Dumas, like every strong personality, had his friends and his enemies. It is doubtful which class was in the ascendency as to numbers. When asked, on one occasion, when he had been dining at the Café de Paris, if he were an archæologist,--he had been admiring a cameo portrait of Julius Cæsar,--he replied, "No, I am absolutely nothing." His partisans were many, and they were as devoted as his enemies were jealous and uncharitable. Continuing, he said, "I admire this portrait in the capacity of Cæsar's historian." "Indeed," said his interlocutor, "it has never been mentioned in the world of savants." "Well," said Dumas, "the world of savants never mentions me." This may be conceit or modesty, accordingly as one takes one view or another. Dumas, like most people, was not averse to admiration. Far from it. He thrived exceedingly on it. But he was, as he said, very much alone, and quite felt a nobody at times. Of his gastronomic and epicurean abilities he was vainly proud. The story is told of the sole possession by Dumas of a certain recipe for stewed carp. Véron, the director of the opera, had instructed his own cook to serve the celebrated dish; she, unable to concoct it satisfactorily, announced her intention of going direct to the novelist to get it from his own lips. Sophie must have been a most ingenious and well-informed person, for she approached Dumas in all hostility and candour. She plunged direct into the subject, presuming that he had acquired the knowledge of this special tidbit from some outside source. Dumas was evidently greatly flattered, and gave her every possible information, but the experiment was not a success, and the fair _cordon-bleu_ began to throw out the suspicion that Dumas had acquired his culinary accomplishments from some other source than that he had generally admitted. It was at this time that Dumas was at the crux of his affairs with his collaborators. Accordingly Sophie made her pronouncement that it was with Dumas' cooking as it was with his romances, and that he was "_un grand diable de vaniteux_." At his home in the Rue Chaussée d'Antin Dumas served many an epicurean feast to his intimates; preparing, it is said, everything with his own hands, even to the stripping of the cabbage-leaves for the _soupe aux choux_, "sleeves rolled up, and a large apron around his waist." A favourite menu was _soupe aux choux_, the now famous carp, a _ragoût de mouton, à l'Hongroise_; _roti de faisans_, and a _salade Japonaise_--whatever that may have been; the ices and _gateaux_ being sent in from a _pâtissier's_. * * * * * The customs of the theatre in Paris are, and always have been, peculiar. Dumas himself tells how, upon one occasion, just after he had come permanently to live there, he had placed himself beside an immense _queue_ of people awaiting admission to the Porte St. Martin.