lleron and Meilhac make any
contribution of importance. But Dumas and Sardou were both of them born
playwrights of keen intelligence, having a definite understanding of the
principles of playmaking; and what they said to M. Binet and his
associate was interesting and significant.

Dumas declared that he made no notes for any of his plays and that he
never composed a detailed scenario. He thought of only one piece at a
time, brooding over it for long months sometimes, and then throwing it
on paper almost at white heat, if it dealt with passion. If, on the
other hand, it was a comedy of character, a study of social conditions,
the actual composition was necessarily more leisurely and protracted. He
had carried in mind for six or seven years the theme of 'Monsieur
Alphonse;' and he had actually put it on paper in seventeen days. He had
written the 'Princesse Georges' in three weeks and the 'Etrangere' in a
month; and the second act of the 'Dame aux Camelias' had been penned in
a single session of four hours. But he had toiled seven or eight hours a
day for eleven months over the 'Demi-Monde,' the second act alone
costing him two months labor. He rarely modified what he had written by
minor corrections; but sometimes, when his play was completed, he
discovered that it was weak in its structure or inadequate in its
motivation, in which case he reconstructed one or more acts, or even the
whole play, writing it all over again.

M. Dumas admitted that he took little interest in the setting of his
plays or in the manifold details of stage-management. He indicated
summarily the kind of room that he desired; and he put down in his
manuscript only the absolutely necessary movements of his characters.
The rest he left to the manager and the stage-manager.

Here--as indeed everywhere,--Dumas revealed himself in the sharpest
contrast with Sardou, who designed his sets himself and placed his
furniture precisely where he needed it for the action of his play,
sometimes finding that a given scene seemed to him to lose half its
effect if it was acted on the left side of the stage instead of the
right. He was a constant note-taker, putting down suggestions for single
scenes or for striking suggestions, as these might occur to him; and as
a result of this incessant cerebral activity he had always on hand more
or less complete plots for at least fifty plays. When he decided to
write one of these pieces, he assembled his scattered notes, set