Thereupon he pulled himself together. To a son of Dumas the use of the pen came naturally. Like most clever young writers--and report speaks of him as specially brilliant at that time--he opened with a book of verse, _Péchés de jeunesse_ (1847). It was succeeded in 1848 by a novel, _La Dame aux camélias_, a sort of reflection of the world in which he had been living. The book had considerable success, and was followed, in fairly quick succession, by _Le Roman d'une femme_ (1848) and _Diane de Lys_ (1851). All this, however, did not deliver him from the load of debt, which, as he tells us, remained odious. In 1849 he dramatized _La Dame aux camélias_, but for various reasons, the rigour of the censorship being the most important, it was not till the 2nd of February 1852, and then only by the intervention of Napoleon's all-powerful minister, Morny, that the play could be produced at the Vaudeville. It succeeded then, and has held the stage ever since, less perhaps from inherent superiority to other plays which have foundered than to the great opportunities it affords to any actress of genius.
Thenceforward Dumas's career was that of a brilliant and prosperous dramatist. _Diane de Lys_ (1853), _Le Demi-Monde_ (1855), _La Question d'argent_ (1857), _Le Fils naturel_ (1858), _Le Père prodigue_ (1859) followed rapidly. Debts became a thing of the past, and Dumas a wealthy man. The didactic habit was always strong upon him. "Alexandre loves preaching overmuch," wrote his father; and in most of his plays he assumes the attitude of a rigid and uncompromising moralist commissioned to impart to a heedless world lessons of deep import. The lessons themselves are mostly concerned with the "eternal feminine," by which Dumas was haunted, and differ in ethical value. Thus in _Les Idées de Madame Aubray_ (1867) he inculcates the duty of the seducer to marry the woman he has seduced; but in _La Femme de Claude_ (1873) he argues the right of the husband to take the law into his own hand and kill the wife who is unfaithful and worthless--a thesis again defended in his novel, _L'Affaire Clémenceau_, and in his pamphlet, _L'Homme-femme_; while in _Diane de Lys_ he had taught that the betrayed husband was entitled to kill--not in a duel, but summarily--the man who had taken his honour; and in _L'Étrangère_ (1876) the bad husband is the victim. Nor did he preach only in his plays. He preached in voluminous introductions, and pamphlets not a few. And when, in 1870 and 1872, France was going through bitter hours of humiliation, he called her to repentance and amendment in a _Nouvelle Lettre de Junius_ and two _Lettres sur les choses du jour_.