46 - DUMAS, Alexandre (1802–1870).

DUMAS, Alexandre (1802–1870). Autograph manuscript signed “Alex Dumas,” [Conversation with My Readers, August 1854]; 3 folio pages on blue paper (folds with small tears). Editorial for his newspaper *Le Mousquetaire* dated August 24, 1854. Note: Dumas addresses his “Dear Readers—Lovely Ladies,” to whom he has not in vain “once again held out D’Artagnan’s hat. You have reached out your hand, and the musketeer’s felt hat is ringing with coins.” He received nearly 400 francs for “poor, dear Madame Saqui” [Marguerite SAQUI (1786–1866), acrobat and tightrope dancer]: “With four hundred francs, she’ll make it through the winter, and come winter, well, we’d be all too unfortunate if we didn’t manage to organize a benefit performance for her.” And Dumas called on Arnault to make his “immense Hippodrome” available. He then mentions that the sculptor CLÉSINGER, having received a splinter of marble in his eye, had to put his statue of Frédéric Soulié on hold. And he recounts that the singer Gilbert DUPREZ came to sing his upcoming opera [Samson] for him: “Never, I must say, has such masterful music been sung with a fresher and more powerful voice.” He then invites his readers to go to Rue Laffitte to admire Eugène DELACROIX’s *The Tiger Hunt*: “You know Delacroix, don’t you, dear readers? You have seen his marvelous canvases, rich in color and bursting with action. Well, you have never seen anything more beautiful, more dynamic, more colorful, or more full of movement—even if you consider this struggle taking place amid tall grass near a pool of water in a ravine opening onto green countryside and beneath a blue sky. An Arab horseman is surprised by a tiger […] The tiger leaped at the horse’s chest, but the horse reared up—so that the tiger could only seize the upper thigh of the horse, which was standing on its hind legs. It crushes that thigh between its teeth. Nothing is more disheveled and painful than the horse’s head—nothing is more powerfully posed than the tiger’s stance. As for the Arab, who is merely the third character in the drama, he pulls himself up from the saddle with one hand while with the other he strikes the tiger with his spear”… Finally, Dumas mentions a pastel portrait of the actor MÉLINGUE by Eugène GIRAUD: “Never has the cavalier nonchalance of the great artist—who created twelve or fifteen roles for me that have become archetypes—been captured on the fly, pinned to the canvas, and enclosed in a frame by a more magical stroke of the brush than that of the enchanter Eugène Giraud. It is as beautiful as a Wandick, as a Velázquez, as a Veronese. It is as beautiful as everything that is beautiful, in short”…