His escapade to Paris was discovered by his employer, who hinted a dislike of such behaviour. The blood of de la Pailleterie was up, and Dumas resigned his clerkship. He had made at Villers-Cotterets the acquaintance of Auguste de Leuven, a noble Swede, "kept out of his own" for political reasons. De Leuven knew Paris and people about the theatres; he also tried his own hand at playwriting. Dumas in his society caught the stage fever, and he happened also to see the _Hamlet_ of Ducis acted--a very French _Hamlet_, but Dumas divined somehow the greatness of Shakespeare through the veil of Ducis. He knew no more English than most Frenchmen of letters know. Like M. Jules Lemaître, he read Shakespeare and Scott, "in cribs," I suspect, but he read them with delight. Homer, too, he studied only in cribs, but he perceived the grandeur of the Greek epics, the feebleness of the cribs, and vowed that he would translate Homer himself. He did not, however, take the preliminary step of learning Greek. The French drama of the period is said by those who know it to have been a watery thing. The great old masters were out--Dumas and Hugo were not yet in. Dumas began by collaborating with young de Leuven in bright little patriotic pieces. Thus his earliest efforts were collaborative, as they continued to be, about which there is much to be said later. Just as Burns usually needed a keynote to be struck for him by an old song or a poem of young Fergusson's--by a predecessor of some sort--so Dumas appears to have needed companionship in composition. It is a curious mental phenomenon, for he had more ideas than anyone else. He could master a subject more rapidly for his purpose than anyone else, yet he required companionship, contact with other minds engaged on the same theme. I am apt to think that this was the result of the pre-eminently social nature of Dumas. Charles II., as we learn from Lord Ailesbury's _Memoirs_, could not bear to be alone, and must have Harry Killigrew to make him laugh, even on occasions when privacy is courted by mankind. Most people like to write alone; not so Dumas. Comradeship he must have, even in composing, and this, I conceive, was the true secret of his inveterate collaborativeness.