Alexandre Dumas died penniless but cheerful on December 5, 1870, saying of death: "I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to me." One hundred years later his biographer Andre Maurois paid him this tribute: "Dumas was a hero out of Dumas. As stong as Porthos, as adroit as d'Artagnan, as generous as Edmond Dantes, this superb giant strode across the nineteenth century breaking down doors with his shoulder, sweeping women away in his arms, and earning fortunes only to squander them promptly in dissipation. For forty years he filled the newspapers with his prose, the stage with his dramas, the world with his clamor. Never did he know a moment of doubt or an instant of despair. He turned his own existence into the finest of his novels."