The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-01-02
A Visit tn Dumas EiIa

The papers tell me that Dumas is
 dead. Only two months ago, when I
 walked out from Dieppe, where I was staying, to that villa at Puys, near Lord Salisbury's, in which Dumas pere had died, I should have refused to believe that the vigorous old man who received
 me so graciously had not many years still before him. He had just been reading his new play to Claretie; for the moment it was a great secret, and
 rot word was to be breathed in Dieppe about the visit from the Come die Francaise. He was very pleased about if, and his face beamed as ho came into the room. I saw a short. thick set, slightly corpulent old man,
 young for his years with very crisp
 white hair, and, coming oddly into the
 distinction of a singularly distinguished face, the trace of the negro, almost as
 marked as 1t had been latterly i'm his father. His eyes were firm and level, still clear, and his voice, little husky, was deep and powerful. He talked cas- fly. f1uently, confidently on any subject,
 not seeming to care particularly what what his audience dhese were three of
 us) thought of what he had to say; he talked like one accustomed to be list ened to, but without the slightest affec- tation the slightest effort.
 Our homage, which was sincere, he reived simply, as his due; our homage to his father, which. on my part, was certainly more deeply felt, seemed to please him more intimately. He took
 us into his study, and showed us a curl | ous collection of portraits, covering an entire wall, Of the young Dumas, ex-
 quisitely thin and elegant, the typical romantic of the time of Antony" drawn by the typically romantic De- verha; then of the young man some what accentuated in type; of the older | man, gradually becoming more obese, | more powerful, I must say, more im- pressiVe; finally of the vast African, clasping his hands across his stomach, as he sits ponderously in an armchair. Dumas fills has always professed an ad- miration, perhaps little extreme or even voulu, for his father, and later on,
 as he was walking up the garden path with us, he stopped to narrate, with immense enjoyment, some culinary story. 'Vous mettrez du poivre rouge" was always the first precaution of the elder Dumas recipes.
 had just been seeing Jane Hading in La Princesse de Bagdad" and we talked of the plays of Sarah Bernhart, | of whom, naturally, he spoke with rap | ture. Then the talk drifted back to lit- erature, and he spoke for a long time. with the most sympathetic emphasis, | of Maupassant. Maupassant had been near neighbor of his, he was always welcome as an informal guest at din- l ner and it had been one of Dumas great desires to install the writer of
 La Maison Tellier" as a. permanent guest at the institute. Maupassant
 never cared for the distinction, which would have simply bored him. It was to the lack, partly, of this distinction | that Dumas, characteristically, attrib- uted some of the neglect which has come upon Maupassants work since his death. Now that he is dead. too" said Dumas, a little bitterly 'everv one who likes can attack him; while he
 was alive they never dared. He was 1 too useful to the papers. The papers were always in want of his short stor- | ies; they had to be polite to their most frequent and popular contributor, Zola now, they can attack as much as they | like. because he only writes long nov | els and it is only once 8 year that a newspaper will want any of his work. | But with Maupassant it was different" And then he talked to us of the charm of the man, the easy excellence of his style with more enthusiasm than he showed for any other subject except | Dumas pere and Sarah Bernhardt.
 We talked a, little of English litera- ture. Like almost all Frenchmen of
 the older school, he knew nothing about it, and was, think, only just politely interested in the subject. It pleased him { know that his plays had made him famous in England. Even our lit tie pilgrimage he was amiable enough l to take as a compliment, and he wrote an affectf0nata inscription in tfle copy 1 of La Dame aux Camelias," which one of us carried with him.. I do not re- member that he said anything memor- able, but he said nothing which was not shrewd and, entirely to the qoint,
 and, in some curious way. he left upon