Indeed, Dumas would have handled to a nicety the "strange surprising adventures" of Jacques Tournebroche, if only Dumas had ever thought to have his collaborators write this brisk tale, wherein d'Astarac and Tournebroche and Mosaïde display, even now, a noticeable something in common with the Balsamo and Gilbert and Althotas of the _Mémoires d'un Médicin_. One foresees, to be sure, that, with the twin-girthed Creole for guide, M. Jérôme Coignard would have waddled into our affections not quite as we know him, but with somewhat more of a fraternal resemblance to the Dom Gorenflot of _La Dame de Monsoreau_ and _Les Quarante-Cinq_; and that the blood of the abbé's deathwound could never have bedewed the book's final pages, in the teeth of Dumas' economic unwillingness ever to despatch any character who could be used in a sequel. And one thinks rather kindlily of the _Rôtisserie_ as Dumas would have equipped it.... Yes, in reading this book, it is the most facile and least avoidable of mental exercises to prefigure how excellently Dumas would have contrived this book,--somewhat as in the reading of Mr. Joseph Conrad's novels a many of us are haunted by the sense that the Conrad "story" is, in its essential beams and stanchions, the sort of thing which W. Clark Russell used to put together, in a rather different way, for our illicit perusal. Whereby I only mean that such seafaring was illicit in those aureate days when, Cleveland being consul for the second time, your geography figured as the screen of fictive reading-matter during school hours. One need not say that here is no question, in either case, of "imitation," far less of "plagiarism"; nor need one, surely, point out the impossibility of anybody's ever mistaking the _Rôtisserie_ for a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Ere Homer's eyesight began not to be what it had been, the fact was noted by the observant Chian, that very few sane architects commence an edifice by planting and rearing the oaks which are to compose its beams and stanchions. You take over all such supplies ready hewn, and choose by preference time-seasoned timber. Since Homer's prime a host of other great creative writers have recognized this axiom when they too began to build: and "originality" has by ordinary been, like chess and democracy, a Mecca for little minds. Besides, there is the vast difference that M. Anatole France has introduced into the Dumas theatre some pre-eminently un-Dumas-like stage-business: the characters, between assignations and combats, toy amorously with ideas. That is the difference which at a stroke dissevers them from any helter-skelter character in Dumas as utterly as from any of our clearest thinkers in office.