Read Ebook: My Memoirs Vol. I 1802 to 1821 by Dumas Alexandre Lang Andrew Author Of Introduction Etc Waller E M Emily Mary Translator

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Ebook has 4620 lines and 182128 words, and 93 pages

"M. d'Orl?ans bore himself as a man who prided himself upon his moderation in the most lawful of pleasures.

"Valen?ay at length presented it to the prince, who, stripping off his day vestments to the waist, afforded to all the company a view of his hairless skin, an example of the fashion indulged in by the highest foppery of the times.

"Princes or great noblemen would not consummate their marriages, nor receive first favours from a mistress, until after they had submitted to this preliminary operation.

"The news of this fact immediately spread throughout the room and over the palace, and it put an end to any doubts of the marriage between the duc d'Orl?ans and Madame de Montesson, over which there had been so much controversy and opposition.

"After his marriage the duc d'Orl?ans lived in the closest intimacy with his wife, she paying him unreservedly the homage due to the first prince of the blood.

"Madame de Montesson's sterling character was for long the source of the prince's happiness, his real happiness.

"She devoted her days to the study of music and of hunting, which pastime she shared with the prince. She also had a theatre in the house she inhabited in the Chauss?e d'Antin, on the stage of which she often acted with him.

"The duc d'Orl?ans was naturally good-natured and simple in his tastes, and the part of a peasant fitted him; while Madame de Montesson played well in the r?les of shepherdess and lover.

"The late duchesse d'Orl?ans had degraded the character of this house to such a degree that no ladies entered it save with the utmost and constant wariness. Madame de Montesson re-established its high tone and dignity; she opened the way to refined pleasures, awakened interest in intellectual tastes and the fine arts, and brought back once more a spirit of gaiety and good fellowship."

Sainte-Assise and this ch?teau at Villers-Cotterets wherein, as related by Soulavie, this ardently desired marriage was brought about, were both residences belonging to the duc d'Orl?ans.

Both father and son set their own marks on it.

The two arms are composed of the letters K and H, and are encircled in the three crescents of Diane de Poitiers.

A curious intermingling of the arms of the married wife and of the mistress is still visible in the corner of the prison which overlooks the little lane that leads to the drinking trough.

My father--His birth--The arms of the family--The serpents of Jamaica--The alligators of St. Domingo--My grandfather--A young man's adventure--A first duel--M. le duc de Richelieu acts as second for my father--My father enlists as a private soldier--He changes his name--Death of my grandfather--His death certificate.

My father, who has already been mentioned twice in the beginning of this history--first with reference to my birth certificate and later in connection with his own marriage contract--was the Republican General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie.

I am unaware what Court quarrel or speculative motive decided my grandfather to leave France, about the year 1760, and to sell his property and to go and establish himself in St. Domingo.

With this end in view he had purchased a large tract of land at the eastern side of the island, close to Cape Rose, and known under the name of la Guinod?e, near Trou-J?r?mie.

Here, on March 25th, 1762, my father was born--the son of Louise-Cessette Dumas and of the marquis de la Pailleterie.

The marquis de la Pailleterie, born in 1710, was then fifty-two years old.

My father's eyes opened on the most beautiful scenery of that glorious island, the queen of the gulf in which it lies, the air of which is so pure that it is said no venomous reptile can live there.

A general, sent to re-conquer the island, when we had lost it, hit upon the ingenious idea of importing from Jamaica into St. Domingo a whole cargo of the deadliest reptiles that could be found, as auxiliaries. Negro snake-charmers were commissioned to take them up at the one island and to set them free on the other.

Tradition has it that a month afterwards every one of the snakes had perished.

St. Domingo, then, possesses neither the black snake of Java, nor the rattlesnake of North America, nor the hooded cobra of the Cape; but St. Domingo has alligators.

I recollect hearing my father relate--when I must have been quite a young child, since he died in 1806 and I was born in 1802--I recollect, I say, hearing my father relate, that one day, when he was ten years old, and was returning from the town to his home, when he saw to his great surprise an object that looked like a tree-trunk lying on the sea-shore. He had not noticed it when he passed the same place two hours before; and he amused himself by picking up pebbles and throwing them at the log; when, suddenly, at the touch of the pebbles, the log woke up.

The log was an alligator dozing in the sun. Now alligators, it seems, wake up in most unpleasant tempers; this one spied my father and started to run after him. My father was a true son of the Colonies, a son of the seashores and of the savannas, and knew how to run fast; but it would seem that the alligator ran or rather jumped still faster than he, and this adventure bid fair to have left me for ever in limbo, had not a negro, who was sitting astride a wall eating sweet potatoes, noticed what was happening, and cried out to my already breathless father:

"Run to the right, little sah; run to the left, little sah."

Which, translated, meant, "Run zigzag, young gentleman," a style of locomotion entirely repugnant to the alligator's mechanism, who can only run straight ahead of him, or leap lizard-wise.

Thanks to this advice, my father reached home safe and sound; but, when there, he fell, panting and breathless, like the Greek from Marathon, and, like him, was very nearly past getting up again.

This race, wherein the beast was hunter and the human being the hunted, left a deep impression on my father's mind.

My grandfather, brought up in the aristocratic circle of Versailles, had little taste for a colonist's mode of life: moreover, his wife, to whom he had been warmly attached, had died in 1772; and as she managed the estate it deteriorated in value daily after her death. The marquis leased the estate for a rent to be paid him regularly, and returned to France.

This return took place about the year 1780, when my father was eighteen years of age.

In the midst of the gilded youth of that period, the Fayettes, the Lameths, the Dillons, the Lazuns, who were all his companions, my father lived in the style of a gentleman's son. Handsome in looks, although his mulatto complexion gave him a curiously foreign appearance; as graceful as a Creole, with a good figure at a time when a well-set-up figure was thought much of, and with hands and feet like a woman's; amazingly agile at all physical exercises, and one of the most promising pupils of the first fencing-master of his time--Laboissi?re; struggling for supremacy in dexterity and agility with St. Georges, who, although forty-eight years old, laid claim to be still a young man and fully justified his pretensions, it was to be expected that my father would have a host of adventures, and he had: we will only repeat one, which deserves that distinction on account of its original character.

Moreover, a celebrated name is connected with it, and this name appears so often in my dramas or in my novels that it seems almost my duty to explain to the public how I came to have such a predilection for it.

The marquis de la Pailleterie had been a comrade of the duc de Richelieu, and was, at the time of this anecdote, his senior by fourteen years; he commanded a brigade at the siege of Philipsbourg in 1738, under the marquis d'Asfeld.

My grandfather was then first gentleman to the prince de Conti.

As is generally known, the duc de Richelieu was, on his grandfather's side , of quite low descent.

The marshal--who at this time was not yet made a marshal--was, by his father, a Vignerot, and only on his grandmother's side a Richelieu. This did not, however, prevent him from taking for his first wife Mademoiselle de Noailles, and for his second Mademoiselle de Guise, the latter alliance connecting him with the imperial house of Austria, and making him cousin to the prince de Pont and the prince de Lixen.

Now it fell out one day that the duc de Richelieu had an attack of colic, and therefore had not taken the usual pains with his toilet; it fell out, I say, that he returned to the camp with my grandfather, and went out hunting, covered with sweat and mud all over.

The princes de Pont and de Lixen were hunting at the same time, and the duke, who was in haste to return home to change his clothes, passed by them at a gallop and saluted them.

"Oh! oh!" said the prince de Lixen, "is that you, cousin? How muddy you are! But perhaps you are a little bit cleaner since you married my cousin."

M. de Richelieu pulled up his horse and leapt to the ground, motioning to my grandfather to do the same, and he advanced to the prince de Lixen:

"Sir," said he, "you did me the honour to address me."

"Yes, M. le duc," replied the prince.

"I am afraid I misunderstood the words you did me the honour to address to me. Will you have the goodness to repeat them to me exactly as you said them?"

The prince de Lixen bowed his head in the affirmative, and repeated word for word the phrase he had uttered.

It was so insolently done that there was no way out of it. M. de Richelieu bowed to the prince de Lixen and clapped his hand to his sword.

The prince followed suit.

The prince de Pont naturally was obliged to be his brother's second, and my grandfather Richelieu's.

A minute later M. de Richelieu plunged his sword through the body of the prince de Lixen, who fell back stone dead into the arms of the prince de Pont.

Fifty-five years had gone by since this event. M. de Richelieu, the oldest of the marshals of France, had been in 1781 appointed president of the Tribunal of Affairs of Honour, in his eighty-fifth year.

He would therefore be eighty-seven when the anecdote we are about to relate took place.

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