g
the sale of her carriages, the pledging of her diamonds and her furs--in
order not to worry the man she loved, for the time being, with money
matters. Honestly speaking, it wanted my son's cleverness to make a
piece out of Alphonsine Plessis' life. True, he was fortunate in that
she died, which left him free to ascribe that death to any cause but the
right one, namely, consumption. I know that he made use of it, but he
took care to show the malady aggravated by Armand Duval's desertion of
her, and this is the only liberty he took with the psychological,
consequently scientific and logical, development of the play. People
have compared his Marguerite Gautier to Manon Lescaut, to Marion
Delorme, and so forth: it just shows what they know about it. They might
just as well compare Thiers to Cromwell. Manon Lescaut, Marion Delorme,
Cromwell, knew what they wanted: Marguerite Gautier and Thiers do not;
both are always in search of _l'inconnu_, the one in experimental
politics, the other in experimental love-making. Still, my son has been
true to Nature; but he has taken an episode showing her at her best. He
was not bound to let the public know that the frequent recurrence of
these love episodes, but always with a different partner, constitutes a
disease which is as well known to specialists as the disease of
drunkenness, and for which it is impossible to find a cure. Messalina,
Catherine II., and thousands of women have suffered from it. When they
happen to be born in such exalted stations as these two, they buy men;
when they happen to be born in a lowly station and are attractive, they
sell themselves; when they are ugly and repulsive they sink to the
lowest depths of degradation, or end in the padded cells of a madhouse,
where no man dares come near them. Nine times out of ten the malady is
hereditary, and I am certain that if we could trace the genealogy of
Alphonsine Plessis, we should find the taint either on the father's side
or on the mother's, probably on the former's, but more probably still on
both."[19]

[Footnote 19: The following is virtually a summary of an
article by Count G. de Contades, in a French bibliographical
periodical, _Le Livre_ (Dec. 10, 1885), and shows how near
Alexandre Dumas was to the truth. I have given it at great
length. My excuse for so doing is the extraordinary popularity
of Dumas' play with all classes of playgoers. As a consequenc