In its limitation to his years of youth, the _Mémoires_ of Dumas resemble that equally delightful book, the long autobiographical fragment by George Sand. Both may contain much _Dichtung_ as well as _Wahrheit_: at least we see the youth of the great novelists as they liked to see it themselves. The _Mémoires_, with _Mes Bêtes_, possess this advantage over most of the books, that the most crabbed critic cannot say that Dumas did not write them himself. In these works, certainly, he was unaided by Maquet or any other collaborator. They are all his own, and the essential point of note is that they display all the humour, the goodness of heart, the overflowing joy in life, which make the charm of the novels. Here, unmixed, unadulterated, we have that essence of Dumas with which he transfigured the tame "copy" drawn up by Maquet and others under his direction. He told them where to find their historical materials, he gave them the leading ideas of the plot, told them how to block out the chapters, and then he took these chapters and infused into them his own spirit, the spirit which, in its pure shape, pervades every page of the _Mémoires._ They demonstrate that, while he received mechanical aid from collaborators, took from their hands the dry bones of his romances, it was he who made the dry bones live. He is now d'Artagnan, now Athos, now Gorenflot, now Chicot,--all these and many other personages are mere aspects of the immortal, the creative Alexandre. Dumas's autobiography, as far as it is presented in this colossal fragment, does not carry us into the period of his great novels (1844-1850). Even this Porthos of the pen found the task of writing the whole of his autobiography _trop lourd._ The work (in how many volumes?) would have been monumental: he left his "star-y-pointing pyramid" incomplete, and no mortal can achieve the task which he left undone.