"We set out for Paris, ah, that journey! I recollect it perfectly.... It was August or September, 1805. We got down in the Rue Thiroux at the house of one Dollé.... I had been embraced by one of the most noble ladies who ever lived, Madame la Marquise de Montesson, widow of Louis-Philippe d'Orleans.... The next day, putting Brune's sword between my legs and Murat's hat upon my head, I galloped around the table; when my father said, '_Never forget this, my boy_.'... My father consulted Corvisart, and attempted to see the emperor, but Napoleon, the quondam general, had now become the emperor, and he refused to see my father.... To where did we return? I believe Villers-Cotterets." Again on the 26th of March, 1813, Dumas entered Paris in company with his mother, now widowed. He says of this visit: "I was delighted at the prospect of this my second visit.... I have but one recollection, full of light and poetry, when, with a flourish of trumpets, a waving of banners, and shouts of 'Long live the King of Rome,' was lifted up above the heads of fifty thousand of the National Guard the rosy face and the fair, curly head of a child of three years--the infant son of the great Napoleon.... Behind him was his mother,--that woman so fatal to France, as have been all the daughters of the Cæsars, Anne of Austria, Marie Antoinette, and Marie Louise,--an indistinct, insipid face.... The next day we started home again." * * * * * Through the influence of General Foy, an old friend of his father's, Dumas succeeded in obtaining employment in the Orleans Bureau at the Palais Royal. His occupation there appears not to have been unduly arduous. The offices were in the right-hand corner of the second courtyard of the Palais Royal. He remained here in this bureau for a matter of five years, and, as he said, "loved the hour when he came to the office," because his immediate superior, Lassagne,--a contributor to the _Drapeau Blanc_,--was the friend and intimate of Désaugiers, Théaulon, Armand Gouffé, Brozier, Rougemont, and all the vaudevillists of the time. Dumas' meeting with the Duc d'Orleans--afterward Louis-Philippe--is described in his own words thus: "In two words I was introduced. 'My lord, this is M. Dumas, whom I mentioned to you, General Foy's protégé.' 'You are the son of a brave man,' said the duc, 'whom Bonaparte, it seems, left to die of starvation.'... The duc gave Oudard a nod, which I took to mean, 'He will do, he's by no means bad for a provincial.'" And so it was that Dumas came immediately under the eye of the duc, engaged as he was at that time on some special clerical work in connection with the duc's provincial estates.