Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/45

 I walked a dozen leagues to dance at a ball, and was pretty smart with the foil and pistol; I could play tennis like a St Georges, and rarely missed a hare or a partridge at thirty paces." His kindly patrons had tried to make a musician, a priest, a notary, or a scholar of him; now he freed himself from all restraining influences, and began to live, think, plan, and work for himself. The change, as we shall sec, worked wonders. Perhaps the phrase "for himself" is misleading; for his worst friends (and he made many) never doubted Dumas's passionate love for his mother. "I was a man, now," he writes, "for a woman depended on me. I was going to repay my mother in some degree for all the care she had lavished on me." Truly, he was a man, in two senses: he had reached the age of a a man, and he acted with all a man's courage and sense of responsibility.

Of all his long and adventurous career, the story of Dumas's early struggles is the most familiar to the general reader; every sketch of his life, however short, deals with it, so that we, in turn, can be as brief as this interesting period will allow.

On his arrival in Paris Dumas went to each of his father's old comrades, and experienced the sad but inevitable disillusionment. Jourdan, Victor, Sebastiani, turned their backs on their old colleague's son; Verdier had himself been superannuated, and