his themes are courage, loyalty, honour, love, pageantry, and adventure; he belongs to the tradition of Scott and Schiller, but as a story-teller excels every other.  His plays and novels are both very numerous; the “OEuvres Completes,” published between 1860 and 1884, fill 277 volumes.  Probably “Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers” are the most famous of his stories.  He was an untiring and exceedingly rapid worker, a great collaborator employing many assistants, and was also a shameless plagiarist; but he succeeded in impressing his own quality on all that he published.  Besides plays and novels there are several books of travel.  His son, Alexandre, was born in 1824.  The “Memoirs,” published in 1852, which are here followed through their author’s struggles to his triumph, may be the work of the novelist as well as of the chronicler, but they give a most convincing impression of his courageous and brilliant youth, fired equally by art and by ambition.

I.—­Memories of Boyhood

I was born on July 24, 1802, at Villers-Cotterets, a little town of the Department of Aisne, on the road from Laon to Paris, so that, writing now in 1847, I am forty-five years old.  My father was the republican general, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie, and I still use this patronymic in signing official documents.  It came from my grandfather, marquis of that name, who sold his properties in France, and settled down in 1760 on vast estates in San Domingo.  There, in 1762, my father was born; his mother, Louise-Cessette Dumas, died in 1772; and in 1780, when my father was eighteen, the West Indian estates were leased, and the marquis returned to his native country.

My father spent the next years among the youth of the great families of that period.  His handsome features—­all the more striking for the dark complexion of a mulatto—­his prodigious physical strength, his elegant creole figure, with hands and feet as small as a woman’s, his unrivalled skill in bodily exercises, and especially in fencing and horsemanship, all marked him out as one born for adventures.  The spirit of adventure was there, too.  Assuming the name of Dumas because his father objected to the family name being dragged through the ranks, he enlisted as a private in a regiment of dragoons in 1786, at the age of twenty-four.  Quartered at Villers-Cotterets in 1790, he met my mother, Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Labouret, whom he married two years later.  Their children were one daughter, and then myself.  The marquis had died in 1786.

My memory goes back to 1805, when I was three, and to the little country house, Les Fosses, we lived in.  I remember a journey to Paris in the same year, and the death of my father in 1806.  Then my mother, sister, and I, left in poverty, went to live with grandfather and grandmother Labouret.  Here, in gardens full of shady trees and gorgeous blossoms, I spent those happy days when hope extends hardly further than to-morrow, and memory hardly further than yesterday; storing my mind with classical mythology and Bible stories, the “Arabian Nights,” the natural history of Buffon, and the geography of “Robinson Crusoe.”