Alexandre DUMAS père (1802-1870). Autograph manuscript signe - Lot 424

Alexandre DUMAS père (1802-1870). Autograph manuscript signed, Casimir Delavigne, [1836]; 4 1/4 pages in-4 (cut out for printing and reassembled; slight wetness). Dramatic criticism article on Casimir Delavigne, published in the newspaper L'Impartial on May 6, 1836. This is the second feuilleton Dumas has devoted to Delavigne (the first appeared on April 26). It begins with Delavigne's return from Italy: "His friends proclaimed him the Messiah of new literature, and this was one of the first wrongs they did him. Men are born in harmony with the times, like flowers and fruit with the seasons [...] The July sun made them bloom; and the most skilful of these, after having seen all that was too young or too old to withstand those hot July and June days fall around him, not only remained standing, but at this very hour has climbed to the highest degree of the ministerial spiral. Now there was a literary revolution", brought about in particular by the actor Talma. Dumas recounts how Delavigne's Marino Faliero, proposed for the Théâtre Français, had to give way to Dumas' Henri III et sa cour, and was brought to the Porte Saint-Martin theater; and he severely criticizes the drama, "an imitation of Byron's", which nevertheless had a hundred performances, before Victor Hugo's Hernani recalls "the attention and the crowd to the Théâtre Richelieu"... Then came Louis XI, inspired by Walter Scott, in which Delavigne "exhumed the skeleton of the old tyrant of Plessis les Tours [...] this historical giant, who appears to us between Darmagnac's scaffold and La Balue's cage". And Dumas inscribed the formula: "La suite à un prochain numero" (but there was no further article on Delavigne in L'Impartial). Attached is a copy (by Armand Guillaume, secretary to the King's Cabinet) of Alexandre Dumas' letter to Louis-Philippe, November 13, 1831, claiming the cross (2p. ½ in-4).