Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/291

 Chasse et l'Amour," for the humours of the chase and a slight but pretty love-story are the chief attractions of this book, which is one of the best of that class of novels written by Dumas and yet so neglected by his admirers,—the slight, humorous story of modern humble life.

It is not generally known that in the closing years of his life Dumas tried his hand once more at a "romance of cape-and-sword." The reader will search the comprehensive list of MM. Calmann-Lévy in vain for any record of it. In the early part of 1866—so Ferry asserts—the editor of Les Nouvelles appealed to Dumas for an historical romance in his famous style, and Dumas agreed to think the matter over. He found an excellent subject in the career of "Le Comte de Moret," that illegitimate son of Henri Quatre who disappeared so mysteriously during the battle of Castelnaudary, and whose body was never found. He had already treated this subject in that charming story, "La Colombe." The first number of the feuilleton, Ferry tells us, promised an engrossing story; but unhappily other preoccupations, other work, took Dumas's attention from the romance, which flagged. He lost the thread of the narrative, which became merely a chronique, full of long extracts from the memoirs of Pontis, Delaporte, and from other historical documents of the seventeenth