KING OF PARIS (504 pp.)Guy Endore Simon & Schuster ($4).
Three roaring literary lions bestrode the narrow Paris of the mid-19th century. All three wrote enormously, loved widely, spent wildly. Honore de Balzac was the greatest novelist. Victor Hugo was the greatest poet. Alexandre Dumas pere ate the most.
The brothers Goncourt described Dumas once: "a kind of a giant with the hair of a Negro, the salt beginning to mix with the pepper, and with little blue eyes buried in his flesh like those of a hippopotamus, clear and mischievous; and an enormous moon...
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