Dumas' Paris

Dumas entered the law- office of one Mennesson at Villers-Cot- terets as a saute-ruisseau (gutter-snipe), as he himself called it, and from this time on he was forced to forego what had been his passion heretofore: bird-catching, shooting, and all manner of woodcraft. When still living at Villers-Cotterets Dumas had made acquaintance with the art of the dramatist, so far as it was embodied in the person of Adolphe de Leuven, with whom he collaborated in certain immature melodramas and vaudevilles, which De Leuven himself took to Paris for disposal. " No doubt managers would welcome them with enthusiasm". said Dumas, " and likely enough we shall divert a branch of that Pactolus River which is irrigating the domains of M. Scribe" (1822). Later on in his " Memoires " he says: " Complete humiliation; we were refused everywhere". STATUE OF DUMAS AT VILLERS-COTTERETS From Villers-Cotterets the scene of Dumas'' labours was transferred to Crepy, three and a half leagues distant, a small town to which he made his way on foot, his belongings in a little bundle " not more bulky than that of a Savoyard when he leaves his native mountains". In his new duties, still as a lawyer''s clerk, Dumas found life very wearisome, and, though the ancient capital of the Valois must have made an impress upon him, — as one learns from the Valois romances, — he pined for the somewhat more free life which he had previously lived; or, taking the bull by the horns, deliberated as to how he might get into the very vortex of things by pushing on to the capital. As he tritely says, " To arrive it was necessary to make a start". and the problem was how to arrive in Paris from Crepy in the existing condition of his finances