Among those of the world's great names in literature contemporary with Dumas, but who knew Paris ere he first descended upon it to try his fortune in its arena of letters, were Lamartine, who already, in 1820, had charmed his public with his "Meditations;" Hugo, who could claim but twenty years himself, but who had already sung his "Odes et Ballades," and Chateaubriand. Soulié and De Vigny won their fame with poems and plays in the early twenties, De Musset and Chénier followed before a decade had passed, and Gautier was still serving his apprenticeship. It was the proud Goethe who said of these young men of the twenties, "They all come from Chateaubriand." Béranger, too, "the little man," even though he was drawing on toward the prime of life, was also singing melodiously: it was his _chansons_, it is said, that upset the Bourbon throne and made way for the "citizen-king." Nodier, of fanciful and fantastic rhyme, was already at work, and Mérimée had not yet taken up the administrative duties of overseeing the preserving process which at his instigation was, at the hands of a paternal government, being applied to the historical architectural monuments throughout France; a glory which it is to be feared has never been wholly granted to Mérimée, as was his due. [Illustration: TWO FAMOUS CARICATURES OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS] Guizot, the _bête noire_ of the later Louis-Philippe, was actively writing from 1825 to 1830, and his antagonist, Thiers, was at the same period producing what Carlyle called the "voluminous and untrustworthy labours of a brisk little man in his way;" which recalls to mind the fact that Carlylean rant--like most of his prose--is a well-nigh insufferable thing. At this time Mignet, the historian, was hard at work, and St. Beauve had just deserted _materia medica_ for literature. Michelet's juvenile histories were a production of the time, while poor, unhonoured, and then unsung, Balzac was grinding out his pittance--in after years to grow into a monumental literary legacy--in a garret. Eugène Sue had not yet taken to literary pathways, and was scouring the seas as a naval surgeon. The drama was prolific in names which we have since known as masters, Scribe, Halévy, and others. George Sand, too, was just beginning that grand literary life which opened with "Indiana" in 1832, and lasted until 1876. She, like so many of the great, whose name and fame, like Dumas' own, has been perpetuated by a monument in stone, the statue which was unveiled in the little town of her birth on the Indre, La Châtre, in 1903. Like Dumas, too, hers was a cyclopean industry, and so it followed that in the present twentieth century (in the year 1904), another and a more glorious memorial to France's greatest woman writer was unveiled in the Garden of the Luxembourg. Among the women famous in the _monde_ of Paris at the time of Dumas' arrival were Mesdames Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu, and Delphine Gay.