The affability of Dumas, so far as he himself was concerned, was a foregone conclusion. In the great world in which he moved he knew all sorts and conditions of men. He had his enemies, it is true, and many of them, but he himself was the enemy of no man. To English-speaking folk he was exceedingly agreeable, because,--quoting his own words,--said he, "It was a part of the debt which I owed to Shakespeare and Scott." Something of the egoist here, no doubt, but gracefully done nevertheless. With his temperament it was perhaps but natural that Dumas should have become a romancer. This was of itself, maybe, a foreordained sequence of events, but no man thinks to-day that, leaving contributary conditions, events, and opportunities out of the question, he shapes his own fate; there are accumulated heritages of even distant ages to contend with. In Dumas' case there was his heritage of race and colour, refined, perhaps, by a long drawn out process, but, as he himself tells in "Mes Mémoires," his mother's fear was that her child would be born black, and he _was_, or, at least, purple, as he himself afterward put it. CHAPTER III. DUMAS' LITERARY CAREER Just how far Dumas' literary ability was an inheritance, or growth of his early environment, will ever be an open question. It is a manifest fact that he had breathed something of the spirit of romance before he came to Paris. Although it was not acknowledged until 1856, "The Wolf-Leader" was a development of a legend told to him in his childhood. Recalling then the incident of his boyhood days, and calling into recognition his gift of improvisation, he wove a tale which reflected not a little of the open-air life of the great forest of Villers-Cotterets, near the place of his birth. Here, then, though it was fifty years after his birth, and thirty after he had thrust himself on the great world of Paris, the scenes of his childhood were reproduced in a wonderfully romantic and weird tale--which, to the best of the writer's belief, has not yet appeared in English. To some extent it is possible that there is not a little of autobiography therein, not so much, perhaps, as Dickens put into "David Copperfield," but the suggestion is thrown out for what it may be worth. It is, furthermore, possible that the historic associations of the town of Villers-Cotterets--which was but a little village set in the midst of the surrounding forest--may have been the prime cause which influenced and inspired the mind of Dumas toward the romance of history. In point of chronology, among the earliest of the romances were those that dealt with the fortunes of the house of Valois (fourteenth century), and here, in the little forest town of Villers-Cotterets, was the magnificent manor-house which belonged to the Ducs de Valois; so it may be presumed that the sentiment of early associations had somewhat to do with these literary efforts.