With Paris it is quantity, with no sacrifice of quality, that has placed it in so preëminent a position among great cities, and the life of Paris--using the phrase in its most commonly recognized aspect--is accordingly more brilliant or the reverse, as one views it from the _boulevards_ or from the _villettes_. [Illustration: DUMAS' HOUSE AT VILLERS-COTTERETS] French writers, the novelists in particular, have well known and made use of this; painters and poets, too, have perpetuated it in a manner which has not been applied to any other city in the world. To realize the conditions of the life of Paris to the full one has to go back to Rousseau--perhaps even farther. His observation that "_Les maisons font la ville, mais le citoyens font la cité_," was true when written, and it is true to-day, with this modification, that the delimitation of the confines of _la ville_ should be extended so far as to include all workaday Paris--the shuffling, bustling world of energy and spirit which has ever insinuated itself into the daily life of the people. The love and knowledge of Alexandre Dumas _père_ for Paris was great, and the accessory and detail of his novels, so far as he drew upon the capital, was more correct and apropos. It was something more than a mere dash of local colour scattered upon the canvas from a haphazard palette. In _minutiæ_ it was not drawn as fine as the later Zola was wont to accomplish, but it showed no less detail did one but comprehend its full meaning. Though born in the provincial town Villers-Cotterets,--seventy-eight kilomètres from Paris on the road to Soissons,--Dumas came early in touch with the metropolis, having in a sort of runaway journey broken loose from his old associations and finally becoming settled in the capital as a clerk in the Bureau d'Orleans, at the immature age of twenty. Thus it was that his impressions and knowledge of Paris were founded upon an experience which was prolonged and intimate, extending, with brief intervals of travel, for over fifty years. He had journeyed meantime to Switzerland, England, Corsica, Naples, the Rhine, Belgium,--with a brief residence in Italy in 1840-42,--then visiting Spain, Russia, the Caucasus, and Germany. This covered a period from 1822, when he first came to Paris, until his death at Puys, near Dieppe, in 1870; nearly a full half-century amid activities in matters literary, artistic, and social, which were scarce equalled in brilliancy elsewhere--before or since. In spite of his intimate association with the affairs of the capital,--he became, it is recalled, a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies at the time of the Second Republic,--Dumas himself has recorded, in a preface contributed to a "Histoire de l'Eure," by M. Charpillon (1879), that if he were ever to compile a history of France he should first search for _les pierres angulaires_ of his edifice in the provinces.