e by M. Edmond About, the other
by his own son, which show, in brief space, why this novelist is so
beloved, and why he deserves our affection and esteem. M. Villaud, a
railway engineer who had lived much in Italy, Russia, and Spain, was the
person whose enthusiasm finally secured a statue for Dumas. He felt so
much gratitude to the unknown friend of lonely nights in long exiles,
that he could not be happy till his gratitude found a permanent
expression. On returning to France he went to consult M. Victor Borie,
who told him this tale about George Sand. M. Borie chanced to visit the
famous novelist just before her death, and found Dumas' novel, "Les
Quarante Cinq" (one of the cycle about the Valois kings) lying on her
table. He expressed his wonder that she was reading it for the first
time.

"For the first time!--why, this is the fifth or sixth time I have read
'Les Quarante Cinq,' and the others. When I am ill, anxious, melancholy,
tired, discouraged, nothing helps me against moral or physical troubles
like a book of Dumas." Again, M. About says that M. Sarcey was in the
same class at school with a little Spanish boy. The child was homesick;
he could not eat, he could not sleep; he was almost in a decline.

"You want to see your mother?" said young Sarcey.

"No: she is dead."

"Your father, then?"

"No: he used to beat me."

"Your brothers and sisters?"

"I have none."

"Then why are you so eager to be back in Spain?"

"To finish a book I began in the holidays."

"And what was its name?"

"'Los Tres Mosqueteros'!"

He was homesick for "The Three Musketeers," and they cured him easily.

That is what Dumas does. He gives courage and life to old age, he charms
away the half-conscious _nostalgie_, the _Heimweh_, of childhood. We are
all homesick, in the dark days and black towns, for the land of blue
skies and brave adventures in forests, and in lonely inns, on the battle-
field, in the prison, on the desert isle. And then Dumas comes, and,
like Argive Helen, in Homer, he casts a drug into the wine, the drug
nepenthe, "that puts all evil out of mind." Does any one suppose that
when George Sand was old and tired, and near her death, she would have
found this anodyne, and this stimulant, in the novels of M. Tolstoi, M.
Dostoiefsky, M. Zola, or any of the "scientific" observers whom we are
actually requested to hail as the masters of a new art, the art of the
future? Would they make her laugh, a