born at Villers-Cotterets, in 1802.

It is often forgotten that the author of more than a hundred volumes firsi made his name as a very successful writer of plays. His novels came later. He started life as an attorney’s clerk,'and it was while at a performance of a play given by a company of English actors visiting Paris that he was seized with a desire to write.

He employed secretaries and “ghosts” to help in the production of his huge output, by a touch of his genius turning their leaden prose into gold. His translation of Sir Walter Scott's “Ivanhoe” shows an amusing impatience, foi after following the original fairly faithfully for a few pages he tells the story his own racy way. His novels were a joy to him, and as he worked he laughed out loud at the discomfort of Cardinal de Richelieu and the triumph of D'Artagnan. Money came and went easily. A house was built as for the hero of Monte Cristo. At the end of his life, when poverty loomed stark before him, his son tocx him away from Pans, and shortly before he died he said to those around him: “When I arrived in Paris I had forty francs. Today I have only forty francs. But what a wonderful time I have had!”