specially the English, have always made very
serious mistakes, both with regard to the heroine of the younger Dumas'
novel and play, and the author himself. They have taxed him with having
chosen an unworthy subject, and, by idealizing it, taught a lesson of
vice instead of virtue; they have taken it for granted that Alphonsine
Plessis was no better than her kind. She was much better than that,
though probably not sufficiently good to take a housemaid's place and be
obedient to her pastors and masters, to slave from morn till night for
a mere pittance, in addition to her virtue, which was ultimately to
prove its own reward--the latter to consist of a home of her own, with a
lot of squalling brats about her, where she would have had to slave as
she had slaved before, without the monthly pittances hitherto doled out
to her. She was not sufficiently good to see her marvellously beautiful
face, her matchless graceful figure set off by a cambric cap and a
calico gown, instead of having the first enhanced by the gleam of
priceless jewels in her hair and the second wrapped in soft laces and
velvets and satins; but, for all that, she was not the common courtesan
the goody-goody people have thought fit to proclaim her--the common
courtesan, who, according to these goody-goody people, would have
descended to her grave forgotten, but for the misplaced enthusiasm of a
poetical young man, who was himself corrupted by the atmosphere in which
he was born and lived afterwards.

The sober fact is that Dumas _fils_ did not idealize anything at all,
and, least of all, Alphonsine Plessis' character. Though very young at
the time of her death, he was then already much more of a philosopher
than a poet. He had not seen half as much of Alphonsine Duplessis during
her life as is commonly supposed, and the first idea of the novel was
probably suggested to him, not by his acquaintance with her, but by the
sensation her death caused among the Paris public, the female part of
which--almost without distinction--went to look at her apartment, to
appraise her jewels and dresses, etc. "They would probably like to have
had them on the same terms," said a terrible cynic. The remark must have
struck young Dumas, in whose hearing it was said, or who, at any rate,
had it reported to him; for if we carefully look at _all_ his earlier
plays, we find the spirit of that remark largely pervading them.

Alphonsine Plessis had probably learned even less in her gi