The fourth volume comprises three widely dissimilar tales.  One of the strangest stories is that of Urbain Grandier, the innocent victim of a cunning and relentless religious plot.  His story was dramatised by Dumas, in 1850.  A famous German crime is that of Karl-Ludwig Sand, whose murder of Kotzebue, Councillor of the Russian Legation, caused an international upheaval which was not to subside for many years.

An especially interesting volume is number six, containing, among other material, the famous “Man in the Iron Mask.”  This unsolved puzzle of history was later incorporated by Dumas in one of the D’Artagnan Romances a section of the Vicomte de Bragelonne, to which it gave its name.  But in this later form, the true story of this singular man doomed to wear an iron vizor over his features during his entire lifetime could only be treated episodically.  While as a special subject in the Crimes, Dumas indulges his curiosity, and that of his reader, to the full.  Hugo’s unfinished tragedy,’Les Jumeaux’, is on the same subject; as also are others by Fournier, in French, and Zschokke, in German.

Other stories can be given only passing mention.  The beautiful poisoner, Marquise de Brinvilliers, must have suggested to Dumas his later portrait of Miladi, in the Three Musketeers, the mast celebrated of his woman characters.  The incredible cruelties of Ali Pacha, the Turkish despot, should not be charged entirely to Dumas, as he is said to have been largely aided in this by one of his “ghosts,” Mallefille.

“Not a mere artist”—­writes M. de Villemessant, founder of the Figaro,—­“he has nevertheless been able to seize on those dramatic effects which have so much distinguished his theatrical career, and to give those sharp and distinct reproductions of character which alone can present to the reader the mind and spirit of an age.  Not a mere historian, he has nevertheless carefully consulted the original sources of information, has weighed testimonies, elicited theories, and . . . has interpolated the poetry of history with its most thorough prose.”

THE BORGIAS

PROLOGUE

On the 8th of April, 1492, in a bedroom of the Carneggi Palace, about three miles from Florence, were three men grouped about a bed whereon a fourth lay dying.

The first of these three men, sitting at the foot of the bed, and half hidden, that he might conceal his tears, in the gold-brocaded curtains, was Ermolao Barbaro, author of the treatise ‘On Celibacy’, and of ‘Studies in Pliny’:  the year before, when he was at Rome in the capacity of ambassador of the Florentine Republic, he had been appointed Patriarch of Aquileia by Innocent viii.

The second, who was kneeling and holding one hand of the dying man between his own, was Angelo Poliziano, the Catullus of the fifteenth century, a classic of the lighter sort, who in his Latin verses might have been mistaken for a poet of the Augustan age.