"Indeed—how do you know what?"
"I've been told so."
"Poor boy! Read it yourself, first, and then you'll change your mind."
Dumas took his friend's advice, and read Thierry, and a high ambition possessed him.
"One day," he tells us, "Lamartine asked me to what I attributed the success of his 'Histoire des Girondins.'"
"'To the fact that you raised history to the height of the romance,' I replied."
"In Dumas," says Swinburne, "the novelist and the dramatist were thoroughly at one." We are told, and can well believe, that when the immense success of "Les Trois Mousquetaires" called for a dramatised version of the book, little more than scissors and paste, some skill in selection, and a change of form, were needed to turn the romance into a play. On the other hand, "Henri Trois et sa Cour" and "La Tour de Nesle" read like cape-and-sword romances in stage dress.
We know that in Dumas a desire to write fiction had always lurked behind the lust for theatrical fame. About the time that his first vaudeville was performed, the first book, a little collection of short stories, appeared. These, as we have said, were the "Nouvelles Contemporaines" of 1826, afterwards included in the "Souvenirs d'Antony" of
