"It was just after the birth of the dauphin; all Paris was full of joy. The king advised him to announce a gratuitous performance in honour of the event, and give a ball after. Doubtless plenty would come, and if the theatre stood, its safety was established. "'Thanks, Sire,' said the architect. "'But reflect, first,' said the king, 'if there be a crowd, are you sure of your building?' "'Sire, I am sure, and shall go there myself.' "'I will go to the second representation,' said the king. "The architect followed this advice. They played 'Adele de Ponthieu' to three thousand spectators, who afterward danced. After this there could be no more fear." It was three years after that Madame and the cardinal went to the celebrated ball, the account of which follows in the subsequent chapter of the romance. Dumas as a dramatist was not so very different from Dumas the novelist. When he first came to Paris the French stage was by no means at a low and stagnant ebb--at least, it was not the thin, watery concoction that many English writers would have us believe; and, furthermore, the world's great dramatist--Shakespeare--had been and was still influencing and inspiring the French playwright and actor alike. It was the "Hamlet" of Ducis--a very French Hamlet, but still Hamlet--and the memory of an early interview with Talma that first set fire to the fuel of the stage-fever which afterward produced Dumas the dramatist. Dumas was not always truthful, or, at least, correct, in his facts, but he did not offend exceedingly, and he was plausible; as much so, at any rate, as Scott, who had erred to the extent of fifteen years in his account of the death of Amy Robsart. In 1824 was born Alexandre Dumas _fils_, and at this time the parent was collaborating with Soulié in an attempted, but unfinished, dramatization of Scott's "Old Mortality." By 1830, after he had left official work, Dumas had produced that drama of the Valois, "Henri III.," at the Théâtre Français, where more than a century before Voltaire had produced his first play, "Oedipe," and where the "Hernani" of Victor Hugo had just been produced. It was a splendid and gorgeous event, and the adventures of the Duchesse de Guise, St. Mégrin, Henri III. and his satellites proved to the large and distinguished audience present no inconspicuous element in the success of the future king of romance. It was a veritable triumph, and for the time the author was more talked of and better known than was Hugo, who had already entered the arena, but whose assured fame scarcely dates from before "Hernani," whose first presentation--though it was afterward performed over three hundred times in the same theatre--was in February of the same year.