Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/242

 Master, and the Black Arrow, you may be sure, and I should think my life not lost for mankind if half a dozen more of my volumes must be thrown in."

208 Dumas himself shared this feeling. The great, strong, vain hero was a child after his own heart. One afternoon his son, seeing him looking careworn, wretched, overwhelmed, asked him,

"What has happened to you? Are you ill?"

"No."

"Well, what is it then?

"I am miserable."

"Why?"

"This morning, I killed Porthos—poor Porthos! Oh what trouble I have had, to make up my mind to do it! But there must be an end to all things. Yet when I saw him sink beneath the ruins, crying 'It is too heavy, too heavy for me!' I swear to you that I cried."

And he wiped away a tear with the sleeve of his dressing-gown.

We have glided insensibly into "Vingt Ans Après" and the "Vicomte de Bragelonne," for it is the D'Artagnan of this last of the series whom Stevenson has so eloquently proclaimed as his hero. In his essay "On a Romance of Dumas's" in "Memories and Portraits," he writes of him thus:

"It is in the character of D'Artagnan, that we