ille and Racine had always been disliked by this born
romanticist. 'Hamlet' carried him off his feet. Soon afterwards he
read Buerger's 'Lenore,' the ballad which Scott translated at the
very beginning of his career as an author.

"Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee."

This German ballad, says Scott, "struck him as the kind of thing he
could do himself." And Dumas found that the refrain

"Hurrah, fantome, les morts vont vite,"

was more to his taste than the French poetry of the eighteenth
century. He tried to translate 'Lenore.' Scott finished it in a night;
Dumas gave up in despair. But this, he says, was the beginning of his
authorship. He had not yet opened a volume of Scott or Cooper, "ces
deux grands romanciers." With a friend named Leuven he began to try
to write plays (1820-1821). He now poached his way to Paris, defraying
his expenses with the game he shot on the road. Shakespeare too was a
poacher; let us excuse the eccentricities of genius. He made Talma's
acquaintance; he went to the play; he resigned his clerkship: "Paris
was my future." Thither he went; his father's name served him with
General Foy, and he obtained a little post in the household of the Duc
D'Orleans--a supernumerary secretaryship at L60 a year. At the play he
met Charles Nodier, reading the rarest of Elzevirs, and at intervals
(like Charles Lamb) hissing his own piece! This delightful scene, with
its consequences, occupies one hundred and thirty pages!

Dumas now made the acquaintance of Frederic Soulie, and became a
pillar of theatres. He began to read with a purpose: first he read
Scott; "The clouds lifted, and I beheld new horizons." Then he turned
to Cooper; then to Byron. One day he entered his office, crying aloud,
"Byron is dead!" "Who is Byron?" said one of his chiefs. Here Dumas
breaks off in his 'Memoirs' to give a life of Byron! He fought his
first duel in the snow, and won an easy, almost a bloodless victory.
For years he and Leuven wrote plays together,--plays which were never
accepted.

At last he, Rousseau (not Jean Jacques!), and Leuven composed a piece
together. Refused at one house, it was accepted at another: 'La Chasse
et l'Amour' (The Chase and Love) was presented on September 22d, 1823.
It succeeded. A volume of three short stories sold to the extent of
four copies. Dumas saw that he must "