Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/147

 now installed in a little plainly furnished palazzo, bent upon devoting all his energies to the service of archaeology and the discovery of priceless art-treasures; but the Neapolitans, learning that a stranger had been appointed to—some post or other—waxed indignant. This "job," as Mr Fitzgerald elegantly calls it, excited the rabble, and Dumas, in the midst of his gaiety and his unselfish labours, was hooted and mobbed by the people for whom he had worked so hard. For a time, the ingratitude of the populace stunned him, and he was undisguisedly pained; but by degrees his spirits returned. This experience was probably still fresh in Dumas's mind when, on the occasion of Victor Emmanuel's triumphal entry into Naples, he pointed out to Du Camp that there were no Garibaldians in the procession. (As a matter of fact we know how the king had insulted the Garibaldians, and caused them to absent themselves.) "Il faut faire le bien d'une façon abstraite, et ne jamais penser à la récompense," was our author's philosophic comment.

Nevertheless he stayed in Naples for four years, occasionally paying flying visits to Paris,—"to have a chat," as he laughingly tells us. But the Indipendant, the journal which Garibaldi had named and which Dumas conducted, so faithfully fulfilled its title, that the editor was continually in collision with Victor Emmanuel's officials, and in 1864 he