In 1830
he had forty years to run, and he filled the cup of the Hours to the
brim with activity and adventure. His career was one of
unparalleled production, punctuated by revolutions, voyages, exiles,
and other intervals of repose. The tales he tells of his prowess in
1830, and with Garibaldi, seem credible to me, and are borne out, so
far, by the narrative of M. Maxime Ducamp, who met him at Naples, in
the Garibaldian camp. Like Mr. Jingle, in "Pickwick," he "banged
the field-piece, twanged the lyre," and was potting at the foes of
the republic with a double-barrelled gun, when he was not composing
plays, romances, memoirs, criticisms. He has told the tale of his
adventures with the Comedie Francaise, where the actors laughed at
his Antony, and where Madame Mars and he quarrelled and made it up
again. His plays often won an extravagant success; his novels--his
great novels, that is--made all Europe his friend. He gained large
sums of money, which flowed out of his fingers, though it is said by
some that his Abbotsford, Monte Cristo, was no more a palace than
the villa which a retired tradesman builds to shelter his old age.
But the money disappeared as fast as if Monte Cristo had really been
palatial, and worthy of the fantasy of a Nero. He got into debt,
fled to Belgium, returned, founded the Mousquetaire, a literary
paper of the strangest and most shiftless kind.
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