From A Bibliography of Alexandre Dumas père by Frank Wild Reed: This was written upon the occasion of the marriage of a great lord with a noble lady who had formerly been the mistress of a famous foreign poet.
On the very morning of the ceremony, so goes the story, the prospective husband received the card of Alexandre Dumas with these four lines upon the back. It must be confessed that such an apparently gratuitous insult is quite foreign to our author's general good-heartedness, and, unless there was some sufficient provocation, it is difficult to accept,
Soit ! épousez cette comtesse,
Vous êtes riche, elle n'a rien ;
Elle ira bien à la richesse,
Et les cornes vous iront bien.
It will be seen that this is practically the epigram which Dumas imitated from Poushkine, and published, first in "Le Monte-Cristo," number for 25th November, 1858, an'd later in the "Impressions de Voyage : En Russie," Chapter XXII.
