Of Dumas' own uproarious good nature many have written. Albert Vandam tells of a certain occasion when he went to call upon the novelist at St. Germain,--and he reckoned Dumas the most lovable and genial among all of his host of acquaintances in the great world of Paris,--that he overheard, as he was entering the study, "a loud burst of laughter." "I had sooner wait until monsieur's visitors are gone," said he. "Monsieur has no visitors," said the servant. "Monsieur often laughs like that at his work." Dumas as a man of affairs or as a politician was not the success that he was in the world of letters. His activities were great, and his enthusiasm for any turn of affairs with which he allied himself remarkable; but, whether he was _en voyage_ on a whilom political mission, at work as "Director of Excavations" at Pompeii, or founding or conducting a new journal or a new playhouse, his talents were manifestly at a discount. In other words, he was singularly unfit for public life; he was not an organizer, nor had he executive ability, though he had not a little of the skill of prophecy and foresight as to many turns of fortune's wheel with respect to world power and the comity of nations. Commenting upon the political state of Europe, he said: "Geographically, Prussia has the form of a serpent, and, like it, she appears to be asleep, in order to gain strength to swallow everything around her." All of his prophecy was not fulfilled, to be sure, but a huge slice was fed into her maw from out of the body of France, and, looking at things at a time fifty years ahead of that of which Dumas wrote,--that is, before the Franco-Prussian War,--it would seem as though the serpent's appetite was still unsatisfied. In 1847, when Dumas took upon himself to wish for a seat in the government, he besought the support of the constituency of the borough in which he had lived--St. Germain. But St. Germain denied it him--"on moral grounds." In the following year, when Louis-Philippe had abdicated, he made the attempt once again. The republican constituency of Joigny challenged him with respect to his title of Marquis de la Pailleterie, and his having been a secretary in the Orleans Bureau. The following is his reply--verbatim--as publicly delivered at a meeting of electors, and is given here as illustrating well the earnestness and devotion to a code which many Puritan and prudish moralists have themselves often ignored: