Spring at Villers-Cotterets--Whitsuntide--The Abbé Grégoire invites me to dance with his niece--Red books--The Chevalier de Faublas--Laurence and Vittoria--A dandy of 1818 CHAPTER VIII I leap the _Haha_--A slit follows--The two pairs of gloves--The quadrille--Fourcade's triumph--I pick up the crumbs--The waltz--The child becomes a man ALEXANDRE DUMAS BY ANDREW LANG There is no real biography of Alexandre Dumas. Nobody has collected and sifted all his correspondence, tracked his every movement, and pursued him through newspapers and legal documents. Letters and other papers (if they have been preserved) should be as abundant in the case of Dumas as they are scanty in the case of Molière. But they are left to the dust of unsearched offices; and it is curious that in France so little has been systematically written about her most popular if not her greatest novelist. Many treatises on one or other point in the life and work of Dumas exist, but there is nothing like Boswell's _Johnson_ or Lockhart's _Scott._ The _Mémoires_ by the novelist himself cover only part of his career, _Les Enfances Dumas_; and they bear the same resemblance to a serious conscientious autobiography as _Vingt Ans Après_ bears to Mr. Gardiner's _History of England._ They contain facts, indeed, but facts beheld through the radiant prismatic fancy of the author, who, if he had a good story to tell, dressed it up "with a cocked hat and a sword," as was the manner of an earlier novelist. The volumes of travel, and the delightful work on Dumas's domestic menagerie, _Mes Bêtes_, also contain personal confessions, as does the novel, _Ange Pitou_, with the _Causeries_, and other books. Fortunately Dumas wrote most about his early life, and the early life of most people is more interesting than the records of their later years.