The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo--even of Thackeray--could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age is as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it does not contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet it is hard to separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the true and the false; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped them, and to distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and moved and had their being, and the phantoms of imagination called into life and given each its local habitation and its name by the poet's pen working its immemorial spell upon the reader's credulity.
To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo's imps and Balzac's bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the tax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the field marshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in Cæsar de Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in the Regent and in Jean Lass. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes and see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out of the Bristol or the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle is merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean nothing at all.
I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet. Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly twenty years. Hard by is the house where the Marquise de Brinvilliers--a gentle, blue-eyed thing they tell us--a poor, insane creature she must have been--disseminated poison and death, and, just across and beyond the Place des Vosges, the Hotel de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her doll-rags and did her spriting after she and Henri Quatre had agreed no longer to slide down the same cellar door. There is in the Museum a death-mask, colored and exceeding life-like, taken the day after Ravaillac delivered the finishing knife-thrust in the Rue de Ferronnerie, which represents the Bèarnais as anything but a tamer of hearts. He was a fighter, however, from Wayback, and I dare say Dumas' narrative is quite as authentic as any.