"At this epoch the sister nations should erect a gigantic statue of Peace. This statue will be Paris, and its pedestal will represent _La Province_." His wish--it was not prophecy--did not, however, come true, as the world in general and France and poor rent Alsace et Lorraine in particular know to their sorrow; and all through a whim of a self-appointed, though weakling, monarch. The era of the true peace of the world and the monument to its glory came when the French nation presented to the New World that grand work of Bartholdi, "Liberty Enlightening the World," which stands in New York harbour, and whose smaller replica now terminates the Allée des Cygnes. The grasp that Dumas had of the events of romance and history served his purpose well, and in the life of the fifties in Paris his was a name and personality that was on everybody's lips. How he found time to live the full life that he did is a marvel; it certainly does not bear out the theory of heredity when one considers the race of his birth and the "dark-skinned" languor which was supposedly his heritage. One edition of his work comprises two hundred and seventy-seven volumes, and within the year a London publisher has announced some sixty volumes "never before translated." Dumas himself has said that he was the author of over seven hundred works. In point of time his romances go back to the days of the house of Valois and the Anglo-French wars (1328), and to recount their contents is to abstract many splendid chapters from out the pages of French history. It would seem as though nearly every personage of royalty and celebrity (if these democratic times will allow the yoking together of the two; real genuine _red_ republicans would probably link royalty and notoriety) stalked majestically through his pages, and the record runs from the fourteenth nearly to the end of the nineteenth century, with the exception of the reign of Louis XI. An ardent admirer of Sir Walter Scott has commented upon this lapse as being accounted for by the apparent futility of attempting to improve upon "Quentin Durward." This is interesting, significant, and characteristic, but it is not charitable, generous, or broad-minded. CHAPTER II. DUMAS' EARLY LIFE IN PARIS At fifteen (1817), Dumas entered the law-office of one Mennesson at Villers-Cotterets as a _saute-ruisseau_ (gutter-snipe), as he himself called it, and from this time on he was forced to forego what had been his passion heretofore: bird-catching, shooting, and all manner of woodcraft. When still living at Villers-Cotterets Dumas had made acquaintance with the art of the dramatist, so far as it was embodied in the person of Adolphe de Leuven, with whom he collaborated in certain immature melodramas and vaudevilles, which De Leuven himself took to Paris for disposal.