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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027343221 
 
THE LIFE OF 
 
 ALFRED DE MUSSET 
 
 BY 
 ARV^DE BARINE 
 
 DONE INTO ENGLISH 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES CONNER HAYDEN 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY 
 
 EDWIN C. HILL COMPANY 
 
 1906 
 

 Copyright, 1905, bt 
 EDWIN C. HILL COMPANY 
 
 
 EDWIN PRESS 
 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I HEREBY render thanks to all those who have 
 been kind enough to open to me their archives 
 or their collections, and thus enable me to write 
 this little book. M. Alexandre Dumas has taken 
 the trouble to furnish me with information which 
 has been of infinite value. Madame Maurice 
 Sand, with a confidence for which I am pro- 
 foundly grateful, has sent me a large number 
 of unpublished letters, taken from the archives 
 of Nohant. M. le Vicomte de Spoelberch de 
 Lovenjoul, whose kindness and graciousness are 
 known to all collectors, allowed me to profit by 
 the treasures of his collection; to him I owe the 
 fact of my having been able to consult the manu- 
 script of Sainte-Beuve's " Journal " and numer- 
 ous unpubhshed letters. M. Maurice Clouard, 
 who knows all that one can know about Musset, 
 was most hberal in the cooperation of his in- 
 exhaustible learning and precious hbrary. M. 
 Taigny has graciously placed at my disposal 
 autograph letters of Musset, most of them un- 
 published. Others have furnished me with in- 
 formation of a kind to be found neither in books 
 nor in manuscripts. I hereby acknowledge to 
 aU, my debt of gratitude. 
 
 A. B. 
 
LIFE OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE BEGINNING CHIIJ)HOOD 
 
 Every generation sings for itself and in a lan- 
 guage of its own. It has poets of its own to 
 interpret its feelings and aspirations. After- 
 ward come other men with other ideas and other 
 passions, almost always quite inconsistent with 
 those of their elders, and the newcomers are un- 
 touched by all that seemed, only the day before, 
 to be so thrilling. Their intellectual preoccupa- 
 tions are no longer the same; nor their eyes, their 
 ears, their souls. If peradventure they rehsh the 
 poets of the bygone generation, it is after study 
 and reflection, as if it were a question of writers 
 of a distant time. This, too, is only on the con- 
 dition that they find no cause to dread their influ- 
 ence. Otherwise they take an aversion to them, 
 because the younger men feel an inward and per- 
 haps wholesome need of thinking and feeling 
 in other ways than their predecessors felt and 
 thought. On these terms only do they gain con- 
 sciousness of themselves. 
 
 Musset is beginning to be one of these poets 
 
6 THE LIFE OF 
 
 of yesterday whom only heads that are turning 
 gray retain power to understand. No other in 
 our century has been so well loved. Not one has 
 waked in men's hearts so many of those pro- 
 longed echoes which spring only from a deep har- 
 mony with him who reads, and which never can 
 spring from mere delight in art. He neverthe- 
 less has yielded to the same law. Our children 
 already need that we explain to them why we can- 
 not hear one line of his, were it the most unmean- 
 ing, without experiencing an emotion of joy or 
 of gloom, why each one of our happinesses, each 
 one of our sufferings revives the memory of some 
 page, a line, a word to console or make us merry. 
 To tell them these things is to betray the secret 
 of our dreams and passions, to confess how 
 romanesque and sentimental we were, and to 
 cover us with ridicule in the eyes of our children 
 who are so little ours. Still such will be the aim 
 of this Uttle book, and the coming historians of 
 Musset will be constrained to do the same, though 
 it may cost them dear. The soul of the poet of 
 The Nights is bound by so many threads, and so 
 strong threads, to the souls of those who were 
 twenty between 1850 and 1870, that to essay to 
 sever them would be in vain. Whether we 
 make it a reproach against Musset or, on the con- 
 trary, see in it his foremost title to glory, matters 
 not ; to speak of him is to speak of the multitudes 
 whom he subdued to their weal or to their woe. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 7 
 
 A happier cradle for a child of genius than that 
 of Alfred de Musset we could hardly imagine. 
 He was born in Paris on the 11th day of Decem- 
 ber, 1810, of a good old family, in which the love 
 of literature was traditional and whose every 
 member from father to son had talent. To trace 
 them back to Colin de Musset, the minstrel of 
 the thirteenth century, whose name was per- 
 haps merely Colin Muset, is unnecessary; but 
 the poet's granduncle, the Marquis de Musset, 
 gained a briUiant success in 1778 with a novel in 
 letters " prompted," according to the preface, 
 " by the love of virtue," and bearing a title to 
 match the preface: Correspondance d'un jeune 
 militaire, or Memoirs de Luzigny et d'Hortense 
 de Saint-Just. The ancient Marquis hved down 
 to 1839, representing, in his grandnephews' 
 eyes, the old regime, not excepting feudal ages. 
 His chateau had medieval parts with deep em- 
 brazures, double floors to hide trap-doors and 
 lurking places. He himself had the strutting 
 gait, the bristhng points of the man who had 
 worn the short culotte. Deep as was his con- 
 tempt for newspapers, never would he faU to 
 uncover when he came across the name of one of 
 the royal family in the gazette, and yet he had 
 not wholly escaped the influence of Rousseau. 
 It was not uncommon for him to write phrases 
 a la Jean Jacques : " One is happy only in the 
 country, one is comfortable only under the shade 
 
8 THE LIFE OF 
 
 of his own fig-tree." With all his devout piety- 
 he had, when getting old, composed a satu-e 
 against the Jesuits, which he signed Thomas 
 SimpUcien. The younger folks of the family- 
 were in the land of Cocagne when with him, 
 but he could not comprehend romanticism. 
 
 The father of Alfred, M. de Musset-Pathay, 
 much younger than the Marquis, harbored no 
 grudges against the Revolution, for it had 
 done him the service of taking away from him 
 that little clerical collet and of giving him his 
 emperor. In his existence he had intermingled 
 literature with war and official labors, and in his 
 writings the same diversity is manifest, a httle 
 of everything — ^novels, history, travels, books of 
 erudition. The biography of Rousseau, in which 
 he takes up his defense against the Grimm clique, 
 is a patient and solid work, and, besides, he pos- 
 sessed a taste and skill in humorous verse. He 
 was jovial and witty and quick at a retort, as well 
 as caustic when the occasion demanded, but at 
 bottom the best and kindest of men. As a father 
 he was amiable, too indulgent, and of the eight- 
 eenth century in his way of thinking. This is a 
 point to bear in mind. No more than the Marquis 
 did M. de Musset-Pathay understand one word 
 of romanticism. He had a sister who was a ca- 
 noness and once a pupU at Saint-Cyr, a woman 
 steeped in pious devotion. She had a httle 
 musty house in a faubourg at Vendome, and here 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 9 
 
 she had quietly grown soured between snarhng 
 dogs and devout practises. Certain lines, writ- 
 ten by one of her nephews, lead one to think that 
 she, too, was not without the gift of repartee and 
 that she was a match for her brother. While she 
 made light of literature, she fixed a distinction 
 between prose and verse : prose was mean drudg- 
 ery, to be left to clodhoppers; verse was the 
 worst of things shameful, one of those himiilia- 
 tions from which families never recover. 
 
 The maternal line of Musset was not less 
 savory. His grandfather, Guyot-Desherbiers, 
 once a lawyer, had associated with the ideologues^ 
 and his imagination was that of a poet, his wit 
 merry and flashing. From all this had sprung 
 an eighteenth-century Fantasio, more sparkling 
 than the one that we know and nowise inferior 
 to him in picturesque language, but without that 
 note of tender melancholy which distinguishes 
 the hero of Musset. M. Guyot-Desherbiers 
 hardly dreamed of showing compassion for the 
 troubles of fairy princesses; but to offset that, 
 during the convulsions succeeding the 9th of 
 Thermidor, he had, and not without great risk, 
 saved more than one head. His grandchildren 
 were fortunate enough to enjoy his inexhaustible 
 vein of inspiration: a grandsire Fantasio was 
 ever Fantasio. He died in 1828, weighed down 
 with years. A poet at leisure, his great work 
 was a poem on Cats. He made the cat a friend 
 
10 THE LIFE OF 
 
 of mankind, a lover of the poor and their scant 
 fare. 
 
 For them, for them his back is swelling, 
 Within his breast for them is weUing 
 The paternoster of dehght. 
 
 Technical difficulties were sport to him; he 
 would write in triple rime — ^unaided by padding 
 expletives — one whole canto of his poem, or he 
 would invent more complicated rhythms. He 
 had guessed the talent of Theodore de BanvUle 
 sooner than Victor Hugo. His grandson missed 
 his influence when he had to face his own people, 
 with their classic bringing up, in defense of the 
 overslidings and unforeseen epithets in the Tales 
 of Spain and Italy. There are so many things 
 that our Fantasies comprehend! 
 
 Grandmother Guyot-Desherbiers was a re- 
 markable sample of the French bourgeois of the 
 preceding century. With an infinite fund of 
 good sense, she was not hindered from being a 
 spiritual daughter of Jean Jacques, as passion- 
 ate as Julie and Saint-Preux, and eloquent hke 
 them in her hours of emotion. Not the eloquence 
 which makes people say of a woman that she 
 talks like a book, but the eloquence and pathos 
 which move the heart. At such a time she made 
 a profound impression upon all the family, for 
 they usually saw her undisturbed and very seri- 
 ous. The eldest daughter, Madame de Musset- 
 Pathay, had much of her nature. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 11 
 
 The intellectual ancestry of De Musset, we see, 
 can readily be unraveled by any one interested 
 in the mysteries of heredity. Among his ances- 
 tors we have found several intellectual men, filled 
 with a joyous animation, and poets more or less, 
 and two women of bright sensibility and warm 
 and natural eloquence. It is to these latter that 
 one may trace The Nights and all the fiery and 
 passionate parts of his work. As for his aunt, 
 the canoness, she fiUed the role of the fairy Cara- 
 bosse, who could not be absent from the christen- 
 ing of a Prince Charming. When De Musset 
 accuses himself in his letters of being a grumbler 
 and writes, " I have grumbled my fiU," or, " Now 
 I am rea,dy to be vexed at myself for all my 
 grumbling," it is the canoness at her pranks, 
 avenging herself for having a poet-nephew, with 
 a breath, a very little one, of her own cross 
 temper. 
 
 The child in whom the race was to unfold in 
 fuU flower was a handsome, affectionate, fair- 
 haired boy. A portrait of him at the age of 
 three, in the troubadour style fashionable in the 
 days of Queen Hortense, presents the youngster 
 en chemise sitting in poetic open-air surround- 
 ings, with his little feet in a stream of water. 
 Long curls give him the look of a very nice little 
 girl. Near him is a big sword which he had de- 
 manded " for defense against the frogs." In 
 another canvas he is a few years older, but stiU 
 
12 THE LIFE OF 
 
 keeping his pretty blond curls. He has also the 
 same placid, ingenuous expression, and yet this 
 did not come out of any failure to take life's 
 troubles in a tragic way, or to enjoy its delights 
 with ardor. He was already in the highest de- 
 gree impressionable, excitable, and eloquent even, 
 if we are to believe his brother Paul, who tells 
 us that, when hardly out of his swaddUng-clothes, 
 the embryo poet had " oratorical impulses and 
 picturesque expressions in depicting childish 
 woes and pleasures." Already he had an " im- 
 patience to enjoy " and the " disposition to squan- 
 der time " which never left him afterward. One 
 day when some red shoes were brought and his 
 mother could not dress him quickly enough to 
 suit him, he stamped his foot and cried, " Hurry, 
 mama, or my new shoes will be old." In fact, 
 he was beginning to suffer from palpitations and 
 choking. 
 
 To deal with these quivering organisms, intel- 
 hgent and light hands are requisite, and M. de 
 Musset-Pathay was only too indulgent. He, 
 too, might have said : 
 
 Whatever he has done, quick pardon first I crave. 
 Whatever he may wish, I ask that he may have — 
 On spoiling children, this is all my mind. 
 
 But M. de Musset-Pathay hardly had any 
 time to be busy with small children. He left his 
 wife to rear Paul and Alfred, who lost nothing 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 13 
 
 thereby. They owed to her one of those whole- 
 some and happy childhoods of which nothing 
 need be said, in which the memorable events, for- 
 ever stamped on the memory, were a game, or a 
 sentence to the dark closet. 
 
 Musset began his studies with a teacher who 
 used to climb up the trees with his pupils. The 
 lessons were none the worse for this, though 
 there was a difficult moment when the scholar 
 came across the Thousand and One Nights and 
 la Bibliotheque bleue. His little head began to 
 turn, and for months, in class and out of it, he 
 thought only of enchanters and paladins. He 
 hunted through his father's house, in rue Cas- 
 sette, for secret passages which make us hear 
 steps sounding within the wall, and for con- 
 cealed doors for traitors and dehverers to spring 
 through. Some one gave him Don Quixote, 
 which quieted him without correcting him of the 
 idea that life is like the enchanted forest in which 
 the four brethren Aymon had miraculous adven- 
 tures. He was born with the faith in luck, and 
 was ever one of those who believe in fate's 
 surprises, only deeming themselves baffled and 
 duped when that which happens is merely what 
 ought to happen. 
 
 Men of such a disposition submit to life 
 instead of being its maker, and the case with 
 Musset was of this kind. 
 
 He was seven when he devoured the Thousand 
 
14 THE LIFE OF 
 
 and One Nights, and that same year he and the 
 whole household made a long stay in the country 
 in an old rambling house, a source of great 
 amusement for the children, which was hard by 
 the farm of goodman Piedeleu, which he has de- 
 scribed in Mar got: " Madame Piedeleu, his wife, 
 had given him nine children, eight of them boys, 
 and if each of the eight was not six feet taU, 
 they were pretty near it. This was certainly the 
 stature of the goodman, and the mother could 
 boast her five feet five; the handsomest woman, 
 too, in the country round. The eight boys, strong 
 as steers, the terror and the admiration of the 
 hamlet, obeyed their sire hke so many slaves." 
 The httle folks from Paris were never weary of 
 watching the tribe of giants and of tumbling in 
 the hayricks. Yet it was after a summer spent 
 in this wholesome fashion that the junior, as soon 
 as he came home, had " a fit of mania," as the 
 brother terms it. " In one day," says Paul, " he 
 smashed a mirror in the parlor with an ivory ball, 
 cut the new curtains with scissors, and pasted a 
 broad, red wafer upon the map of Europe in the 
 very middle of the Mediterranean. These three 
 disasters drew upon him not the smallest repri- 
 mand, because he seemed to be in consternation." 
 This anecdote, which at first sight seems puerile, 
 casts a flash of light upon the inequality of Al- 
 fred's character. No one could show better sense, 
 a clearer head, when the nerves were not con- 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 15 
 
 cerned, but they often were. They were irritable, 
 exciting " fits of mania," in the course of which 
 he would do mischief against his own will. Next 
 he bewailed it all, overwhelming himself with 
 reproaches, but continued none the less at the 
 mercy of his nerves. 
 
 From his brother, also, we learn that he drew 
 his own portrait as Valentine at the beginning 
 of The Two Mistresses. The page that we are 
 about to read is therefore a personal reminis- 
 cence, showing us a too impressionable child. 
 " To make you better acquainted, we must tell 
 you a trait of his childhood. Valentine, when ten 
 or twelve, slept in a little room with a glass door, 
 behind his mother's bedchamber. The room had 
 a somewhat paltry look, and was encumbered 
 with dusty wardrobes. With other limiber, it 
 contained an old portrait in a broad gilt frame. 
 When, on any fine morning, the sun was beating 
 upon the portrait, the child would kneel on the 
 bed and creep close to it, and when they thought 
 him to be asleep, until it was time for the teacher 
 to come, he would he there for hours, with his 
 brow resting on one corner of the frame, and the 
 sunbeams striking the gildings surrounded him 
 with a halo, as it were, in which his swimming 
 eyes were dazzled. In this attitude he would 
 have a thousand dreams, while queer ecstasies 
 laid hold of him. The more brilliantly the 
 light shone the more his heart would expand. 
 
16 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Here it was, as he told me himself, that he con- 
 ceived a passionate longing for sunlight and 
 gold." 
 
 Again, at the age of thirteen, during a hunt 
 in which he barely missed wounding his brother, 
 he had nervous spasms of sufficient violence to 
 induce fever. Noting this, we have the key to 
 many incidents of his troubled existence. 
 
 His college years were as destitute of event as 
 were those of his earlier childhood. From the 
 sixth form onward he was a day-pupU at the 
 college of Henri IV., and made good progress. 
 Now and then he got his share of fisticuffs. We 
 may beheve that he gave some in return. In The 
 Two Mistresses he has told us the rest: "His 
 first steps in hfe were guided by the instinct of 
 inborn passion. In college he sought intimates 
 solely among boys wealthier than himself — ^not 
 out of pride, but from taste. He was precocious 
 in his studies, and was less incited by self-love 
 than by a kind of need of distinction. He would 
 sometimes begin to shed tears in the very midst 
 of the class when on a Saturday he had missed 
 his place on the honor-bench." During holidays 
 his father would take him out for family visits, 
 and he was present at a skirmish with the canon- 
 ess, or even enjoyed the unparalleled honor of 
 sleeping in his uncle's secret chamber. This is 
 aU that happened to him between the ages of nine 
 and sixteen. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 17 
 
 In 1827 he took the second prize in philosophy 
 in the grand competition. Musset, in his essay, 
 treated the pyrrhonists as sophists, as was re- 
 quired by etiquette, but he added that it mattered 
 but Httle whether they were right, " provided 
 that what is do not change and be not taken 
 from us," dummodo quae sunt nee mutentur, nee 
 eripiantur — all of which looks pyrrhonist enough 
 essentially. After the award his mother de- 
 scribed the ceremony to a friend. There were 
 flourishes of trumpets, princes, the four facul- 
 ties in their robes, and her son was so beautiful! 
 She had a good cry, and everything was lovely. 
 " For three days," she continues, " we have seen 
 nothing but crowns, and books with gilt edges; 
 we needed carriages to carry them away." Mus- 
 set, after this apotheosis, left the benches of the 
 classroom. He was bachelor of arts, and he was 
 aU energy in his refusal to fit for the Polytechnic. 
 A long letter to his friend, Paul Foucher, writ- 
 ten, on the 23d of September following, from 
 the chateau of the Marquis, gives us a first 
 glimpse of the forces at work within him. We 
 must bear in mind, as we read these fragments, 
 that he was then at the awkward age, when the 
 ideas are as loose- jointed as the body. He was 
 the first to say, at a later day, that he had been 
 " as shallow as the next man." 
 
 He had but recently heard of the sudden death 
 of Madame Guyot-Desherbiers. His holidays 
 
18 THE LIFE OF 
 
 were broken up and rendered gloomy. "My 
 brother has started back to town. I am alone 
 in the chateau; there is no one to speak to but 
 my uncle, who, it is true, shows me a thousand 
 kindnesses; but the ideas of a white-haired head 
 are not those of a head covered with blond locks. 
 He is a man of extreme erudition. Whenever 
 I speak of dramas which please me or verses 
 which are striking, he replies : ' You would rather 
 read that in some good historian, would you not? 
 It is always truer and rnore exact. You have 
 read Hamlet, and you know the effect produced 
 on him by the learned and erudite Polonius.' 
 And that man is good withal, virtuous, loved by 
 every one. He is not one of those to whom the 
 brook is only flowing, the forest nothing but tim- 
 ber of this or that species and so many hundred 
 fagots. Heaven bless them! Perhaps they are 
 happier than you and I." 
 
 We feel that Musset is a prey to the distress 
 which often seizes upon young men as they per- 
 ceive, at the moment when they begin to think 
 for themselves, that they have become strangers 
 to the round of ideas in which they have been 
 reared. The discovery disconcerts them as a lack 
 of filial respect, albeit that it may flatter their 
 pride. In 1827 romanticism was fermenting in 
 the veins of youth. Young men knew the Medi- 
 tations and the Odes et Ballades by heart. Shake- 
 speare and Bjrron, Goethe and Schiller were their 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 19 
 
 passion. The preface to Cromwell was soon to 
 appear, the adversaries of the new school of 
 poetry were preparing for resistance, and the two 
 camps were seen to be forming which were to 
 come to blows at the first representation of Her- 
 nani. Musset was young among the young, and 
 we can conceive his indignation when the Mar- 
 quis, reasonably no doubt, called it to his atten- 
 tion that Plutarch deserves more confidence than 
 Shakespeare, and that it is not by any means 
 sure that Moses hadaU the ideas which De Vigny 
 ascribed to him. 
 
 In his letter he passed at once to himself and 
 his future : " I feel duU and gloomy, and do not 
 believe you to be more cheerful than I, but I have 
 not even the courage to work. Eh! What could 
 I do? Take up some old thesis again or be orig- 
 inal in spite of myself and my verse? Since I 
 have been reading newspapers, my sole pastime 
 here, somehow all that seems to have a wretched 
 finish! I do not know whether it is the quibbling 
 of commentators, the mania of adapters that dis- 
 gusts me, but I would rather not write or I could 
 wish to be Shakespeare or Schiller. So I do 
 nothing, feeling that the worst that can befall 
 any man with lively passions is to be vidthout 
 them. I am not in love, I am doing nothing, 
 nothing keeps me here. ... I would give 
 twenty-five francs to have one of Shakespeare's 
 pieces here in English. The papers are so in- 
 
20 THE LIFE OF 
 
 sipid — critics so flat! Make systems, my friends, 
 establish rules ; you are working only on the cold 
 monuments of the past. A man of genius will 
 come, and he will upset your scaffoldings, laugh 
 at your poetics. I feel at moments a wish to take 
 the pen and defile one or two sheets of paper, 
 but the initial difficulty deters, and a sovereign 
 disgust makes me stretch my arms and shut my 
 eyes. How is it that I am left here for so long? 
 I need to look at woman; I need a pretty foot 
 and a shapely waist; I need to love. I would 
 fall in love with my cousin, who is old and ugly, 
 if she were not thrifty and a pedant." There 
 ensue two big pages of complaints about his 
 ennui and the law studies for which he is destined 
 by the family: "No, my friend," he concludes, 
 " I cannot believe it; I have that pride; neither 
 you nor I am destined to be merely estimable 
 lawyers or intelligent attorneys. In the depths 
 of my soul an instinct calls out the contrary. I 
 still believe in happiness, though very unhappy 
 nowadays." 
 
 In these schoolboy effusions, it will be noticed, 
 he is racked with the need of writing. White 
 paper attracts and dismays him — ^the two go well 
 together. This is the bursting forth into bud of 
 his vocation, and we detect it at the very begin- 
 ning, as Musset was not one of those infant 
 prodigies, after the fashions of Goethe or Hugo, 
 who used to cry for their nurse in rime. At 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 21 
 
 seventeen his poetical baggage was utterly in- 
 significant. 
 
 As for the distressing ennui always gnawing 
 him, his discouragement in the face of the fu- 
 ture at the moment when all is opening before 
 him, there is nothing within him that is peculiarly 
 his. It is a mental state, noticed again and again 
 by a great variety of authors in the generation 
 which was coming to manhood during the Res- 
 toration, and by Stendhal, and Musset himself, 
 wrongly or rightly attributed to the concussion 
 caused by the downfall of the empire. Their 
 argument is well known. The void left by a Na- 
 poleon cannot be filled. On the morrow after 
 the violent efforts which he exacted from the 
 French, the young men of the Restoration found 
 themselves idlers. Comparing what was going 
 on around them to the imperial gallop through 
 the capitals of Europe, they held the present to 
 be colorless and mean; they knew not what to 
 do with themselves. To these young men Musset 
 has devoted one chapter of the Confession: "A 
 feeling of indescribable discomfort began to 
 work in all young hearts. Condemned to quiet 
 by the rulers of the world, delivered over to 
 vulgar pedants of every species, to sloth and 
 to ennui, the younger men felt in the depth 
 of their souls the presence of an intolerable 
 wretchedness." 
 
 The source of this moral wretchedness may be 
 
22 THE LIFE OF 
 
 a subject for discussion; we cannot deny the ex- 
 istence of it. It was a stubborn disease. Max- 
 ime Du Camp, who was a dozen years younger 
 than Musset, writes in his Literary Souvenirs: 
 " The generation of artists and writers which 
 came before me, the one to which I belonged, 
 had a youth of deplorable sadness — a sadness 
 without cause as well as without object; purely 
 abstract, but inherent in the being and in the 
 epoch." Young men were haunted by the idea 
 of suicide. " It was no fashion merely, as might 
 be thought; it was a general breaking down 
 which rendered the heart sad, the thoughts som- 
 ber, and made men see dimly a deliverance in 
 death." 
 
 The " very unhappy " student of the letter to 
 Paul Foucher was then to enter the world with 
 a soul poisoned with germs of disgust. Another 
 disease which he shared with many of his con- 
 temporaries prevented the wound from healing: 
 " I had," so he wrote long afterward, " or sup- 
 posed I had, that nasty malady, doubt, which 
 essentially is a childish thing, whenever it is not 
 a prejudice and an affectation." (To the Duch- 
 esse de Castries, 1840.) The question here is 
 not merely one of religious lukewarmness, but 
 of that moral anemia which impels us to lose 
 faith in everything, Musset ascribed this plague 
 to the influence of English and German ideas, 
 represented by Byron and Goethe. Whatever 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 23 
 
 the truth, the trouble was there, contributing to 
 the general breaking down mentioned by Du 
 Camp. Musset had been stricken at the age 
 when it is most important to believe in some- 
 thing, no matter what. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MUSSET AND THE CENACLE 
 
 The two years after his leaving college were 
 decisive for his development. He seemed to be 
 doing nothing. " He pretended to be studying 
 law," he says of himself in The Two Mistresses, 
 " and really spent his time strolling about the 
 boulevard or the Tuileries." Soon he quitted law 
 for medicine, but the dissecting-room gave him 
 the horrors; he fled, could not eat, dreamed of 
 corpses, and solemnly renounced the adoption of 
 a profession. " Man," he declared to his family, 
 " is now too little a thing upon this particle of 
 sand on which we live. Most decidedly I shall 
 not consent to become a particular variety of 
 man." 
 
 Despite appearances he was far from losing 
 his time. Paul Foucher had taken him, when a 
 mere boy, to Victor Hugo, and after leaving 
 school he was assiduous in keeping up the ac- 
 quaintance, becoming the Benjamin in the Cena- 
 cle. Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Merimee, 
 Charles Nodier, the two Deschamps brothers, ac- 
 customed themselves, in imitation of Hugo, their 
 chief and master, to keeping the boy about them, 
 
 24 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 25 
 
 admitting him to library discussions in which 
 they laid down the principle that romanticism 
 sprang from the " need of truth " — exactly what, 
 half a century later, was said of naturalism, 
 " that the poet should have but one model, na- 
 ture; one guide, truth"; that, as a consequence, 
 he requires to mix the ugly with the beautiful in 
 his works, " the grotesque with the sublime," 
 since nature has given him the example, and 
 " all in nature is not art." 
 
 In his presence they settled what their new 
 poetic was to be : " We should like a verse at 
 once free, genuine, straightforward, xinderstand- 
 ing how to break at the right moment and, by 
 displacing the cesura, to disguise the monotone 
 of the Alexandrine; fond of the enjambement 
 extending it rather than of the inversion that 
 makes it intricate; faithful to rime, that slave- 
 queen, that supreme grace of our poetry, that 
 parent of our meter, inexhaustible in the variety 
 of its devices, with inconceivable secrets of ele- 
 gance and execution." 
 
 They took him out for esthetic walks, in which 
 the Cenacle, headed by Victor Hugo, practised 
 at romantic sensations; and we must own that 
 Musset did not always bring to them an edifying 
 mental attitude. His companions took their part 
 as neophytes seriously. Whether climbing up 
 the towers of Notre Dame to contemplate in im- 
 agination the Paris of the begging vagrants or 
 
26 THE LIFE OF 
 
 walking the plain of Montrouge to see the sun 
 go down, nobody ever forgot to be romantic. 
 Musset irreverently laughed at the satin waist- 
 coats of his mates, their beards fluttering in the 
 wind, their attitudes of respect before an ogiveal 
 arch, and their grandiloquent apostrophes to the 
 landscape. 
 
 He was also at the evenings with Nodier in 
 the hbrary, when each man would recite his 
 works, prose or verse. In a word, he had the 
 signal good fortune to be adopted, spoiled, lec- 
 tured, indoctrinated by one of the most glorious 
 intellectual elites ever possessed by any country, 
 and he was straightway to prove that the good 
 seed had not fallen into stony places or among 
 the thorns. In him poetry awoke so quickly that 
 it was swifter than the spring; it was an aurora 
 which grew and grew before the sight, and whose 
 earliest gleams flung him into unforgotten rav- 
 ishment. 
 
 It was in the course of sohtary walks in the 
 Bois de Boulogne, less frequented then than now, 
 that he overheard within him the song of his ear- 
 liest rimes. In 1828, in the spring, his relatives 
 had established themselves at Auteuil. He would 
 go out into the woods to read, and there he re- 
 ceived the yet stealthy visits recalled in the Nuit 
 d'Aout. 
 
 From these walks he brought home pieces of 
 verse which he did not admit into his collections. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 27 
 
 and with good reason, because imitation was too 
 much felt in them, but which are precious to the 
 biographer on account of their extreme diversity. 
 They are the verses of a beginner seeking his 
 path, and not irresistibly drawn to one or the 
 other sidie. A reading of Andre Chenier inspired 
 an elegy: 
 
 Both white and sweet she comes, the Athenian maid. 
 To seek the rill from springs beneath the fig-tree's shade. 
 
 A meeting of the Cenacle brought out a ballad, 
 and next Musset wrote a drama in honor of 
 Hugo. We read in this : 
 
 One man in a helmet's worth two with hats. 
 
 Four doctors with cap, a dozen in wigs 
 
 And twenty-four tonsured above the nape of their necks. 
 
 Another ballad, called the Dream, and by its 
 rhythm foreshadowing the Ballad to the Moon, 
 was printed, thanks to Paul Foucher, in a coun- 
 try paper: 
 
 The rope so bare and lean 
 Would shiver 'neath the cold. 
 Cold bell-tower. 
 And shirk with bitter tone and keen. 
 Will ye miss in your convent-hold 
 The Advent hour? 
 
 Monks round the candle-flame 
 
 With brows against the pavement stone 
 Washed all clear. 
 
28 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Blushing at the Virgin's name. 
 Would hide each sin full-blown 
 Far from her ear. 
 
 Is this a parody of the poetry of the romantics 
 abeady, like the Ballad to the Moon? There 
 would be nothing wonderful in that, for Musset, 
 in the Cenacle, was zealous as a pupU, but not 
 docUe. They were kind and listened to the 
 youngster, and he profited by that, and on certain 
 questions flew in the face of the master himself. 
 He never considered the rich rime was obhgatory. 
 On the appearance of his first poetry he wrote 
 to his mother's brother, Desherbiers, sending him 
 the volume: "You wiU see feeble rimes; I had 
 an aim in making them, and know what to think 
 of them ; but it was important to distinguish one- 
 self from this school of rimesters who have un- 
 dertaken to reconstruct, but have concerned 
 themselves only with form, supposing them- 
 selves to be rebuilding when they were replaster- 
 ing." (January, 1830.) A witness of his first 
 groping attempts, Sainte-Beuve declares that he 
 unrimed afterward, intentionally, the Andalouse, 
 and that it was " better rimed in the early sketch." 
 
 He also considered himself emancipated — ^his 
 presumption will be pardoned in view of his 
 youth — from all the forced and declamatory in 
 the ancestors of romanticism. Six years later he 
 reminded George Sand how he had laughed of 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 29 
 
 old at the Nouvelle Heloise and Werther. He 
 had no right to laugh so much, for he had worse 
 on his conscience. In 1828 he translated for 
 a bookseller De Quincey's Confessions of an 
 Opium Eater. His rendering is royally faith- 
 less; this, indeed, is its chief interest. Not only 
 does Musset cut and prune a dozen pages here, 
 fifty there, but he enlarges and restores, and in 
 a very decided spirit, invariably adding romantic 
 embellishments everywhere, first to the senti- 
 ments: the hero of the English original forgave 
 a poor creature picked up in the gutter, the one 
 in the version assures her of his respect and ad- 
 miration. He adds enormously to the sums of 
 money: two or three hundred francs given to a 
 young man in trouble become twenty-five thou- 
 sand, fortunes sweU beyond measure, and the 
 business of petty lenders assumes mighty pro- 
 portions. He embroiders events with episodes 
 from his own stock: reminiscences of the dissect- 
 ing-room, dark adventures to suit the taste of 
 the time. In brief, there was a general parade 
 of plumes, after which he was not permitted to 
 go on laughing at Saint-Preux or at Charlotte's 
 friend. 
 
 At that time he really appeared to be carried 
 away by the flood of romanticism. His great 
 friends of the Cenacle made him recite his poems, 
 gave him good advice, and, it is needless to add, 
 pushed him along in their peculiar path. The 
 
30 THE LIFE OF 
 
 drama a la Hugo was applauded greatly, and 
 Emile Deschamps gave a reception for a reading 
 of Don PaeZj at which rose cries of admiration 
 at the lines about the dragon. 
 
 A dragon, yellow and blue, who lay sleeping 
 in the hay. There were other cries approving of 
 the green sleeves of the Dawn: 
 
 Behold the watchful huntsmen, 
 And the black feet of falcons 
 Perched upon their sleeves of green. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve thought this beginner too far in 
 advance, and reproached him with the abuse of 
 enjambements and trivialities. It is surprising 
 that, with his extraordinary penetration, he did 
 not guess at once thjlt Musset was a romantic- 
 born classic, which is as much as saying an acci- 
 dental romantic, and that it was a mistake to 
 count on him absolutely, drawn this way and that 
 between his instincts and the influence of sur- 
 roundings. The rest of the Cenacle were excusa- 
 ble for not suspecting it. Musset did not con- 
 ceal his task for the eighteenth century, but we 
 overlook a partiality for Crebillon and Clarissa 
 Harlowe in a runaway from college. As for his 
 very significant admiration for Voltaire's poetry, 
 that was not taken so seriously in the case of an 
 apprentice of romanticism, fed on Shakespeare 
 and saturated with Byron, one made to learn his 
 trade, not unprofitably, in Mathurin Regnier. I 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 31 
 
 insist on these details because the Cenacle at a 
 later time accused Musset of desertion. That 
 was vmjust; there was no defection, only misun- 
 derstanding. The future author of the Nuits 
 was so little theirs, body and soul, as they fan- 
 cied, that he always gave ear to other counsels, 
 though of far less authority. We may recall that 
 the family did not like the new hterary school. 
 These amiable people did not stop at tacit dis- 
 approval. They withstood the tendencies which 
 they deemed destructive, and Musset's letter to 
 Desherbiers, a passage from which we have just 
 read, proves that their effect had not been a dead 
 loss. Here are other fragments: " I ask pardon 
 for complicated sentences ; I have got over them, 
 I believe. ... As for the broken rhythms in 
 the lines, I think that they do not harm in what 
 may be caUed the recitative — that is, the transi- 
 tion of sentiments and actions. In the rest they 
 ought to be rare. I wiU ask you to notice the 
 composition more than the details, for I am far 
 from having a fixed method. I shall change a 
 number of times yet. I await hints from you. 
 My friends have given me praises, which I put 
 into my rear pocket. I owe to four or five con- 
 versations with you my reforming opinions on 
 very important points, and I have made many 
 reflections since. But you know they do not go 
 so far as to make me love Racine." 
 
 Waiting for his reflections to bear their fruit. 
 
32 THE LIFE OF 
 
 good or bad, he wrote at full speed his Tales 
 of Spain and Italy, and his friends noticed in 
 them nothing but a crescendo of impertinence 
 toward everything that the bourgeois, in his crust 
 of classic^,! prejudices, made it his duty to re- 
 spect and admire. After the Songs and Don 
 Paez came the Chestnuts from the Fire, Portia, 
 the Ballad to the Moon, Mardoche, and the last 
 piece was the most impudent; accordingly all 
 agreed in predicting a great success for it. Mus- 
 set had decided to have his work printed in order 
 to gain the right to quit his position as law-clerk 
 which his father had imposed. His volume came 
 out toward the 1st of January, 1830. 
 
 This is the time to examine the drawing of 
 Deveria at the head of this volume. It repre- 
 sents Musset at about his twentieth year, in the 
 costume of a page, which he Uked and several 
 times wore. To judge by his slender waist and 
 his beardless and boyish face, we should think 
 him younger than he really was. In doublet and 
 tights he has the haughty grace which Clouet 
 used to lend to his models, and their extreme and 
 refined elegance. His physiognomy is somewhat 
 lacking in fire, and this through no fault of the 
 artist. His face was not at all times glowing 
 with fire ; it was as changing as the humor which 
 it expressed. There were two Mussets suiting 
 the moment and the direction of the breeze. One, 
 bashful and silent, somewhat cold in appearance, 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 33 
 
 is that which showed itself commonly in his ear- 
 lier youth, even after the uproar caused by his 
 debut. A college friend of his, who saw him 
 very frequently down to the spring of 1833, 
 assured me that he saw hardly any other. 
 This is the Musset whom Lamartine described 
 " stretched out nonchalantly in the shade, his 
 elbow on a cushion, his head resting on his hand, 
 upon a divan in Nodier's gloomy parlor." La- 
 martine noticed his " floating locks, his eyes 
 rather dreamy than brilliant," his " modest and 
 habitual sUence in the midst of the bewildering 
 tumult of a babbling company of women and 
 poets," and he took no further notice of him; it 
 took him thirty years to observe anything more. 
 In Victor Hugo hy a Witness of his Life we 
 find a neat sketch of Musset which is entirely 
 different: "With his steady, clear glance, his 
 dilating nostrils, and his widely open and ver- 
 milion lips." This is the one who showed himself 
 by fits and starts — Musset quivering with life 
 and passion, whose blue eyes darted fire, whom 
 pleasure enraptured, and who was overwhelmed 
 by the least emotion, weeping like a child; the 
 Musset whom a delirium would seize the moment 
 he was overtaken by fever, who was the prey of 
 every inconsistency, of every extreme. He was 
 kind, generous, of a deep and passionate deli- 
 cacy of feeling, and also violent and capable of 
 great harshness. The same hour saw him de- 
 
34 LIFE OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 
 
 lightf ully tender and absurdly confident and then 
 suspicious to the point of unkindness, mingling 
 in the same breath adoration and sarcasm, suffer- 
 ing hundredfold the pangs which he was in- 
 flicting, and next showing a charming regret, 
 eloquent, frank, and irresistible repentance, 
 throughout which he loathed and tried to hum- 
 ble himself, taking cruel delight in making his 
 own heart bleed — a heart that was ever suffering 
 pain. At other moments he was a dandy, a gay 
 worldling, fuU of sparkling wit and banter, at 
 others again he would never move from the com- 
 pany of young ladies, whose purity enraptured 
 him and with whom he would waltz forever, talk- 
 ing nonsense and trifles. Altogether a complex 
 being, not inoffensive — far from it — and some- 
 times frightening women whom he liked; but 
 more than one side of his character was great, 
 with nothing small or base — a seductive, engag- 
 ing being, who could not be otherwise than un- 
 happy. 
 
 Contemporaries who saw him in these vary- 
 ing aspects in succession have given utterance to 
 contradictory judgments, which aU contained a 
 share of truth. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 TAT.es of SPAIN AND ITALY 
 
 The Tales of Spain and Italy dismayed the 
 classicals. Hitherto nobody had ridiculed them 
 in so free and easy a style, so that the critics 
 grasped their ferules, and Musset caught it on 
 his knuckles. I beheve, though I dare not war- 
 rant the correctness of the statement, that the 
 first article was one in the Universal, January 
 22-23, 1830. It had as an epigraph the lines 
 from Chestnuts from the Fire: 
 
 I hope baked apples none will throw 
 To lay footlights and curtains low. 
 
 It began as follows: "Behold the force of 
 conscience! The first cry of M. de Musset, 
 who does not like baked apples, is: Pray don't 
 throw baked apples at me! He feels that the 
 reader will be tempted to fling something at him, 
 and of course he wards off the danger which he 
 most dreads. What shall we fling at M. de 
 Musset then? " 
 
 The critic, F., at once begs his readers to par- 
 don him for " dragging their eyes over the poetry 
 of M. de Musset," and he analyzes the volume 
 
 35 
 
36 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Avith strong signs of disgust. The faults in the 
 French revolt him, the running of verse into 
 verse, reahstic terms hke pot or rags pain him. 
 Poor man! 
 
 The Figaro of February 4th is on its guard, 
 in fear of being caught by some joke: " Is his 
 book a parody? Is it written in good faith? " 
 Figaro, after weighing everything, admits the 
 good faith, and is aU the more indignant. He 
 scolds the young author for beginning " his poet- 
 ical life " by exaggerations and mad freaks, and 
 shows him to what he is exposing himself: " Ridi- 
 cule, once stamped on the brow or the name of 
 a writer, often stays there Hke one of those stains 
 which are not to be wiped out except by vigorous 
 application of soap and brush." M. de Musset 
 deserves to escape this sad fate, for here and 
 there traces of talent appear in his collection in 
 despite of his " contempt for the rules of good 
 sense and of the language." 
 
 The same day the Temps declared that a por- 
 tion of the public imagined there was a parody. 
 For its part, it finds a very personal inspiration 
 in the verses of the newcomer. It recognizes that 
 there are charming images and sparkling dia- 
 logues. But the characters are inconsistent; for 
 instance, Camargo " contradicts every moment 
 the nature of her Italian heart by the forms of 
 abstract discourse, by metaphysical exclamations, 
 by images and comparisons quite beyond the ma- 
 
 I 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 37 
 
 terial and moral world of Italy." Would it be 
 a possible thing that the critic had not recognized 
 in the Chestnuts from the Fire a double parody 
 of tragedy and of the Romantic form ? Camargo 
 is Hermione compelling Orestes- Abbe Annibal 
 to kiU Pyrrus-Raphael — and greeting him after- 
 ward with imprecations. Respect unto the " na- 
 ture of the Italian soul " had been the least anxi- 
 ety to the author, and here he was right. In the 
 same article, on Mardoche: " From one end to 
 the other, it is an enigma void of interest, poor 
 in style and mere buffoonery, and dull at that." 
 The Quotidienne of February 12th is relatively 
 amiable, seeing in the beginner " a poet and a 
 madman, one inspired and a beginner in rheto- 
 ric ": in the Tales, a " strange book," where you 
 are tossed " from the height of the finest poetry 
 to the most incredible baseness in diction, from 
 the most graceful ideas to the most hideous pic- 
 tiu-es, from the most animated and happy expres- 
 sion to the most inexcusable barbarisms." Don 
 Paez reveals a true dramatic sense, and contains 
 profound observations with details of great poetic 
 richness. Apart from this it is a poem, " crowded 
 with enough of the ridiculous to stock a com- 
 plete literary school." The same critic, in a sec- 
 ond article, February 23d, declares that there 
 is more promise in Musset than in any other 
 of the poets of our epoch, a compliment which 
 looks too much as if it had been put in with the 
 
38 THE LIFE OF 
 
 sole aim of displeasing Victor Hugo; but, adds 
 the journal, the " child " must be put to school 
 if he wishes to amount to anything. 
 
 The Globe — ^this paper gave proof of a deal 
 of friendship for the romantics — ^begins on Feb- 
 ruary 17th by remarking an advanced party 
 in whose opinion " M. Hugo is almost station- 
 ary . . . M. de Vigny classic," and M. 
 de Musset the one great poet in France. It 
 avows that, so far as the Globe is concerned, 
 the first impression was bad: " Two things in his 
 poems are astonishing and shocking — the ugli- 
 ness of the substance and the fatuity of the 
 form." The critic, as he advanced in his work, 
 perceived " certain beauties; then these grew, and 
 next they predominated over defects " ; and he 
 is awake to the " frank inspiration, force in 
 execution, the sentiment and the movement 
 lacking in so many poets. M. de Musset, it is 
 true, exaggerates some of the defects of the 
 new school." The latter " breaks the lines, M. 
 de Musset dislocates them; the former resorts to 
 slidings from one line to the next, he lavishes 
 them." Yet, despite the Chestnuts from the 
 Fire, which " revolts " and " disgusts " the au- 
 thor of the notice, despite Mardoche, which looks 
 as if written by a maniac, the Tales announce 
 " an original and genuine talent," 
 
 The most vinegary criticism has remained 
 closed to the public. It came from Vendome. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 39 
 
 His aunt, the canoness, had learned by the public 
 voice that she had a poet-nephew, and she sourly 
 reproached M. de Musset-Pathay for having 
 brought this disgrace upon her. She had al- 
 ways blamed her brother for loving literature 
 too much; now he could see to what that led. 
 
 Forgiveness of injuries did not figure in her 
 credo. As a chastisement for the Tales, the 
 canoness " disowned and disinherited the males 
 of her family for derogation," and stiU the first 
 edition was expurgated! The impious conversa- 
 tion of Mardoche with the beadle has been sup- 
 pressed. Meantime Musset read the newspapers 
 with great calmness and attention, and without 
 indignation. He did not call his critics mere 
 ushers and pedants. He did not lose faith in 
 literature and in humanity. "Just criticism," 
 said he, " gives more impetuosity, more ardor. 
 Unjust censure is never to be feared. In any 
 case, I am resolved to move onward with a 
 word in answer." M. de Musset-Pathay, who 
 was as attentive and less composed, wrote to a 
 friend a propos of the cruel article in the Uni- 
 versal: " My anxiety as to possible disputes was 
 happily unfounded, and I was surprised to hear 
 of the stoicism of our young philosopher. I 
 know from the only confidant he has, Paul (who 
 betrays him to me alone), that he profits by aU 
 the criticisms, and is giving up this sort of com- 
 position in great part. The confidant adds that 
 
40 THE LIFE OF 
 
 my surprise vnR be great at the change. I am 
 wishing and waiting." This letter is to M. de 
 Cairol, April 2, 1830. 
 
 Musset was modest and extremely discerning. 
 Hence his patient and attentive attitude when 
 people were speaking ill of his poetry. Withal 
 he had been indemnified for the insults of the 
 press. Not that the general public was for him. 
 Good folks, so Sainte-Beuve relates, saw in the 
 book " only the Ballad, and would hear no pleas- 
 antry on this point of new invention: it was an 
 outburst of broadest laughter." But the women 
 and the younger people declared for Musset, and 
 all the ancient retainers of the classical party felt 
 more or less distinctly that here was something 
 new. 
 
 There was, indeed: first, sensations of singu- 
 lar vividness, expressed with great power — " hot 
 youth, that tree with rugged bark that cast its 
 shadow on path, horizon, and on all." A genu- 
 ine sensation is so strongly brought out, on the 
 next page, that the reader feels its influence, and 
 sees, as it sweeps by, that image dear to Don 
 Paez, who " could never shut his eyes and not 
 behold his mistress passing, white with eyes of 
 black." Elsewhere the sensation becomes subtle, 
 but loses no strength. It is sensuous poetry, but 
 of a very refined and very delicate quality: 
 " Night is of power to make women, like the 
 flowers, more fair, and each evening breeze 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 41 
 
 that touches them steals fragrance sweeter to 
 inhale." 
 
 In other places, again, an accidental sensation 
 gives the poet merely an epithet, but this is 
 enough to summon up a picture: " Soft and mel- 
 low, the moonbeam blended long, silvery streams 
 with golden flames on velvets pale and marble 
 gay." Musset had seen the moonlight glide 
 through the stained glass, and he feels compelled 
 to personify it to interpret the impression of 
 something airy and material at once, which might 
 have been grasped, and which flowed neverthe- 
 less through the windows, though they were 
 closed. It was very new, very modern, or, if you 
 wiU, very antique. Homer and Virgil had epi- 
 thets like his, and before a written or chanted 
 poetry came to be, the early myths translated 
 impressions such as these. So Diana, as she 
 comes to kiss Endymion, poured through the net- 
 work of the foliage with her soft and supple body. 
 
 Further he is very antique and very modern 
 at once in his comparison where he is emancipated 
 from any care for the pompous which beset so 
 many poets of the eighteenth century. He re- 
 discovered the rough and f ehcitous bluntness of 
 the older poets, their skill in realistic detail which, 
 striking the imaginations, causes the scene to 
 rise before our sight: " Slowly round and round 
 the she-wolves turn, and hold their gaunt snouts 
 toward each other." 
 
42 THE LIFE OF 
 
 His literary training had, of course, mixed this 
 old pagan realism with elements foreign to it. 
 Musset called Regnier his first master, and, in- 
 deed, the latter appears in more than one passage, 
 as, for example, in the case of the spinners, who, 
 " with callous hands, shake the cotton thread and 
 feebly drop their chins upon their knees." 
 
 The romantic in the Tales of Spain and Italy 
 might thus be accounted new. Victor Hugo, in 
 the OrientaleSj had gone so far, but Musset out- 
 ran him in boldness. His dislocated lines, his 
 riotous metaphors put him in the utmost van of 
 the revolutionary host, while his irony and tur- 
 bulent animation put him in the forlorn hope 
 whom no man could expect to keep in line. He 
 himself had taken pains to give warning that 
 every one would waste time and trouble in the 
 attempt. He had hinted to the riming school 
 " that he wanted nothing in common with them; 
 though he rimed idee with fdcJiee, the Muses 
 came." 
 
 Like irreverence touching other reforms, this 
 audacious poet had allowed himself to parody, in 
 the Ballad to the Moon, the rimes and images 
 of the romantic school, and he proclaimed the 
 intention to express what he felt, not what it 
 might be the fashion to feel. The fashion was 
 all for distressing and finical ways : Musset ven- 
 tured to be cheerful, and made fun of the melan- 
 choly bards. " As for melancholy, it has a flavor 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 43 
 
 of holes in stockings, garret-rooms, and pennies 
 worse for wear." 
 
 He did not deceive his masters in the Cenacle; 
 he used to show, as plainly as could be, as to what 
 points he parted with them. As to telling them 
 where he would be on the morrow, if he were 
 warming Candide or Manfred over again, he 
 would have been puzzled what to say. He did 
 not know, and had no one to help him to have 
 clear sight of his own mind. " The Tales of 
 Spain and Italy," said Sainte-Beuve, " presented 
 a sort of enigma as to the nature, the limits, and 
 the destiny of this talent." An enigma whose 
 obscurity was increased by the queerest jumble 
 of sophomoric triviahties — " by the small size of 
 her feet she was Andalusian and a countess " — 
 and soaring verses such as genius conceives and 
 talent can never manufacture, no matter how 
 much pains it may take: "The sunbeams are 
 splendid on the crests of the seas, as the soldier, 
 defeated, shatters his spears." How could a 
 book so preposterous, so filled with exaggera- 
 tions and incongruities, not fail to shock the logi- 
 cal and delight the irrational? Good folks had 
 some consolation in asserting with perfect truth 
 that the success of the Tales of Spain and Italy 
 was due to scandal. 
 
 The culprit kept quiet and reflected, finding 
 truth in certain critiques, and preparing himself 
 for the evolution which his poetic temperament 
 
44 THE LIFE OF 
 
 rendered inevitable as soon as he became his own 
 master. " Our romantic is dehugotizing himself 
 completely," wrote his father, on the 19th of 
 September, to his friend Cairol. There was no 
 further need of indiscretions to suspect that The 
 Bevue de Paris, in July, published the hterary 
 manifesto entitled Secret Thoughts of Rafael, 
 which the Cenacle took for a disavowal and which 
 was but a declaration of independence. Reading 
 it now in cool blood, we hardly can comprehend 
 how any one could have made a mistake about it. 
 Still the mistake was made, and Musset's re- 
 lations with Hugo's group grew cooler. It is 
 right to add that Musset betrayed a purpose to 
 walk without leading-strings in the future. The 
 term poetic school appeared to him now void of 
 sense. " We discuss a good deal," he wrote to 
 Paul. " I find, indeed, that we lose too much 
 in reasoning and hair-splitting. I met Eugene 
 Delacroix one evening returning from the thea- 
 ter, and we discussed painting in the open street, 
 from his door to mine and from mine to his, 
 until two o'clock in the morning; we could not 
 separate. With the good Antony Deschamps, I 
 talked from eight till eleven on the boulevard. 
 When I leave Nodier's or Deveria's, I argue all 
 the way in the street with one or the other. Have 
 we made any progress for aU this? Could we 
 turn off a better line in a poem or give a better 
 touch in a painting? Each one of us has within 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 45 
 
 him a particular sound which he can give forth, 
 like violin or clarinet. All the reasonings in crea- 
 tion could never bring from a blackbird's throat 
 the song of a starling. What the artist or poet 
 requires is emotion. When, in composing a 
 verse, I feel a certain thriUing of the heart which 
 I know, I am convinced that my verse is of the 
 best quality that I can be delivered of." 
 
 Farther on in the same letter, " Horace de V. 
 told me a thing which I did not know: that since 
 my last poems they are all saying that I am con- 
 verted. Converted to what? Do they fancy that 
 I have been to confession to Abbe DeliUe, or that, 
 by reading Laharpe, I have been touched with 
 grace? Doubtless they are expecting that in- 
 stead of saying, ' Take thy sword and slay him,' 
 I am henceforth to say, ' Weapon thy arm with 
 homicidal glaive and sever the thread of his days.' 
 Nonsense for nonsense, I would much rather re- 
 commence the Chestnuts from the Fire and Mar- 
 doche" (August 14, 1831.) 
 
 Months more elapsed in barren discussion. A 
 deep, moral convulsion, caused by his father's 
 death in April, 1832, at last led to a return to 
 labor, and old friends were summoned on New 
 Year's eve to listen to the Cup and the Lips and 
 Of What Young Maidens Dream. It was a very 
 chilly meeting, and when they separated the 
 alienation of the nursling of romanticism from 
 the Cenacle was consummated. From that mo- 
 
46 THE LIFE OF 
 
 merit forth Musset was isolated. He had wished 
 and sought for that. 
 
 The new volume appeared just at the end of 
 1832, under the title, Scene in an Armchair. 
 Critics took little note of it. Sainte-Beuve had 
 an article, Bevue des Deux Mondes of January 
 15, 1833, in which Alfred de Musset was dis- 
 cussed seriously, and classed among the most vig- 
 orous artists of the time. One newspaper warmly 
 commended the work, two others dismissed it 
 with abuse as an ill-digested mess, a work for 
 which no name is bad enough, wearisome and 
 rambling. Most journals disdainfully gave him 
 the tribute of silence. The sullen attitude was 
 continued during following years, and it corre- 
 sponded to that of the general public. Musset 
 had suddenly sunk back into the shade. True 
 success — that which is not forgotten and fixes a 
 writer's definite class — ^kept him waiting long. 
 He beheld glory before death came, but he did 
 not long enjoy it. The reasons for this contin- 
 ued eclipse are rather complex. 
 
 For the bitterness of the journalists he was 
 somewhat to blame. Pretending not to bear them 
 any ill will for their insults, he had not hidden 
 boyish glee when they all, or almost all, were 
 caught by The Ballad to the Moon. He laughed 
 like a downright giddypate, without mercy, in 
 the Secret Thoughts of Bafael, at their great 
 outlay of indignation at a mere pleasantry: 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 47 
 
 " They say, O masters, that your eyebrow, as 
 it saw that moon, that dot o'er the i, assumed the 
 look, the frightful look, of a circumilexl " 
 
 The Parisian journalist accepts, if it must be, 
 the fate of being called pedant, or even silly, 
 besotted pedant. But nothing in the world is 
 more hateful to him, more intolerable, exasper- 
 ating, unforgettable, than to be convicted of 
 credulity. The critics of 1830 long maintained 
 their ill will for the young gentleman who 
 " quizzed everybody." 
 
 No more coteries to defend him, for he had 
 fallen out with the Cenacle, and the new volume 
 was really hard to understand. Of the three 
 poems composing it, not one was accessible to the 
 many unaided by commentary. The Cup and 
 the Lips was at first glance astonishing through 
 its unusual form. The chorus, borrowed from 
 the Greek tragedy and expressing ideas by no 
 means antique in a modern language, troubled 
 and confounded the reader. Further, the basis 
 and conception of the piece is far from being 
 distinct. Various rather inconsistent ideas fol- 
 low one another, and are mingled in confusion. 
 Without noticing it himself, the author glides 
 frqm his original theme into another and quite 
 different subject. In the first act he seems to 
 have designed to construct a tragedy of pride as 
 Corneille wrought the tragedy of the will, and 
 to have endeavored to display the growth of pride 
 
48 THE LIFE OF 
 
 in a strong and ardent soul: " All, even patience, 
 comes to us from pride." 
 
 But what next? Frank, who was plunging 
 into life with so much pride and vainglory, meets 
 in the forest Belcolore, and she says to him, 
 " Mount your horse and come to supper with 
 me," and the subject changes aU of a sudden. 
 Frank is now the man whom excess has contam- 
 inated in the very bloom of youth, and who car- 
 ries its bhght in his heart. " Hapless the man 
 when excess drives a first nail in his left breast! " 
 
 Musset again and again has come back to this 
 thought, and at all times with an accent of sting- 
 ing pain which betrays self-examination and 
 harsh regret. 
 
 In the fifth act, the graceful idyl of Deidamia 
 causes the subject to deviate anew, and termi- 
 nates the drama with a romanesque event — a 
 pure accident, unless we accept the interpreta- 
 tion given by M. Faguet of the denouement 
 of the Cup and the Lips, which interpretation is 
 very interesting, because it omits the accident and 
 restores to the poem the unity which was lacking. 
 According to him, Frank " returns to his boy- 
 hood's love as to a rebirth and to a redemption 
 . . . and is unable to regain it, for Belcolore — 
 Jiere to be understood as a symbol for the specter 
 of debauchery — watches him, attracts him, slays 
 him. . . ." 
 
 Whatever the truth as to this may be, Frank, 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 49 
 
 of all Musset's heroes, is the most Byronic; and 
 this is singular, for Musset, in the very dedica- 
 tion to the Cup, defended himself against the 
 charge of giving way to the influence of Man- 
 freds and Laras. 
 
 Byronicism was a shred of the romantic mantle 
 of which he never got rid. It was in vain that 
 he flung it away; the gaudy rag would suddenly 
 come back to his shoulders. We are to see it 
 again in all its glitter when Musset writes Rolla 
 and the Confession. 
 
 A public which had not lent attention to the 
 grand and tragic imaginings of the Cup was 
 hardly fit to rehsh that pearl of poesy which is 
 entitled Of What Young Maidens Dream. We 
 must have a lively fancy ourselves, or have been 
 put to school in the fairy-world of Shakespeare, 
 to accept without hesitating the improbable idea 
 of Laertes, the prudent father who sings sere- 
 nades under the balcony of his daughters in order 
 that they may have their little romance before 
 the expediency match, such as families have made 
 since time began. But yet see how far old 
 Laertes was in the right. No one seconds him. 
 The two suitors who should attend to serenades 
 and love-letters are, the one too bashful, the other 
 too dull. Irus is quite siUy, Silvio is a nobody, 
 and they both hamper Laertes instead of profit- 
 ing by his lessons and climbing up the silken 
 ladder into the azure land. But such is the force 
 
50 THE LIFE OF 
 
 of a sound idea that everything is settled in spite 
 of everything, as the old Duke had foreseen. 
 Ninon and Ninette had breathed the poetry of 
 love before devoting themselves, Hke nice, good 
 little girls, to the prose of marriage. For a whole 
 evening they will have been poets themselves, and 
 so risen one round in the scale of created beings. 
 Ninon exclaims, " Earth, winds, and waters fill 
 with harmonies," and Ninette, " Ye palm-leaves 
 scattering love upon the burning breeze ! " 
 
 In this little piece there is an invigorating 
 grace. Never before had any one lent more ex- 
 quisite language to young and ingenuous love. 
 The duet between Ninon and Silvio, on the ter- 
 race, was an act of faith which the Tales had not 
 led the reader to expect, in favor of chaste and 
 tender passion, the treasure of pure hearts. More 
 than once has the poet come back to the theme, 
 a thing which has always brought him good-luck. 
 
 In the last poem, Namouna, the tone changed 
 again, and did not cease to change — ^now cynical, 
 now eloquent and passionate, now filled with 
 emotion. Musset had put himself into it, and 
 we know whether he was of " infinite variety." 
 He abandoned himself to his fickle moods, espe- 
 cially in the tirade on Don Juan. He related 
 his own dream in those glittering strophes which 
 paint the handsome stripling as " loving, loved 
 of all, and open as a flower," whom the deifica- 
 tion of sensation condemns to a forlorn search 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 51 
 
 after an impossible ideal, and who dies with a 
 smile on his hps, "full of hope in his ending 
 path." These Don Juans unluckily are Hkely 
 to turn into RoUas, and when Musset saw that 
 it was too late, and he could only cry out with 
 anguish like Frank, 
 
 The Spectacle^ it is to be noticed, contains 
 hardly any broken lines or verses passing into 
 those following, except in Namouna. Musset's 
 form becomes a compromise between the new 
 school and the old. Poverty of rime he erects 
 more and more into a system. " You will find, 
 dear friend, my rimes very poor." He disowns 
 the obligatory local color, manufactured with 
 Travelers' Guides. " Bear in mind," he says, 
 " that I have filched nothing from the Library." 
 
 Musset, better than any one else, knew the 
 value of local color drawn out of the guide-book. 
 He had just been working up his description of 
 the Tyrol in the Cup^ by means of an old geo- 
 graphical dictionary. 
 
 He had broken then with his own romantic 
 audacities, but for all that he was by no means 
 reconciled with the classicals, whom he contin- 
 ued to chaff: " Body and soul shall go two by 
 two, hke yoked oxen or classical verses." Placed 
 here between the two camps, nothing was left 
 him but to remain himself. Though lacking a 
 people of worshipers, he had his own handful 
 of faithful admirers — those who, from the out- 
 
52 LIFE OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 
 
 set, had discerned the personal accent amid bor- 
 rowed notes, asked the author of Don Juan to 
 be Musset, still Musset, ever Musset. His mother 
 relates, in a letter written in 1834, that a dancing- 
 partner of his sister, a polytechnic, said to her: 
 " Mademoiselle, they teU me that you are a sis- 
 ter of M. Alfred de Musset." "Yes, sir, I 
 have the honor." " You are very fortunate, 
 mademoiselle." Madame de Musset-Pathay 
 adds that the Polytechnic School swears only 
 by him. At the moment when Madame de Mus- 
 set-Pathay was tracing these lines, the youth of 
 her son was over. He was twenty-three. The 
 six years elapsed since his leaving coUege had 
 been by no means heavy years. They are aU 
 simimed up in one of his songs, a poem smiling 
 and melancholy: " To my heart I said, is it not 
 enough to love my love? " He answers, " Cease- 
 less changing lends sweetness vmto passing joys." 
 The period of happy recklessness has gone by. 
 We come to the great crisis of Musset's life. He 
 is to love truly for the first time, and is not to 
 find that love's woes are " sweet and dear." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 GEORGE SAND 
 
 Geoege Sand to Sainte-Beuve (March, 1833) : 
 " By the way, after reflection, I wish you not to 
 bring Alfred de Musset. He is too much of a 
 dandy, we should not agree, and I should be 
 more curious than interested to see him. I think 
 it imprudent to satisfy aU one's curiosities and 
 better to obey one's sympathies. So, instead of 
 him, I will ask you to bring Dumas, in whose 
 art I have found soul, to say nothing of talent." 
 
 Some time after, Alfred de Musset and George 
 Sand met at a dinner given by the Revue des 
 Deux Mondes. They were seated side by side, 
 and agreed to meet again. Letters of Musset 
 without date — I have them under my eyes — 
 form a sort of prologue to the drama. The two 
 are not beyond ceremonious formulas and com- 
 monplace courtesies. The first letter to mark 
 an advance in intimacy was written about Lelia^ 
 which George Sand had sent to Musset. He 
 returns warm thanks, and through his compli- 
 ments he lets slip the avowal that he would be 
 most happy to be admitted to the rank of com- 
 rade. The " Madame " disappears forthwith 
 from the correspondence. He grows bold, and 
 
 53 
 
54 THE LIFE OF 
 
 declares himself, first very nicely and the second 
 time with passion, and destiny is fulfilled for 
 them both. Without circumlocution she an- 
 nounces to Sainte-Beuve that she is Musset's 
 mistress, adding that he may tell anybody; she 
 asks no discretion on his part. In this relation, 
 she goes on, " far from being distressed and mis- 
 understood, I find a candor, an integrity, a ten- 
 derness which intoxicates me. Truly a young 
 man's love and a comrade's friendship, a some- 
 thing of which I had no idea, which I did not 
 expect to meet anywhere, and above all in this. 
 This affection I denied, repelled, refused at first, 
 and then I surrendered, and now I am happy 
 for having done so. I surrendered more from 
 friendship than through love, and the friendship 
 which I never knew has revealed itself to me 
 without one of the pangs I expected to suffer." 
 (August 25, 1833.) 
 
 " I have been sick, but I am well now. And 
 more, I am happy, very happy, my friend. 
 Every day I bind myself more closely to him; 
 every day I see those little things in him fade 
 away which once made me suffer; every day I 
 behold the beautiful things of my admiration 
 gleam and shine in him. And again, above all 
 that he is, he is a kind fellow, and this familiar 
 friendship is as delightful as his preference was 
 precious." (September 21st.) 
 
 At the end of September she writes : " In Lelia 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 53 
 
 I blasphemed nature, and perhaps God. God, 
 who is not cruel, and whose nature is not to take 
 vengeance on us, has closed my mouth by restor- 
 ing to me the youth of the heart, forcing me to 
 confess that he has bestowed upon us joys which 
 are subhme." 
 
 Such was the opening of this famous liaison 
 which, in a biography of Alfred de Musset, is 
 not to be passed over in silence, not for the igno- 
 ble pleasure of stirring over again a mess of idle 
 gossip and of scandal, nor because it involves two 
 famous writers, but because it exercised a decisive 
 influence upon Musset, and also because it af- 
 fords an imique and extraordinary example of 
 what the romantic spirit could do with beings 
 who had fallen a prey to it. The correspond- 
 ence of these illustrious lovers, in which we fol- 
 low step by step the ravages of the monster, is 
 one of the most precious psychological docu- 
 ments of the first part of the last centiuy. We 
 follow in it the mad and painful endeavors of a 
 man and a woman of genius to hve the senti- 
 ments of a literature which sought its heroes out- 
 side of all reahty, and to exist as much above or 
 beyond nature as Hernani or Lelia. Nature is 
 seen avenging herself severely on those who have 
 off'ended her, and condemning them to reciprocal 
 tortures. Following this correspondence, we 
 shall essay to recount a history which may be 
 called xmknown, though the subject of so much 
 
56 THE LIFE OF 
 
 talk, for all who have busied themselves there- 
 with have undertaken to disfigure it. Paul de 
 Musset designedly travesties the facts in his Biog- 
 raphy. Elle et Lui, George Sand's book, and 
 Paul de Musset's answer, Lui et Elle, are works 
 of rancor, born of a state of war caused and kept 
 up by friends, full of good purposes, without 
 doubt, but certainly very badly inspired. Even 
 the letters of George Sand printed in her Cor- 
 respondence have been mutilated to suit the needs 
 of her cause. Not one of those about the two 
 reflected, that by belittling the other he was 
 making his own hero equally small. 
 
 During the earlier months they had no need 
 of letters, but Musset has filled this gap in the 
 Confession, the last three parts of which are the 
 picture — pitiless for himself, triumphant for his 
 mistress — of his life with George Sand. In these 
 he never spared himself. His serious defects of 
 character, his offenses from the very first, are 
 depicted in them with a kind of fury, and with 
 what truth, an unpublished fragment by George 
 Sand bears witness : " I teU you, this Confession 
 has stirred me deeply, in fact. The smallest de- 
 tails of an unhappy intimacy are so faithfully, 
 so minutely set down, from the first hour to the 
 last, from the sister of charity to the proud in- 
 sensee, that on closing the book I burst into tears 
 like a silly creature." (To Madame d'Agoult, 
 May 25, 1836.) 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 57 
 
 Having put all the wrongdoing upon himself, 
 he poetized the conclusion. Let us call to mind, 
 reread this story moving on with breathless 
 swiftness : we shall see, day by day, hour by hour, 
 the steps of this anguish and adoration, summed 
 up in the cry of distress uttered by George Sand 
 at the moment of their rupture : " Enough of 
 you, I wish no more; yet I cannot hve without 
 you! " (To Musset, February or March, 1835.) 
 And the more we read, the clearer the eye sees 
 that what was to happen inevitably came to pass. 
 Each of them wished and exacted the impossible. 
 Musset, for the first time in his life, was passion- 
 ately in love, but behind him was a libertine past 
 which clung to him like a Nessus shirt, and con- 
 strained his inteUigence to torture his heart. 
 Like Portia's sinner, " he did not beheve," and 
 he felt a despairing need of believing. He 
 dreamed of a love above aU other loves — ^to be at 
 once a delirium and a worship. Well he under- 
 stood that neither of them had reached such a 
 point, but he could not be reconciled, passing his 
 time trying to scale the heaven and falling back 
 into the mire, until he conceived iU will against 
 George Sand for his own defeat. A quarter of 
 an hour after having treated her " as an idol, as a 
 divinity," he insulted her with jealous suspicions, 
 with outrageous questions concerning her past. 
 " A quarter of an hour after affronting her, I 
 was on my knees; as soon as I ceased to accuse, 
 
58 THE LIFE OF 
 
 I was begging pardon. Then a delirium unheard 
 of before, a fever of dehght, would seize hold of 
 me; I would almost lose my reason by the vio- 
 lence of my transports of joy; I knew not what 
 to do, what to say, what to imagine, in order to 
 repair the harm which I had done. I would take 
 Brigitte in my arms, and I would make her re- 
 peat a hundred times, a thousand times, that she 
 loved me and forgave me. Then outbursts would 
 last whole nights, during which I never ceased 
 to speak, to weep, to grovel at her feet, to in- 
 toxicate myself with a boundless passion, as en- 
 ervating as insensate." The day brought doubt 
 back, for the divinity was only a woman whom 
 genius did not shelter from human weakness, and 
 who, like him, had a past. There were beautiful 
 and glowing suns between the whirlwinds. Mus- 
 set, repentant, grew gentle and submissive as a 
 child. He was all tenderness, all respect. He 
 would make his mistress live among adorations, 
 would exalt her above all creatures, and intoxi- 
 cate her with a passion of such violence as to 
 fling him pale and fainting at her feet. He is 
 mute in his rage at himself; as to these dead 
 calms, he says: "Those were happy days: of 
 them we are not to speak," and he passes on. 
 
 George Sand — she also struggled against a 
 chimera and the reahty. She had constructed 
 for herself regarding Musset, who was six years 
 her jimior, a half -motherly ideal which she 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 59 
 
 thought very lofty, and which was only very 
 false. She drew from this a proud compassion 
 for her " poor child," so weak and unreasonable, 
 and she caused him to feel somewhat overmuch 
 her superiority as a guardian angel. She would 
 scold him with infinite gentleness and reason (in 
 their letters she always had reason on her side), 
 but this impeccable voice ended by irritating 
 Musset. He could not refrain from an ironical 
 smile, a bantering allusion, and the storm broke 
 out again. 
 
 Nevertheless, both cherished their chains, be- 
 cause the sweetness of hours of serenity appeared 
 far greater than the bitterness of the evil time. 
 Some astonished friends blamed them. They 
 were meddling in what? George Sand answered 
 with great common sense to one of the indiscreet : 
 " There are so many things between two lovers 
 of which they alone can be judges ! " 
 
 The autumn of 1833 was interrupted by the 
 excursion to Fontainebleau, which they have cele- 
 brated in turn and cursed in verse and prose. 
 December saw them on the way to Italy together. 
 The stories of this journey, and of its sequel, 
 have so little connection with the reality that here 
 we must be specific and fix the dates, in order, 
 once for all, to restore the truth and the fact. 
 The heroes in the drama — we cannot repeat this 
 too often — ^have only to gain, by light dispelling 
 obscurity. 
 
60 THE LIFE OF 
 
 On the 22d of December they embarked at 
 Marseilles, made a short stop at Cienoa, another 
 at Florence, and on the 28th or 29th they were 
 off again for Venice, where they arrived in the 
 early part of January. George Sand had been 
 sick since they were in Genoa, and on the very 
 day of their reaching Venice she took to her bed, 
 where the fever kept her for two weeks. On 
 January 28th she is at last enabled to report to 
 her friend Boucoiran that she is doing well, phys- 
 ically and morally, " but this is a mere respite." 
 On the 4th of February she vn-ites again: " I 
 have just been sick again, for five days, with a 
 frightful dysentery. My traveling companion 
 is very sick, too. This we do not boast of, be- 
 cause we have in Paris a crowd of enemies who 
 would be glad of it. They would say, ' They 
 have been in Italy for amusement, but now they 
 have the cholera ! What a pleasure for us ! They 
 are sick ! ' Next, Madame de Musset would be 
 in despair if she were to learn of her son's sick- 
 ness, so not a whisper! He is not in a disquiet- 
 ing state, but it is very sad to see one whom we 
 love, and who is generally so kind and so cheer- 
 ful, in a languishing and suffering condition. 
 So, then, my heart is troubled, like my stomach." 
 Musset was at the beginning of his great malady. 
 The two lovers had just had their first falling 
 out, which does not mean that they had ceased 
 to see each other. Musset's album, which is still 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 61 
 
 extant, does not for an instant omit representing 
 George Sand — now in traveling garb, now in 
 home attire, as an Oriental smoking her pipe, or 
 a tourist bargaining for some trinket. On one 
 page she is looking roguishly at Musset across 
 her fan, on another she is smoking a cigarette 
 very serenely. We turn, keep on turning, and 
 there she is always, and two lines of Musset, al- 
 most the last that he published, come back to 
 mind: 
 
 O memory importunate 
 Take those eyes away that I must ever see. 
 
 Nevertheless, they were at odds. Musset had 
 been violent and brutal. He had brought tears 
 from those great, dark eyes which haunted him 
 until his death, and he had not run in haste a 
 quarter of an hour afterward to beg forgiveness. 
 His sickness caused aU to be forgotten. In their 
 romance, it opens a new chapter, which is touch- 
 ing to the point of absurdity. 
 
 On the 5th of February he is suddenly in dan- 
 ger. " I am consimaed with anxieties, overcome 
 with fatigue, sick, and in despair. Keep abso- 
 lute silence as to Alfred's sickness because of his 
 mother, who would hear of it inf alUbly, and die 
 of grief." (To Boucoiran.) 
 
 On the 8th she writes to the same correspond- 
 ent: " He is reaUy in danger. The brain nerves 
 are attacked so violently that his delirium is 
 
62 THE LIFE OF 
 
 frightful and uninterrupted. To-day, however, 
 there is an extraordinary improvement. Reason 
 has returned fully, and his tranquillity is perfect. 
 But last night it was horrible. Six hours of such 
 frenzy that, in spite of two strong men, he ran 
 about the room naked. Cries, songs, howhng, 
 convulsions — O God! what a spectacle! " 
 
 Musset owed his life to the devotion of George 
 Sand and of a young physician named Pagello. 
 Hardly was he convalescent when the vertigo of 
 the sublime and the impossible seized the lovers 
 once more. They conceived the most fantastic 
 deviations of sentiment, and their home was the 
 theater of scenes which in novelty exceeded the 
 most daring pranks in contemporary literature. 
 Musset, always eager to make atonement, sacri- 
 ficed himself to Pagello, who in turn had yielded 
 to the fascination of the great, dark eyes. Pa- 
 gello became a partner with George Sand in 
 recompensing the voluntary and heroic victim by 
 means of a " holy friendship." George Sand 
 reminds Musset, in a letter of the next summer, 
 how simple that all appeared to them. " I loved 
 him like a father, and you were the chUd of us 
 both." She recalls to him, also, their solemn emo- 
 tions " when at Venice you extorted from him 
 the avowal of his love for me, and he swore to 
 make me happy. Oh! that night of enthusiasm 
 when, in spite of us, you joined our hands and 
 said, ' You love each other, and yet you love me; 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 63 
 
 me you have saved — ^body and soul.' " They had 
 dragged the good Pagello along, ignorant as he 
 was even of the name of romanticism, in their 
 ascent toward madness. He said to George 
 Sand, with tender feehng, " our love for Al- 
 fred." George Sand repeated it to Musset, who 
 shed tears of enthusiastic joy on hearing it. 
 
 Still PageUo kept some remnant of good sense. 
 As a physician, he judged that the state of 
 chronic exaltation which did not hinder Musset 
 from being in love — quite the contrary — was of 
 no advantage to a man hardly recovering from 
 brain fever. He recommended a separation, 
 which came to pass on April 1st or March 31st, 
 Musset departing for France. On the 6th 
 George Sand gives to her friend Boucoiran, in 
 a confidential letter, the medical reasons for this 
 decision, and she adds : " He was still too delicate 
 to undertake this long journey, and I am not free 
 from anxiety as to the manner in which he will 
 endure it. But it was more injurious for him 
 to stay than to go, and every day devoted to 
 awaiting the return of health delayed, instead 
 of accelerating it. We have parted, perhaps for 
 some months, perhaps forever. Heaven knows 
 now what wiU become of my head and my heart. 
 I feel that I have strength to hve, to work, to 
 suffer." 
 
 " The manner in which I became separated 
 from Alfred save me much to think about. It 
 
64 THE LIFE OF 
 
 was a delight to me to see this man — ^so frivolous, 
 an unbelieving atheist — ^in love; so incapable (so 
 it seemed to me at first) of earnest attachment, 
 become good, affectionate, and true from day to 
 day. While at times I suffered from the differ- 
 ences of our characters, and above aU the dispar- 
 ity of our ages, stiU more often I have had reason 
 to glory in the other bonds uniting us. There is 
 in him a fund of affection, kindness, and sincer- 
 ity which ought to make him adorable to all those 
 who may know him weU and not judge him by 
 his hghter conduct." " I doubt our ever becom- 
 ing lovers again. We made no promises as to 
 this, but we shall always love each other, and 
 hfe's sweetest moments will be those which we 
 can pass together." 
 
 Musset writes to Venice, on all the stages of 
 the journey, letters which are marvels of passion 
 and dehcacy, of pathetic eloquence and thrilling 
 poetry. Here and there is an emphatic stress, a 
 declamatory touch, but that was the taste of the 
 time and, so to speak, the poetic of this style of 
 composition. 
 
 He writes to her that he deserved to lose her, 
 because he knew not how to honor her when he 
 possessed her, and because he has caused her deep 
 suffering. At night, in his room at the inns, he 
 shed tears, and is nevertheless almost happy, al- 
 most joyful because he can relish the bliss of 
 sacrifice. He has left her in the hands of a man 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 65 
 
 of heart who will render her happy, and he is 
 fuU of gratitude to this noble fellow; he loves 
 her, cannot refrain from tears as he thinks of her. 
 She may try to be but an endeared brother to 
 the absent, it will be in vain, for she vnll forever 
 remain his one and only mistress. 
 
 George Sand to Musset (April 3d) : " Do not 
 be anxious about me; I am strong as a horse; 
 but do not tell me to be cheerful and calm. That 
 wUl not come so soon. Ah! who vdU take care 
 of you, and of whom shall I take care? Who 
 will have need of me, and henceforth whom shall 
 I nurse? How shall I do without the good and 
 the evil which you did me? 
 
 " Think not, Alfred, that I can be happy in 
 the thought of having lost your heart. It mat- 
 ters but httle whether I have been your mistress 
 or your mother! Whether I have inspired you 
 with love or friendship, whether I have been 
 happy or unhappy with you, are all questions 
 that make no change in the state of my soul now. 
 I know that I love you now, and that is all." 
 (April 15th.) 
 
 Her question is how could so maternal an af- 
 fection engender all this bitterness: " Why have 
 I, who was ready to give you all my blood to 
 bring you one night of rest and calm, become a 
 torment to you, a plague, a specter? When these 
 frightful memories beset me (and at what hour 
 do they leave me in peace?), I become insane 
 
66 THE LIFE OF 
 
 almost, and cover my pillow with tears, hearing 
 your voice calling me in the silence of the night. 
 Now who shall call me? Who shall have need 
 of my watchings? In what shall I use the 
 strength which I have gathered for you, and 
 which now is turning against me? Oh, my child, 
 my child ! How I need your affection and your 
 forgiveness ! Speak not of mine, never call your- 
 self guilty toward me. How much do I know 
 about the past? No more than this do I remem- 
 ber, that we have been very unhappy and we have 
 parted. But I know, I feel, that we shall love 
 each other to the end of life. . . . The feeling 
 which binds us is closed against so many things 
 that it cannot be compared to any other. The 
 world will never understand it in the least. So 
 much the better! We shall love each other, and 
 we shall laugh in its face! 
 
 " I am living almost alone. Pagello comes to 
 dine with me. I spend the most delicious mo- 
 ments of the day with him talking of you! He 
 has so much feeling and kindness, and under- 
 stands my sadness so well! He respects it re- 
 ligiously! " 
 
 Her letters were more generous than prudent. 
 They acted powerfully upon a tender sensitive- 
 ness already too much excited by disease. Mus- 
 set had reached Paris on April 12th, and had at 
 once plunged head first into society and its pleas- 
 ures, hoping that diversion would put an end to 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 67 
 
 the sorrow which was wasting him away. On 
 the 19th he begs his love not to write to him any 
 more in such a tone, and rather to tell him of 
 her present happiness; this is the only thought 
 which revives his courage. On the 30th he thanks 
 her with rapture for maintaining her love for 
 him, and blesses her for her beneficent influence. 
 He has already renounced the life of pleasure, 
 and to his grand George he owes the strength to 
 have done so. She has uplifted him ; she has torn 
 him from his evil past; she has revived faith in 
 a heart knowing only how to deny and to blas- 
 pheme; if ever he achieves anything great, he 
 will owe it aU to her. 
 
 He continues his talk about PageUo, going so 
 far as to say, " When I beheld that worthy 
 PageUo, I recognized in him the good part of 
 myself, but pure, free from the incurable taints 
 which poisoned it in me. This is the reason why 
 I discerned that I must depart." However, we 
 may note a faint change in his friendship for 
 PageUo as soon as he has come home to Paris. 
 It seems that in setting forth again in that jeer- 
 ing city, he conceived a vague suspicion that the 
 " ideal bond," of which all three were so proud, 
 might be a mistake, a ridiculous mistake. 
 
 On the ensuing page he makes confession of 
 childishness. He has found a little broken comb 
 used by George Sand, and goes everywhere with 
 that bit of wreckage in his pocket. Farther on : 
 
68 THE LIFE OF 
 
 " I am going to write a novel on it, I should 
 so much like to write our history. It seems to 
 me that that would cure me, and Mf t up my heart. 
 I would fain build you an altar, were it with 
 my bones." 
 
 This plan resulted in the Confession of a Child 
 of the Century. George Sand, on her side, had 
 already begun to work the mine of souvenirs. 
 The first, the Letters of a Traveler, was finished, 
 and announced to Musset. We now shall have, 
 down to the end of the tragedy, something hke 
 a faint smell of printer's ink. We must resign 
 ourselves; it is the ransom for the loves of liter- 
 ary folk, to be settled even with Musset, who 
 was as little of an author as could be. 
 
 The letters from Venice continued to throw oU 
 on the fire. George Sand could not contrive to 
 hide the fact that memory of the turning, tumul- 
 tuous passion of yore was rendering present 
 pleasure very flat. To Pagello she was grateful, 
 and he was all care and attention. " He is an 
 angel of sweetness, goodness, and devotion." 
 But life with him was a trifle colorless in com- 
 parison. " I was not used to enthusiasm, and 
 sometimes I miss it. Here I am not Madame 
 Sand ; my worthy Pietro has not read Lelia, and 
 I believe he would never understand a syllable 
 of it. For the first time I love without passion. 
 Pagello is neither suspicious nor nervous. Great 
 qualities, and still — Oh, I need to suifer for 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 69 
 
 some one ! I need to use this surplus energy and 
 sensibility which are in me. I need to nourish 
 this motherly anxiety which is wont to watch over 
 a suffering and fatigued creature. Oh! why 
 could I not live between you two, and render 
 you happy without belonging to one or the 
 other? " She would like to make the acquaint- 
 ance of Musset's future mistress ; she would per- 
 chance teach her to love and cherish him. But 
 perhaps that mistress will be jealous? " Ah! at 
 least I can speak of you at any moment and never 
 see a brow darkened, never hear one bitter word. 
 Your memory is a sacred relic, your name a sol- 
 emn word which I pronounce at evening in the 
 silence of the lagoon." 
 
 PageUo writes to De Musset on June 15th: 
 " Dear Alfred, we have not yet written to each 
 other, perhaps because neither wished to begin. 
 But that takes naught from the reciprocal affec- 
 tion which will always bind us in bonds sublime, 
 though not to be understood by other men." 
 
 Cries of love were the answer to the avowals 
 of the faithless one. From May 10th Musset 
 writes that he is lost, that all is crumbling round 
 him, that he passes hours in weeping, kissing her 
 portrait, and addressing mad speeches to her. 
 To him Paris seems a frightful desert ; he wishes 
 to leave it, and flee even to the Orient. He 
 accuses himself of having misunderstood her, 
 loved her Ul; anew he drags himself in the mire. 
 
70 THE LIFE OF 
 
 and builds an altar to the celestial being, the 
 great genius, once his and now lost through his 
 fault. This is the moment when his soul, all in 
 a fever, opens itself to the comprehension of 
 Rousseau: " I am reading Werther and the Nou- 
 velle Heloise. I am devouring all those sublime 
 frenzies which I used to ridicule so much. I 
 shall perhaps go too far in this direction as in the 
 other. What do I care for that? I shall keep 
 on." He feels an imperious and terrible need 
 to make her understand that she is happy. This 
 alone soothes his grief. 
 
 On June 26th she writes renouncing her in- 
 tention to bring Pagello, and advises Musset to 
 make light of gossip. " What might harm me, 
 but what cannot happen, would be the loss of 
 your affection. What shall console me for all 
 possible iUs is that. Think, my child, that you 
 are in my life, by the side of my children, and 
 that but two great causes exist to crush me — 
 their death or your indifference." 
 
 Musset writes on the 10th of July: " ' TeU me, 
 sir, is it true that Madame Sand is a woman, and 
 an " adorable one "? ' Such is the honest ques- 
 tion which a fair and siUy person put to me the 
 other day. The dear creature has repeated it not 
 less than three times, to see whether I would vary 
 my answers. ' Crow, chanticleer! ' I said quietly 
 to myself; ' you will not deny like St. Peter.' " 
 
 The coming of Pagello to Paris was the awk- 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 71 
 
 ward blunder which spoiled everything. Things 
 there are which in a gondola, between poets, seem 
 almost natural, and which wiU not bear a jour- 
 ney. The return of Musset, alone and disabled, 
 had already occasioned spiteful gossip, which he 
 had vainly striven to check. George Sand had 
 failed to hush her friends also. She kept saying 
 to them: " This is the only passion of which I do 
 not repent." But people were sure they knew 
 better than she, quite as usual, and tongues 
 wagged at the same rate as ever. A rumbling 
 of CAdl-speaking rose from the Boulevard dq 
 Gand and from the Cafe de Paris. It rose to a 
 clamor on the entrance of the accomplice — ^poor, 
 innocent fellow — in the overflow of romanticism 
 inspired by the Place St. Mark and the feverish 
 air of the lagoons. The situation appeared in aU 
 its extravagance, and the three friends were 
 rudely torn from their dream by the jeers of the 
 idle simpletons. The three suffered painful an- 
 noyance when they had to face a reality which 
 was so mean and almost degrading. 
 
 George Sand and her comrade had scarcely 
 arrived — ^it was about midnight — ^when a great 
 agitation seized them all. With Musset it was 
 an awakening of passion to which the conscious- 
 ness of the irreparable communicates sadness 
 without bounds. He writes to George Sand, 
 that in daring to see her again he has presumed 
 too far on his strength, and that he is lost. The 
 
72 THE LIFE OF 
 
 only course left him is to go very far away. Let 
 her have no fear. In him exists no jealousy, 
 conceit, or offended pride. There is nothing but 
 a despairing man who had lost the only love of 
 his hf e, and who is bringing away with him bitter 
 regret at having lost it to no purpose, because it 
 leaves her unhappy. 
 
 She in fact was wasting away with disappoint- 
 ment. PageUo, as he changed atmosphere, had 
 opened his eyes to the ridiculous side of the situ- 
 ation. " From the moment when he set foot on 
 French soil," wrote George Sand, "he ceased 
 to comprehend things." Instead of that sacred 
 enthusiasm of yore, he felt nothing but irritation 
 when his two friends called him as a witness to 
 the chastity of their kisses: " Look at him; he is 
 becoming a weakling once more — suspicious, un- 
 fair, quarreling about nothing, and dropping on 
 your head all-smashing stones." In his anxiety 
 he opens letters, blabs and scolds without discre- 
 tion. George Sand contemplated with horror the 
 shipwreck of her illusions. She had assumed 
 that the world would understand that their his- 
 tory was not to judge by the rules of vulgar 
 morality. But the world cannot admit that there 
 are privileged characters, or, to speak with more 
 exactness, people dispensed in morals. She read 
 condemnation on all countenances, and for 
 whom, great heavens! For this insignificant 
 Italian, of whom she now was ashamed. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 73 
 
 Six months ago they were all in a false posi- 
 tion, laboring to deceive themselves and to trans- 
 figure a commonplace adventure. They were 
 destined to pay a dear price for their misdeeds. 
 
 George Sand consented to a last adieu to her 
 friend; not without difficulty, for an instinct 
 warned her that it would all be worthless. Next 
 day Musset wrote to her: " I send this last fare- 
 well, my well beloved, and I send it with con- 
 fidence, not without pain, but without despair. 
 Cruel anguish, keen struggles, bitter tears have 
 given place in me to a very dear companion — 
 pale and sweet melancholy. This morning, after 
 a tranquil night, I found her by the head of my 
 bed, with a gentle smile upon her lips. This is 
 the friend who is going with me. She bears on 
 her brow your last kiss. Why should I fear to 
 say so to you? Was it not as chaste, as pure 
 as your lovely soul? O my well beloved, you 
 will never reproach me with those two hours — 
 hours so sad — ^which we spent! You will treas- 
 ure their memory. They poured a heahng balm 
 upon my wound ; you wUl not repent having left 
 your poor friend a keepsake which he will ever 
 bear, and which all sorrows, all joys in the future 
 wiU find like a talisman upon his heart between 
 the world and him. Our friendship is conse- 
 crated, my child. Yesterday it received before 
 God the holy baptism of our tears. It is as in- 
 vulnerable as baptism. I fear nothing, I hope 
 
74 THE LIFE OF 
 
 for nothing. I am done on this earth. It was 
 not reserved for me to have a greater pleasure." 
 
 Next he begs leave to continue writing to her; 
 he will bear anything without complaint provided 
 he knows that she is content: " Be happy; have 
 courage, patience, pity; try to vanquish that well- 
 grounded pride ; narrow your heart, big George, 
 yours is too great for a human breast. But if 
 you make renunciation of life, if you ever find 
 yourself alone in the face of misfortune, recall 
 the oath which you swore, do not die without me. 
 Remember that you promised before God. But 
 I shall not die without having written a book 
 upon myself — ^upon you, above all. No, my fair 
 betrothed; you shall not he down in this chill 
 earth without its knowing it has borne you. No, 
 no; I swear it by my genius and by my youth, 
 on your tomb shall spring only lilies without 
 stain. With these hands I will set your epitaph 
 in marble purer than the images of our glories 
 of bygone days. Posterity shall repeat our 
 names as those of the immortal lovers who have 
 but one to them both, such as Romeo and Juliet, 
 such as Heloise and Abelard. Men shall never 
 speak of one without the other. I wiU finish your 
 history with a hymn of love." 
 
 The calmness of this letter was deceitful. He 
 set out for Baden toward August 25th, stopped 
 at Strasburg on the 28th, and immediately came 
 explosions of passion, burning and insensate let- 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 75 
 
 ters. He writes from Baden, September 1, 1834 : 
 " Never did man love as I love you. I am lost; 
 behold! I am drowned, overwhelmed with love." 
 He no longer knows whether he lives, eats, walks, 
 breathes, or speaks ; he only knows that he loves, 
 that he can do no more, that he is dying, and 
 that it is frightful to die of love, to feel one's 
 heart shrink and shrink tUl it ceases to beat, one's 
 eyes grow dim, and knees quake. He can neither 
 hold his peace nor say aught else: " I love you, 
 my flesh and my bones and my blood. Of love 
 I am dying, and of a love endless, nameless, in- 
 sensate, desperate, beyond redemption. You are 
 loved, adored, idolized to death. No; I shall not 
 get well, I shall not attempt to hve, and I prefer 
 it so; and to die loving you is worth more than 
 to live. I am, indeed, concerned at what people 
 say. They will say that you have another lover, 
 I know. I am dying with it, but I love — I love. 
 Let them stop me from loving!" Why sepa- 
 rate ? What is there between us ? Phrases, phan- 
 toms of duty. Let her come for him or let her 
 teU him to come. But no ; always these phrases, 
 these pretended duties. And she is allowing him 
 to die of the thirst she has for him! 
 
 A Uttle farther down in the same letter a re- 
 flection, very wise, but belated: " We ought not 
 to see each other again. Now aU is finished. To 
 myself I said that I ought to find another love, 
 forget yours, have courage. I essayed; I endeav- 
 
76 THE LIFE OF 
 
 ored, at the least." It is impossible at the present 
 moment, now that he has seen her again ; he pre- 
 fers suffering to life. 
 
 Just as he is retiring far from Paris, George 
 Sand flees to Nohant, as if maddened. The let- 
 ters which she sends to friends are the plaintive 
 cries of a wounded animal. She writes to Gus- 
 tave Papet: " Come to see me; I am in frightful 
 pain. Come and give me an eloquent grasp of 
 your hand, my poor friend. If I can recover, 
 I wiU pay all my debts to friendship ; for I have 
 neglected it, and it has not forsaken me." To 
 Boucoiran she says: "Nohant, August 10, — All 
 my friends have come. I experienced great 
 pleasure in being there again. It was a farewell 
 which I came to say to my home and to all the 
 memories of my youth and childhood, for you 
 must have understood and divined this: that my 
 life is hateful, ruined, impossible, and I wish to 
 have done with it forthwith. I shall have to talk 
 fully with you, and to charge you with the exe- 
 cution of sacred purposes. Don't lecture me be- 
 forehand. When we have spoken for an hour 
 together, when I have made you see the state 
 of my brain and my heart, you wiU say with me 
 that it is weak cowardice to try to live, so long 
 has it been my duty to have done with exist- 
 ence." 
 
 And PageUo? They had left him all alone in 
 Paris, and he was in a very bad temper. He 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 77 
 
 thought it very wrong that they should have 
 brought him two hundred and fifty leagues to 
 make him play such a siEy part. 
 
 George Sand writes to Musset in pencil, and 
 without dating — ^in a word, paper on her knees: 
 "Alas! what means all that? Why forget at 
 every moment, and this time more than ever, that 
 this feeling ought to transform itself and no 
 longer have the power, of its own nature, to give 
 umbrage to man or woman. Ah! you stiU love 
 me too well; we must never meet again. What 
 you express is passion, but no longer the sacred 
 enthusiasm of better moments, no longer that 
 uncontaminated friendship of which I hoped to 
 see those excessive expressions die away little by 
 little." She reveals to him the painful condition 
 of relations with Pagello : " Everything from me 
 wounds and irritates him, and — must I tell you? 
 — he is going, perhaps already gone; and as for 
 me, I shall not hold him back; he has no more 
 faith, consequently no more affection. If he is 
 still in Paris, I shall see him, as I am going to 
 return to console him; justify myself, no; detain 
 him, no. And yet I loved him, heartUy and ear- 
 nestly, this generous fellow, who is as roman- 
 esque as I am — stronger, I thought, than I." 
 
 All through the month of September they con- 
 tinued devouring their hearts in reciprocal tor- 
 ture. Neither had strength enough to break 
 loose. October brought them together, and they 
 
78 THE LIFE OF 
 
 resumed the endeavor to believe, the struggle to 
 put faith in each other and in the cleansing virtue 
 of love. Days wore away in harassing alterna- 
 tives. Musset, having kept fewer illusions of the 
 past than George Sand, felt a nausea rise to his 
 hps amid protesting oaths of love. His disgust 
 would turn to wrath, and he would overwhelm 
 his friend with insults. Hardly had he left her 
 when reality faded away before his eyes, and he 
 beheld nothing but the chimera which their in- 
 flamed imaginations had bred. He got pardon 
 and grace by dint of eloquence and despair, and 
 both began anew to roU their stone, which again 
 tumbled back upon their heads. Musset, on the 
 13th of October, 1834, thanks George Sand, in 
 a gentle, sad letter, for consenting to see him 
 again. On the 28th, PageUo, a man not made 
 for tragedies and beginning now to be fright- 
 ened, without knowing why, announces his de- 
 parture to Alfred Tattet, conjuring him never 
 to say one word about these amours with 
 George. " I don't want," he adds, " any ven- 
 dette." George Sand writes, without dating, to 
 Musset: " I was sure that the reproaches would 
 come on the morrow of the happiness dreamed 
 of and promised, and you would make a crime 
 of what you had accepted as a right. Have we 
 already come to that — my God! Well, we must 
 go no farther; let me depart. Yesterday I de- 
 sired to go ; it is a farewell forever settled in my 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 79 
 
 mind. Recall your despair and all you said to 
 make me believe myself necessary to you, believe 
 that without me you were a lost man. And once 
 again, I have been mad enough to want to save 
 you. But you are lost more than of old, since 
 hardly were you contented when you turned your 
 despair and anger on me. What can I do, good 
 heavens? What are you asking now? What are 
 you demanding of me? Questions, suspicions, 
 recriminations already ! " She reminds him of 
 the harm done her in Venice, the offensive or dis- 
 tressing things which he had said, and for the 
 first time her language is bitter. She had fore- 
 seen what is at hand. " That past which exalted 
 you like a beautiful poem as long as I refused 
 myself, and which seems to you no more than 
 a nightmare now that you again seize upon me 
 like your prey." That past was infallibly to 
 make him suffer. Separation was an absolute 
 necessity. They would both alike be too un- 
 happy. " What have we left of a bond that 
 seemed so fair to both? Neither love nor friend- 
 ship — mon Dieu! " 
 
 A letter which seems to have crossed the above, 
 betrays a still greater anguish. He is in conster- 
 nation over what he has done. He understands 
 nothing ; it is the onset of madness. Hardly had 
 he gone three paces in the street when reason 
 came back, and he nearly fell when he recalled 
 the memory of his ingratitude and of his stupid 
 
80 THE LIFE OF 
 
 brutality. He deserves no forgiveness, but so 
 unhappy is he that she will pity him. She shall 
 impose a penance and leave him hope, for, in 
 truth, his reason would not resist the thought of 
 losing her. Once more he paints his love with a 
 passionate ardor which makes these letters the 
 Nights in prose. 
 
 She relents and forgives. Musset is intoxi- 
 cated with bliss. They meet, and George Sand 
 takes up her pen in discouragement: " Why were 
 we so sad at our separation? Shall we meet 
 again to-night? Can we love? You said yes, 
 and I strive to believe it. But it seems to me 
 that there is no coherence in your ideas, and that 
 at the shghtest trouble you rise in indignation 
 against me as against a yoke. Alas! my child, 
 we love — ^here you see the only certain thing be- 
 tween us. Time and absence have not prevented, 
 and will not prevent, us from loving each other. 
 But is our life possible together? " She proposes 
 that they separate for good and all; that in every 
 way would be wiser. " I feel that I shall love 
 you again as before, if I do not run away. Per- 
 haps I may kill you and myself too. Think of 
 this. I wished to tell you beforehand all there 
 was to fear between us. I ought to have written 
 and not come back. Fatality brings me here 
 again. Must we bless or accuse it? There are 
 hours, I avow, when terror is stronger than love." 
 
 Musset was the first to tire. The rupture came 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 81 
 
 from him. On the 12th of October he announces 
 it to Alfred Tattet. Sainte-Beuve, then George 
 Sand's confidant, was officially informed also. 
 Everything ought to have been over and done 
 with, and yet past tempests are nothing less than 
 naught compared to those now brewing. It 
 might be said that one of those pitiless punish- 
 ments, wherein the ancients recognized the hand 
 of the divinity, had come, so that now we feel 
 only compassion for the wretches who writhe in 
 anguish with cries of pain. 
 
 George Sand had gone home to Nohant, and 
 at the very first had felt a sense of deliverance 
 and of repose : " I am pretty well, diverting my- 
 self, and I shaU come up to Paris only when 
 cured and strengthened. I read your note to 
 Duteil. You are wrong in speaking so of Alf . 
 Don't say anything about him, as you love him, 
 and be assured that between him and me all is 
 over." 
 
 This was, however, nothing but a calm. The 
 tone of her letters changes very soon. On the 
 25th of December, 1834, she writes from Paris 
 to Musset: " But still I am not getting well. I 
 am giving over to my despair. It is gnawing, 
 crushing me. Alas! Every day it grows like 
 this dreadful isolation, these struggles of my 
 heart, to rejoin the heart once open to me! And 
 if I ran, when love seizes me with too great a 
 force? If I were to go and break the bell-cord. 
 
82 THE LIFE OF 
 
 to make him open his door to me? If I lay down 
 by the threshold until he passed? If I flung 
 myself, not at his feet — mere madness, after all, 
 for that would be an entreaty, and surely he is 
 doing all he can for me; it is cruel to beset him 
 and demand the impossible — ^but if I flung my- 
 self on his neck, into his arms, and said, ' You 
 love me stiU, you are sufi^ering, blushing, but you 
 pity me too much not to love me '? Whensoever 
 you feel your tenderness growing weary and 
 your irritation coming back, drive me away, mal- 
 treat me, but never be it with those frightful 
 words — the last time! I shall sufi^er as much as 
 you desire, but permit me sometimes, were it but 
 once in the week, to come asking for one tear, 
 one kiss, to give me life and courage. But you 
 cannot. Ah! you are sick of me, and you have 
 been cured of it very quickly too. Alas! I was 
 certainly more guUty than you at Venice." 
 
 Her turn to accuse herself, and to implore for- 
 giveness. Her pride is crushed. She takes a 
 bitter pleasure in humbly eating her own words 
 and justifying the worst insults from Musset. 
 But has the lesson not been hard enough? " Fri- 
 day. — In vain I call anger to help me. I love; 
 I shall die of it, or God wiU work a miracle for 
 me. He will give me literary ambition or spir- 
 itual devotion. Midnight; I cannot work. Iso- 
 lation, sohtude! I can neither write nor pray — 
 would I could die; who shall hinder me? O my 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 83 
 
 poor children, how unhappy your mother is I " 
 " Saturday, midnight. — Maniac, you forsake me 
 at the fairest hour of my life, on my love's truest, 
 most passionate day, when my heart is bleeding 
 the most violently! Is it naught to have tamed 
 a woman's pride and to have flung her at your 
 feet, naught to know that she is dying of it? 
 Torment of my life! Deadly love! I would 
 give all that I have lived for a single day of your 
 flood-tide. But never! It is too frightful, atro- 
 cious! I cannot believe that, and I am going 
 there, I am. No! Shriek or howl — ^but I must 
 not go ; Sainte-Beuve forbids ! " 
 
 Exaltation soars to delirium. The famous 
 letters of the Portuguese Nun are lukewarm and 
 tame beside some of these pages, which may be 
 accounted among the most fiery that love has 
 ever extorted from a woman. She wallows at 
 his feet, begging him to kick her — in lack of a 
 better gift: " I would rather have a blow than 
 nothing " — and jumbling up her supplications 
 with reproaches addressed to God for abandon- 
 ing her at this crisis, she offers a bargain to the 
 Most High: "Ah! restore my lover to me, and 
 I will be a devout and godly woman, and my 
 knees shall wear away the churches' pavement- 
 stones." 
 
 And this was not aU mere words: she cut her 
 magnificent hair, and sent it to Musset. She 
 came to his house, and wept at the door or on 
 
84 THE LIFE OF 
 
 the stairway. She roamed about like a soul 
 in torments, her eyes ringed, despair on her 
 face. 
 
 Musset loved her still. He could not resist. 
 George Sand, on January 14, 1835, writes to 
 Tattet: "Alfred is my lover once more." 
 
 The weeks which followed were frightful, and 
 we shall not trouble the reader with the painful 
 and monotonous story. Well may any one be 
 astonished that they were able to stand fast, and 
 not go stark mad. They obstinately persisted in 
 this refusal to accept the past — their impure and 
 ineiFaceable past — ^in chasing the specter of a 
 sublime and consecrated affection. More than 
 ever, memories and suspicions poisoned each of 
 their joys, and hideous quarrels crowned their 
 spells of intoxication. 
 
 At last, one day George Sand declares that 
 she can go no farther, and is utterly unfit to 
 bring him happiness. "My God!" she contin- 
 ues, " I am reproaching you who are suffering 
 so much yourself. Forgive, my angel, my dar- 
 ling, my unfortunate! I am suffering so myself. 
 . . . You, you want to whip and spur your 
 pain. Haven't you enough as it is? I don't 
 think that there can exist anything worse than 
 what I feel and undergo. Farewell! I would 
 not leave, would not take you back. I love no 
 more — I adore! Stay, go, only say not that I 
 suffer not. That would make me suffer more. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 85 
 
 My only love, my life, my heart's core, my blood 
 depart; but, as you depart, slay me." Musset 
 also could go no farther. He had written her that 
 he was packing. As he could not make up his 
 mind to depart, and as the love and wrath storm 
 was furious as ever; as, furthermore, a woman 
 who has been forsaken is inclined to make the 
 first move and get the start, in order not to be 
 deserted a second time — George Sand plotted a 
 sort of jail-breaking for the 7th of March, 1835, 
 and sought refuge at Nohant. 
 
 On the. 14th she writes to Boucoiran: "My 
 friend, you are wrong in talking to me of Alf . 
 This is no time to say a word against him. De- 
 spising is much worse than regretting. Any- 
 how, neither shall ever overtake me. I cannot 
 regret the stormy life which I am leaving, I can- 
 not despise a man whom, in all that concerns 
 honor, I know so well. I asked you this only, 
 to speak of his health, and the effect my depar- 
 ture has on him. You inform me that he is well, 
 and betrays no mortification — all I desire to 
 learn, and the happiest news I could hear. My 
 desire was to leave, and not cause him suffering. 
 If I have succeeded, God be praised ! " 
 
 At first the two were reheved, as we may well 
 conceive. George Sand had a liver complaint, 
 and after that crisis she very soon reached the 
 point of indifference. Likewise Musset believed 
 himself cured, but he was mistaken. Something 
 
86 THE LIFE OF 
 
 in him had broken down, leaving an incurable 
 sore. 
 
 On neither side — this remark is essential to the 
 appreciation of their characters — on neither side 
 is there any trace, at the earhest rupture, of the 
 abyss of rancor and animosity which the iU- 
 service of their intimates was to dig between 
 them, and at their expense. At long intervals 
 they wrote to each other, for some piece of in- 
 formation, to recommend some person, and they 
 persevered in protecting each other from evil 
 tongues. The Confessiorij in which Musset raises 
 an altar to his friend, came forth in 1836, and 
 George Sand at that time wrote: "For you I 
 do not cease to feel, I confess, aU a mother's 
 tenderness, and at the bottom of my heart. Im- 
 possible for me to hear any one speak Ul of you 
 except with anger." Two years later the Nuits 
 came out. Friends did not desist from kindling 
 resentment in them. We feel that hostihties are 
 near. On the 19th of April, 1838, George Sand 
 writes to Musset: " I did not exactly understand 
 the remainder of your letter. I do not under- 
 stand why you ask whether we are friends or 
 enemies. It seems that you came to see me last 
 winter, and that we had six hours of fraternal 
 intimacy, after which it would never be right to 
 doubt each other, were ten years to come and 
 go without our seeing each other or writing, un- 
 less we consented to doubt our own sincerity; 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 87 
 
 and, in truth, it is beyond me to imagine how 
 and why we should be deceiving each other now." 
 In 1840 they exchange a few letters, to decide 
 what to do with their correspondence. Their last 
 meeting came to pass in 1848. 
 
 The conclusion of their story we borrow from 
 George Sand. " Peace and pardon," said she, in 
 her old age, to Sainte-Beuve, one day when they 
 had been stirring the ashes of that terrible past. 
 So be itl Peace and pardon to those wretched 
 victims of romantic love — not at aU, as George 
 Sand would have it, because they had loved much, 
 but because they had suffered much. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NIGHTS 
 
 Life resumed its wonted course. In a frag- 
 ment written in 1839, Musset says: " At first I 
 believed that I should not feel regret or pain at 
 my abandonment. I withdrew with pride, but 
 hardly had I looked around me when I beheld 
 a desert. I was attacked with an unexpected 
 suffering. It seemed to me that aU my thoughts 
 were falling hke dry leaves, when some unknown 
 feeling of dreadful sadness and tenderness rose 
 in my soul. The moment I saw that I could not 
 struggle, I gave way to grief in utter despera- 
 tion." Little by httle his tears dried. " Tran- 
 quil now, I cast my eyes on what I have left. 
 With the first book that came under my hand 
 I perceived that all had changed. Nothing of 
 the past continued to exist, or, at least, nothing 
 had the same look. An old picture, a tragedy 
 which I knew by heart, a romance sung an hun- 
 dred times, a chat with a friend, surprised me; 
 I could not recognize the usual meaning." 
 
 Familiar objects round him shocked him. His 
 
 hbrary — that of a young man — ^vexed him. " I 
 
 began, hke Cervantes' cure, by purging my li- 
 es 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 89 
 
 brary, and putting my idols in the garret. I 
 had in my room a number of lithographs, the 
 best of which seemed hideous. I did not go so 
 far as up-stairs to rid myself of them, and was 
 content with throwing them into the fire. My 
 sacrifice ended, I took count of the remainder. 
 The account was not long, but the few I had 
 kept inspired me with a kind of respect. My 
 library, in its emptiness, distressed me; I pur- 
 chased another — about three feet wide, and of 
 but three shelves. There I arrayed, slowly and 
 after due reflection, a small number of volumes ; 
 as for my frames, they remained unoccupied for 
 a long time. Only at the end of six months did 
 I manage to fill them to my taste; I put in only 
 engravings after Raphael and Michael Angelo." 
 
 The engravings were Madonnas, sacred sub- 
 jects, and a battle piece. The list of the books 
 admitted is interesting: It was Sophocles, Am- 
 yot's Plutarch, Aristophanes, and Horace; 
 Rabelais, Montaigne, Regnier, the seventeenth- 
 century classics, and Andre Chenier, Shake- 
 speare, Goethe, Byron, Boccaccio, and the four 
 great Italian poets. Not one writer of the eight- 
 eenth century save Chenier; Voltaire or Rous- 
 seau no more than CrebiUon the younger and 
 Duclos. 
 
 That done, he resumed his pen. He had writ- 
 ten almost no verse since Rolla, published Au- 
 gust 15, 1833, at the outset of his haison with 
 
90 THE LIFE OF 
 
 George Sand, and of which we could not speak 
 farther lest we' broke the narrative of the drama. 
 We must then turn back an instant, for Bolla 
 cannot be passed over in silence. No other poem 
 has done more to win over the young to Musset. 
 The very faults which could be picked out did 
 him no harm; for example, that declamatory ac- 
 cent in certain passages, since youth is by nature 
 declamatory, and sincerely so. As Sainte-Beuve 
 tells us, law students, medical students had the 
 poem by heart. When it had been printed in 
 the review only, they would declaim it for the 
 benefit of newcomers. And since then the genu- 
 ine admirers of Musset have always felt a par- 
 ticular tenderness for Rolla. Taine speaks of it 
 as " the most passionate of poems," wherein a 
 " bruised heart " has gathered up " all the mag- 
 nificences of nature and of history, and made a 
 flashing sheaf of them, glistening with the most 
 burning sun of poetry which ever flamed." 
 
 From such eloquence, and emotion so strong, 
 we might divine that a moral crisis was at hand, 
 and that passion was in quest of the author of 
 the Andalusian. With what suddenness the 
 crisis came, with what unsparing violence pas- 
 sion descended upon him, we have already be- 
 held. He wrote no more for two years — ^in verse, 
 at aU events. 
 
 During this protracted silence, poet and man 
 underwent transformation. The man, ripened 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 91 
 
 by suffering, had almost nothing left of the fair 
 youth who had charmed and bewitched the poets 
 of the Cenacle, nothing of the boyish and radiant 
 appearance of which Sainte-Beuve has preserved 
 the spirited and dazzling memory. " It is twen- 
 ty-nine years since then," wrote Sainte-Beuve in 
 1857, on the morrow of Musset's death. " I still 
 see him on his entrance into the literary world, 
 at first into the familiar circle of Victor Hugo, 
 next into that of Alfred de Vigny and of Des- 
 champs. What a debut! What easy grace! 
 And, from the first lines he repeated, what sur- 
 prise and rapture he excited round him! It was 
 spring itself — a whole springtime of poesy 
 bursting forth to our sight. He was not yet 
 eighteen: a lofty, masculine forehead, cheeks in 
 bloom which had not lost the roses of childhood, 
 nostrils swelling with the breath of desire, he 
 came on, with ringing tread and uplifted eye, 
 as one sure of victory and overwhelming with the 
 pride of life. No one, at the first view, could 
 better give the idea of adolescent genius." 
 
 To the triumphant youth, so marvelously 
 brought before us by Sainte-Beuve, had suc- 
 ceeded a cold and haughty man, who would know 
 no surrender of himself except with knowledge 
 and reflection. The devoted friend whom he 
 styled his marraine, or sponsor, vainly re- 
 proached him for his unsociable and disdainful 
 airs. He made acknowledgment with cheerful 
 
92 THE LIFE OF 
 
 alacrity, as he always did, of anything wrong 
 found in him or his works. " Everybody agrees 
 on the disagreeable defects in my bearing in the 
 salon. Not only do I agree with everybody, but 
 the disagreeable is more so to me than to any- 
 body else. Whence comes it? From two first 
 causes: pride and shyness. We can't change 
 nature; we must arbitrate, compromise." He 
 promised his godmother to take it upon himself 
 to cultivate politeness, but he guarded against 
 a surrender of the smallest particle of his heart, 
 whether it were to friendship or to the hght and 
 fleeting sympathies, even, which form the ordi- 
 nary attraction of social intercourse. Was it 
 mere sterility of soul? Was it an apprehension 
 of what it might cost, and intuitive dread of 
 pain? " I looked at myself, querying whether 
 beneath this surly, stiff, and impertinent outside, 
 which excites little affection, whatever the pretty 
 little Milanese may say — whether under it aU 
 there were not primitively something passionate 
 and exalted, after the style of Rousseau." That 
 is not doubtful, for there was a httle of Saint- 
 Preux in his composition, and without it we 
 should never have had the Nights, which assur- 
 edly were not written by Mardoche or Octave. 
 
 Save two pieces of secondary value,- the first 
 verse after his return from Italy was the May 
 Night — June 15, 1835, Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 The three other Nights, the Letter to Lamartine, 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 93 
 
 the Stanzas to Malihran, succeeded at brief in- 
 tervals. In 1838 the Hope in God closes the 
 series. The great poet will awake again, but not 
 tiU. three years after, to write his admirable 
 Souvenir. By 1838 the best of his novels and 
 the masterworks for the theater were already 
 done. He was then twenty-seven. After the 
 promise of an unrivaled springtime, after the 
 efflorescence of too brief a summer, Alfred de 
 Musset had no autumn, no winter. His entire 
 work is confined to a space of ten years, three 
 or four of which were devoted to reflecting, hesi- 
 tating, loving, and recovery. 
 
 In the poetry of this second period, Musset is 
 no longer a romantic, form only being consid- 
 ered. Not contented with abandoning the con- 
 quests of the Cenacle, he turns against his former 
 allies. He is aggressive, waggish; he writes the 
 famous letter of Dupuis and Cotonet on the 
 Abuse of Adjectives [Revue des Deux Mondes, 
 1836) , in which a pair of plain citizens of Ferte- 
 sous-Jouarre, after trying to comprehend what 
 this romanticism might be, discover it to be a kind 
 of fool-trap, a patchwork of brand-new and 
 second-hand from Shakespeare, Byron, Aris- 
 tophanes, the Gospels, and the Spaniards — all 
 so adroitly glued and regilt that quidnuncs stand 
 agape before the display without noticing that 
 labels have no sense, and that no man ever knew 
 or will know what in the world social art or hu- 
 
94 THE LIFE OF 
 
 manitarian art may be. Musset even rejects the 
 romantic claim to the invention of the broken 
 hne, and he adds, ingrate as he is, " It is, more- 
 over, horrible; and more stiU, it is impious; it is 
 a sacrilege in the sight of the gods, to the Muses 
 an offense." He leaves them in all and for all, 
 as their " discoveries " and " treasure-trove," the 
 glory of saying stupifie for stupifait, or hlan- 
 dices for flatteries, and even that with a very 
 bad grace, as if he begrudged it. Had he 
 read Chateaubriand, where the word stands, he 
 would have been prompt to take away blandices 
 also. 
 
 Victor Hugo and his friends were avenged for 
 Dupuis et Cotonet, by Musset. He might un- 
 wind himself from the tangle of the formulas 
 used by the younger school, but nevertheless he 
 has romanticism in his marrow. The soul of the 
 newer times was in him, and to drive it out did 
 not depend upon his will, for the movement of 
 1830 had brought something more weighty and 
 tenacious than a literary form. As Brunetiere 
 well expresses it, the most original, peculiar, and 
 distinguishing element in romanticism was a 
 " combination of the liberty and sovereignty of 
 the imagination with the expansion of the poet's 
 personality." Changing the terms, and sticking 
 to things in themselves, romanticism is lyrisme 
 — lyrical rapture. The definition looks as if 
 Musset himself had inspired it, so well does it 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 95 
 
 fit him. He always took pleasure in putting 
 himself, in his own person, into his work. 
 
 A taste for this became an imperious necessity 
 after the grand passion. The bard has not a 
 word left, not a thought, either, for anything 
 else than his own affliction. What did aU things 
 else signify at present? Not all his genius was 
 too much to tell the terrors of the catastrophe 
 which had rent his life in twain, compelling men 
 to speak of the Musset before Italy and the Mus- 
 set after George Sand. To the recoil toward 
 classical form corresponds an overflow of roman- 
 ticism in the sentiment. 
 
 The Night of May was written in two nights 
 and a day, in the spring of 1835, some weeks 
 after the conclusive break with George Sand. 
 It breathes weariness, deep exhaustion. There 
 is no anger in the poet's answers to the Muse 
 who incites him to sing of springtime, love, glory, 
 happiness or its counterfeits, pleasure or its 
 shadow. We hear the gentle plaint of a sick 
 man, oppressed by his disease, entreating that he 
 be not forced to speak 
 
 Of hope I cannot sing. 
 Nor glory nor of bKss, 
 
 Nor yet of suffering. 
 
 The mouth a silent thing 
 The heart to hear, I wis. 
 
 The Muse is urgent. For want of any better 
 theme, let him sing of his pain: 
 
96 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Despair doth fill the sweetest songs that flow, 
 Immortal songs that only throb with woe. 
 
 The Muse invites him to serve up his own heart 
 at the banquet of the gods, as the pelican parts 
 its vitals, a share to each of its offspring, but he 
 replies, with an exclamation of horror: 
 
 O Muse insatiable, spectral form! 
 
 Not this from me shalt thou demand. 
 
 Man nothing writes upon the sand 
 That hour when sweeps the rising stonn. 
 
 The profound causes of his depression appear in 
 the foregoing chapter. He had been making 
 futile attempts to clear away the foul, old stains 
 by means of a passion which was itself a viola- 
 tion of the moral rule, and to his love-sorrows 
 was now added a crushing feeling that he had 
 made a capital mistake on that day when a man 
 chooses the ideal which is to be his reason for 
 existence. After the pattern of the romantic 
 heroes, he had required passion to supply the 
 prop of his moral hf e, and that prop had broken, 
 and left him bruised and exhausted. 
 
 The Night of May appeared in the Revue, 
 wherein Musset brought out almost everything 
 that had come from his pen since Namouna. Six 
 months later came the Night of December. The 
 poet has interrupted his course to write the Con- 
 fession, which in the latter two-thirds is a genuine 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 97 
 
 confession, the sincerity of which moved George 
 Sand to tears. He did not change his subject 
 in writing the second of the NightSj whatever 
 Paul de Musset may say about the matter; and 
 here is the place to explain voluntary confusions. 
 He had two reasons for altering the facts: his 
 hatred of George Sand inspiring him to " dimin- 
 ish her share," according to the expression of 
 one who knew him well, and a legitimate wish 
 to bewilder the reader in the medley of fashion- 
 able women compromised by his brother. The 
 Night of December gave to the heroine a finer 
 share than a justiciary of such harshness 
 could consent to assign to George Sand. We 
 must, however, restore it to her on the faith 
 of testimony which in my eyes is not to be 
 rejected. 
 
 The first part of the piece is a mysterious tissue 
 of dreams. The poet seems himself a phantom, 
 which soon dissolves, as he has been left at each 
 stage of his earthly pilgrimage. The vision 
 appears and disappears, hke the intermittent 
 dreams of troubled sleep. It is forever the same 
 and forever different; thus does the real man 
 undergo an incessant transformation and re- 
 newal. 
 
 Suddenly the tone is changed. The poet, in 
 panting phrase, relates the cruel separation, and 
 declares that he was guilty, and that his mistress 
 would not forgive: 
 
98 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Begone, begone, and in that heart of ice 
 
 Bear pride content away. 
 
 I feel mine young and stout and gay, 
 And many a woe it may entice. 
 
 With what you brought, to stay. 
 
 The epilogue of Solitude is so awkward, cold, 
 and powerless to interpret anything, that it might 
 well be cut out. 
 
 The Night of December will receive extraor- 
 dinary hf e the day when there shall be printed 
 at the end, as a commentary, two letters of Mus- 
 set received by George Sand the winter previous 
 — one as to an unjust complaint which he made, 
 and his mad fear lest she refuse to forgive, the 
 other, written in pencil, and in an extreme mental 
 disorder about visions which he has just had of 
 a fantastic world, in which their two specters took 
 strange shapes, and held converse in dream. 
 Musset had recalled all that time in writing the 
 December Night. What has been taken as pure 
 fancy, in the marvelous piece, rests upon a basis 
 of reality. 
 
 Contemporaries united in recognizing a fresh 
 female influence in the Letter to Lamartine of 
 March, 1836, despite the opening of the famous 
 narrative : 
 
 As when abandoned by one void of truth 
 I first knew sorrow in that day of youth. 
 
 These two verses and some others seem to indi- 
 cate that there was some mixture or confusion. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 99 
 
 as it were, in Musset's regrets while he was wri- 
 ting the Letter to Lamartine. The piece, how- 
 ever, is in a poetic vein which is less even and 
 pure than that of the Nights. O My Only Love 
 is a poem which breaks into sobs, but there are 
 merely rhetorical parts in the opening concern- 
 ing Byron and in the plaudits addressed to 
 Lamartine. 
 
 The end is of a lively interest for the biog- 
 rapher. This is the first time that Musset con- 
 fides to us his opinions as to those fundamental 
 questions whose solution is the great business of 
 the being who thinks. He begins by adopting 
 without examination the God of Lamartine, a 
 simphfication which may be too complete: 
 
 The heavens are His and boundless be: 
 To One alone belongs imihensity. 
 
 Thereupon he glorifies the relations of the hu- 
 man soul to the Infinite in strophes of real gran- 
 deur. The poet has been rewarded for having 
 this once drawn inspiration from springs eternal 
 and untroubled by the mire of earthly passions: 
 
 Upon thy knees, insensate creature, fall: 
 Immortal is the soul, though death seem all. 
 
 By adding to this the fragment which sums up 
 the Hope in God, " despite of me the Infinite 
 torments me," we have the whole of Musset's 
 religion, Musset cured, according to his own 
 phrase, of the " vile malady of doubt." To teU 
 
100 THE LIFE OF 
 
 the truth, his rehgion is but a religiosity which 
 exacts httle, is not sujfficiently incommoding. 
 The nature of it and its limits he himself has 
 traced in a letter to the Duchesse de Castries 
 (1840) : " Behef in God is innate in me, dogma 
 and practise are impossible for me; but I would 
 not deny myself anything; certainly, in this re- 
 spect I am not mature." 
 
 The conclusion of the Letter to Lamartine was 
 a parenthesis in the occupations of Musset. How 
 soon it was closed, the Night in August will at- 
 test. Musset has written nothing more impious, 
 in this sense, that he has nowhere exalted the 
 " idolatry of the creature " to so great a height 
 and with so much eloquence, leaving that alone 
 as an horizon for degraded human kind, seeing 
 that alone as the end of " immortal nature." 
 What a hymn to Eros I What a potent evocation 
 of the impassive deity who strides through our 
 blood and laughs at our tears| He grows to an 
 enormous stature as the poet's accents glow ever 
 more and more. He fiUs the universe with his 
 divinity, and prompts the bard to utter sacrile- 
 gious verses. 
 
 I choose to sing of joy and idleness, 
 I give my genius for one single kiss: 
 Of love I swear to live and die in bliss. 
 
 Behold him again among those whom Bossuet 
 mentions, " spending a life in filling the universe 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 101 
 
 with the mad foUies of their youth gone astray." 
 Retribution did not make him wait. The mem- 
 ory of George Sand came back hke a master in 
 that devastated heart, and it had never been far 
 away. That he may have had other mistresses 
 is nothing to the point. Certainly it is not the 
 same love as that which he had bestowed upon 
 George Sand, the article which he next handed 
 out, as he might have done with a packet of sweet- 
 meats, to a long procession of the fair and frail, 
 and of grisettes besides. 
 
 This turning back toward the past produced 
 the October Night, the last and finest of the 
 series, bursting and dying down like a storm 
 brought by the gale and suddenly swept away. 
 
 At first a slow movement, giving an impres- 
 sion of serene peace. The poet assures the Muse 
 that his cure is so thorough that it soothes him 
 to tell her of bygone sulBFerings. 
 
 You shall know all and I will tell to you 
 The ill that one, a woman, aye can do. 
 
 He begins rather calmly the story of a night 
 spent in waiting for the faithless one. The onset 
 of the tempest is soon heralded by thrilling verses, 
 but the poet still holds himself in check. Sud- 
 denly the storm breaks loose: 
 
 Great God! deliver! I behold, 'tis she! 
 
102 THE LIFE OF 
 
 The movement becomes headlong and raging. 
 The efforts of the Muse to appease her foster- 
 child serve only to bring the thunder-crash: 
 
 Shame on thee, thou hast taught me treason. 
 Horror and wrath have reft me of my reason! 
 
 Maledictions continue to resound for a longer 
 time stUl, but at last he consents to listen while 
 the Muse talks of pardon, and teaches him to 
 bless the bitter lessons of sorrow. He grows 
 calmer and makes surrender, and forgives with 
 a heart swoUen with bitterness : 
 
 Thou from my memory art exiled. 
 Thou fragment of a passion wild! 
 
 The real forgiveness kept them waiting three 
 years more. In September, 1840, Musset went 
 to visit Berryer at the chateau in Augerville. He 
 crossed the forest of Fontainebleau in a carriage, 
 in mute contemplation of the phantoms rising 
 before him at every turn of the wheels. Seven 
 years had elapsed since he threaded that forest 
 with George Sand in the young ardor of their 
 passion, and the sight of the places that were 
 witnesses of his happiness poured into his soul 
 a sweet and unexpected consolation. 
 
 After coming back to Paris he met her — ^the 
 one he could never forget — ^in the corridor of the 
 ItaUens. He took his pen, on reaching his home, 
 and he wrote, almost at one burst, the incompara- 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 103 
 
 ble Souvenir — a poem impregnated with a rever- 
 ence due to the " relics of the heart," and full 
 of the idea that a sentiment is precious according 
 to its sincerity and intensity, independently of 
 the joys or griefs which it may procure. Dide- 
 rot said: " The first oath sworn by two beings 
 of flesh and blood was at the foot of a rock fallen 
 into dust; they called as witness of their con- 
 stancy a sky that is never the same; everything 
 in and around them was passing away, and they 
 believed their hearts to be free from vicissitude. 
 O children always! " Musset makes answer: 
 
 Mad! says the sage. Happy! the poet cries. 
 
 The pieces which we have now reviewed are not 
 to be separated. They form the epilogue to the 
 romantic drama of Venice and of Paris, and they 
 are the original portion of Musset's poetical 
 work, with reservation of the Don Juan, of 
 Namounaj and of certain pieces in the earlier 
 collections. 
 
 On Musset's earliest manner had lain the yoke 
 of the fashion in rhythm, style, scenery, and 
 choice of subject. In a word, he had received 
 from without some share of his inspiration. In 
 the group of poems dominated by the Nights, 
 nothing is conceded to foreign influences. As 
 Sainte-Beuve has said, " the inspiration bursts 
 out from within, whence come also the flame and 
 the breath to color and give fragrance to nature." 
 
104 THE LIFE OF 
 
 The poet is altogether absorbed in himself and 
 in the spectacle of nature, and " his charm con- 
 sists in the mixture, in the alhance of the two 
 springs of impression — that is, of profound sor- 
 row, and of a soul open still to every living im- 
 pression. The poet feels spring coming back 
 again, and he feels its intoxicating speU. He 
 grows more sensitive than before to the number- 
 less beauties of nature, to verdure, to flowers, to 
 the rays of the morn, the songs of birds, and he 
 wears his lily and eglantine as fresh as when he 
 was fifteen." Musset, set free and become him- 
 self again, has been without parallel in our 
 poetry. 
 
 Of the short poems which fill the other two- 
 thirds of the New Poetical Works, not one rises 
 to the same height — far from it. Some, like Sad- 
 ness and On the Dead, display emotion. Others, 
 like Fortunio or Ninon, are tiny masterworks of 
 grace and sentiment. Others, smaller yet and by 
 no means masterpieces, have a certain manner 
 like the eighteenth century. Finally, there are 
 trifles — aff'ected eif usions and insignificant noth- 
 ings — and there is all Dupont and Durant, so 
 remarkable for the stamp of the verse ; we should 
 compare it to the Plaideurs and Boileau's real- 
 istic verse, in order to grasp thoroughly in what 
 way and measure Musset had classical instincts. 
 In this pell-mell of rimes, very few pieces bring 
 us anything new or essential. We might disre- 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 105 
 
 gard almost all without guilt of treason com- 
 mitted against the poet. 
 
 If, now, we turn back and ask ourselves what 
 rank The Tales and the Spectacle occupy in the 
 whole of his work, we are not to hesitate to recog- 
 nize the rank as inferior to that of the New 
 Poems. Musset had not yet gained a conscious- 
 ness of his own character and powers. He was 
 held down by the authority of the romantics, and 
 at heart he was the least romantic of men. It 
 was in vain that in audacity he outstripped all 
 the others; in his bold strokes we feel the arti- 
 ficial. An observant historian of French versi- 
 fication — M. de Souza — speaking of the revival 
 of lyric verse in our century, makes no account 
 of Musset's first works. In his eyes they have 
 no more importance than Gautier's Albertus: 
 " They were verses of youthful bravado, so to 
 speak, in which all the exaggerations of the 
 earliest poetic spark grew stronger, and the poets 
 themselves, by their later work, pushed them into 
 the background." This decision is extremely 
 severe and absolute. Souza is interested merely 
 in the technique of the verse, while those early 
 poems have value of another kind. The fresh 
 bloom of genius is a priceless treasure, not 
 to be replaced by anything, and here it shines 
 with splendor. It is a festival for the mind to 
 see this happy youthfulness, with fuU and prodi- 
 gal hand, flinging felicitous imagery gaily here 
 
106 THE LIFE OF 
 
 and there, and the inventions of a fresh fancy, 
 wanton and charming ideas, or the kindhng sen- 
 sations of the twentieth year. Let us beware of 
 disdaining this gift, and let us recognize that we 
 must search in the succeeding volume for the real 
 technical methods of Musset which to-day bring 
 down upon him the name of unskilful workman. 
 There is a point as to which he invited and 
 challenged attack. We should do his shade a 
 wrong to attempt to deny that his rimes are 
 feeble, and worse, at times. He sought to make 
 them poor, striving toward that end, and reach- 
 ing it. Sainte-Beuve very rightly blamed him 
 for " deriming " his ballad The Andalusian. He 
 reproached him, too, with boasting overmuch to 
 the pubhc of the advantage of riming badly: 
 " Musset's verses, with aU their wit, have a sort 
 of pretentiousness and fatuity which his talent 
 could do without. There is always a certain reac- 
 tion against rime and rimers, against lyric poetry 
 and lofty verse, from which, after all, he himself 
 has sprung. It is a shght fault. He is original 
 enough without it. But from the outset he 
 wanted to sport a cockade of his own, and he 
 has turned ours round." Our cockade is the em- 
 blem of the school of form, which Musset was 
 always afraid that he had not turned quite upside 
 down. He would have been chagrined had he 
 been able to read the page on which M. Faguet, 
 after conmiending the poor rimes, makes haste 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 107 
 
 to add: " Well, let us own that we do not think 
 of them when we are reading." Poor Musset 
 might have spared the pains he took to rime 
 griser and levrier! 
 
 Furthermore, he is reproached with classical 
 rhythms, regular caesuras, repeated negligence, 
 and easy ways of contenting himself. In other 
 words, certain people reproach him with being 
 neither a precursor nor a faultless poet, and each 
 reproach is well grounded. It would, at least, be 
 justice not to fail to appreciate this : that he has 
 made the most of the technical resources to which 
 he confined himself. 
 
 It is incontestable that after the Tales he 
 profited hardly at all, by new romantic formulas, 
 to vary his alexandrines, Musset, in his second 
 manner calling Imnself reforme, and by Sainte- 
 Beuve called reldchS, admits the double caesura 
 sometimes, but this kind of pause has httle im- 
 portance. He has recourse to more delicate 
 rhythmic elements to shade and modulate his 
 verse. He is the master in distributing in the 
 body of a line accentuated syllables of words, or 
 words receiving the oratorical stress. He was 
 ignorant of none of the infinitely varied effects 
 produced by interlacing mute and resonant syl- 
 lables — ^the obscure and the fuU. He discerned 
 how precious the mute syllable is — a treasure of 
 the French language of poetry — and how useful 
 in prolonging a preceding syllable. 
 
108 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Instinct revealed the mysterious relations ex- 
 isting between the sonority of the word and the 
 image to be evoked — a power independent of the 
 value of the idea expressed, a power which the 
 broad movement of the alexandrine most highly 
 favors. Finally, the just or false scruples, pre- 
 venting Musset from disjointing his alexan- 
 drines, were not in the way of a mingling of 
 meters, and by means of this he produced the 
 most happy effects, particularly in the Nights. 
 
 Most technical processes can be imitated and 
 transmitted. Theodore de Banville, in his trea- 
 tise on versification, gives recipes by means of 
 which any imbecile may, we are assured, turn 
 out very fine verses. But the choice of words, 
 the unexpected value, the particular resonance 
 which they receive under the poet's pen — all that 
 is not to be imitated, not to be taught, for those 
 are not things controlled by the poet's will; they 
 are determined beforehand by the inmost nature 
 of the poetic vision. Thus, in the case of Gau- 
 tier, the epithet is ahnost always purely material, 
 and it expresses no more than color and form; 
 and often it is the same with Hugo. But in his 
 case the epithet is symbolic, and interprets much 
 less the real aspect of things than the ideas called 
 forth in ourselves, the impressions, and unwonted 
 and remoter images. Musset's epithet paints at 
 once the outward appearance of the object, and 
 its poetic meaning. There exists seemingly a 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 109 
 
 necessary accord between the essence of things 
 and their sensible form. This may be an error 
 in metaphysics, but what would become of poetry 
 without the illusion? We may judge its worth 
 by verses in which Musset has revealed with 
 grandeur, by means of two adjectives, the splen- 
 dor of the summer night, and the emotion it 
 awakes in the depths of the soul : 
 
 Voluptuous mildness of melancholy nights 
 Springs from the calyx of the flowers around. 
 
 In the following the epithets make us see the 
 adorable little virgin, and open her innocent soul 
 before us: 
 
 A maiden in fine gold from tomes of legend quaint, 
 In floods of velvet dragging tiny feet. 
 
 Those who like the curious subject of rare sen- 
 sation will perhaps be interested in learning that 
 Musset possessed color-hearing, which in his day 
 was never discussed, and which so much occupies 
 the attention of contemporary psychologists. In 
 an unpublished letter to Madame Jaubert, he 
 declares himself to have been wroth, when dining 
 with his family, at being compelled to make an 
 argument in order to prove that fa was yellow, 
 sol red, a soprano voice fair, and the contralto 
 dark. He supposed that such things were self- 
 evident. 
 
110 THE LIFE OF 
 
 As we mount toward the spring of Musset's 
 inspiration we find it not hidden; and, to discover 
 that source, we have no need that he should make 
 his Muse say: 
 
 Which is the poet, thou or but thy heart? 
 My heart is poet! 
 
 A tender sensibility, and one that was formid- 
 able, brought to him the consecrated flame. To 
 it he owed a sincerity which he could not have 
 restrained, even had he wished, and a passionate 
 eloquence, able to pity sufferings other than his 
 own. We may recall the Hope in God: 
 
 Thy pity surely was profound 
 When, with its bliss and many a pang. 
 
 This wondrous and this wretched earth 
 With wailing from dark chaos sprang! 
 
 But the price he paid was dreadful. Because 
 he felt with a painful violence, he referred every- 
 thing to sensation, and fixed pleasure as the ob- 
 ject of life. Whensoever a soul, noble and pure 
 of vulgarity and baseness, has fallen into this 
 error, it has sunk into an incurable melancholy, 
 if not absolute despair. Musset escaped not this 
 fatality. With a cheerful wit he had a heart 
 that bled, a heart that was disconsolate, a union 
 less seldom seen than is commonly thought. His 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 111 
 
 poems make a divinity of sensation, but from the 
 first he had felt the bitter rehsh of pleasure : 
 
 Surgit amari aliquid medio de jonte leporum. 
 
 For this reason the reading of his poetry leaves 
 in us a saddened f eehng. The bitter rehsh domi- 
 nates aU the others. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 PROSE WORKS — PLAYS 
 
 Musset's debut as a playwright was a con- 
 spicuous failure. After the noise made by his 
 earlier poems, the Odeon asked him for a play, 
 " the newest and boldest possible." He wrote 
 the trifle caUed the Venetian Nighty which, in 
 times of literary peace, would have passed un- 
 perceived, and which fell before a storm of hisses 
 on the 1st of December, 1830. This rebuff had 
 the happiest consequences. 
 
 The author, in his resentment, declared that 
 he would write no more for theaters. Hence 
 he felt himself untrammieled by any anxiety to 
 obey the fashion which gives plays a transient 
 and factitious showiness, for which they must pay 
 in wrinkles of premature old age. He now had 
 only to attend to the higher and immutable ele- 
 ments of art, the soul and its passions, the laws 
 of life and their fateful action. Neglecting the 
 ever-changing conventions of the theater, dis- 
 daining unsettled formulas, the offspring of the 
 hour and of caprice, he wrote the least perishable 
 works of the nineteenth century. Since he re- 
 nounced the task of writing for his own time, 
 Musset wrote for all time. 
 
 112 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 113 
 
 We are not to imagine that his dramatic pro- 
 ductions would have been ahnost the same, had 
 he hoped to see them performed. It is not doubt- 
 ful that if he had continued to write for the 
 stage after he had broken with the Cenacle, his 
 works would have passed through the same evo- 
 lution as his poetry, in the same classical direc- 
 tion. Musset, dehugotized, had his eyes opened 
 wide to the defects of the romantic drama. 
 While he believed in its vitality, he thought that 
 there was room beside it for a severer form of 
 art: " Would it not be a fine thing to essay, in 
 our days, the real tragedy, not that of Racine, 
 but that of Sophocles, in all its simplicity, with 
 strict observance of rules? " " Would it not be 
 a bold enterprise, but a praiseworthy one, to 
 purge the stage of those empty speeches, philo- 
 sophical madrigals, and displays of twaddle 
 which burden the boards at the present time? " 
 
 " Would it not be a great novelty to awake the 
 Greek muse, venturing to show her to the French 
 in her grandeur and subhme atrocity? 
 
 " Would it not be curious to see her in the en- 
 counter with the modern drama, which often con- 
 siders itself terrible when it is only ridiculous; 
 to see her as she was, wild, inexorable, in the 
 bright days of Athens, when the bronze urns 
 quivered at the sound of her voice? " 
 
 This was not mere idle talk. Musset labored 
 for the drama once after the failure of 1830. 
 
114 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Rachel had requested a play, and he, without 
 wavering, undertook a classical tragedy, think- 
 ing at first of the Alcestis of Euripides. This 
 project having been put off tiU a later date, he 
 came down to a Merovingian subject. A faUiug 
 out with Rachel interrupted The Servant to the 
 King (1839). Some scenes, however, survive, 
 and they do not cause a very lively regret for the 
 loss of the others; they promised to be part of 
 a tragedy of distinction, and it is matter of sUght 
 importance for French hterature that we possess 
 one distinguished tragedy more or less, while it 
 is highly important that we have Lorenzaccio and 
 No Trifling with Love. 
 
 Musset, we must add, was of the number of 
 the warm admirers of Ponsard's Lucrece. He 
 wrote to his brother in 1833: " M. Ponsard, a 
 young writer who comes from the country, has 
 brought out at the Odeon a tragedy, very fine 
 despite poor acting. He is the lion of the day. 
 The talk is all of him, and justly so." 
 
 Blessed, then, be the hisses which received the 
 Venetian Night so roughly! Musset, no longer 
 troubling himself henceforth about being fit for 
 the stage, took no further pains to seize his 
 dreams on the fly, and to fix them, such as they 
 were, on paper. To this emancipation from 
 every rule we owe an historical dream, which is 
 the only Shakespearian play in our language and 
 of our theater, and half a dozen of adorable 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 115 
 
 dreams concerning love, in which, as Gautier 
 says, " melancholy is chatting with cheerfulness." 
 The idea of Lorenzaccio germinated in Mus- 
 set's mind during the swift hours spent in Flor- 
 ence with George Sand, at the very end of 1833. 
 The noble city still wore the frowning girdle of 
 crenelated walls with which the republicans of 
 the fourteenth century had surrounded it, and 
 which was demolished in our day to widen the 
 ephemeral capital of the young kingdom of 
 Italy. Florence had preserved in all its grim 
 severity, that dark and hard look which contrasts 
 so strangely with the pure and winding lines of 
 its smiling hills, and which makes it the most 
 astounding example of how far the genius of 
 man can break free from the tyranny of nature. 
 The conmion people's quarters, not yet thrown 
 open to the light of day by broad avenues, en- 
 tangled their narrow and tortuous streets, favor- 
 able to riot and ambuscade about the fortress- 
 palaces of the Strozzi and the Riccardi. The 
 entire city, to the mind of him who could under- 
 stand the tale told by the stones, illustrated and 
 commented upon the ancient chronicles of the 
 Florentines. Musset, profiting by the lesson, 
 found, as he turned the leaves of those chronicles, 
 the subject of his drama: the murder of Alexan- 
 der de Medici, tyrant of Florence, perpetrated 
 by his cousin Lorenzo, and the uselessness of the 
 murder for liberating the city. A little idle saun- 
 
116 THE LIFE OF 
 
 tering about the town furnished him with the 
 frame and setting. A peculiar mixture of his- 
 torical intuitions and personal souvenirs effected 
 the rest. Paul de Musset says, in Lui et Elle, 
 that the piece was written in Italy. Then it must 
 have been in Venice, in January, 1834, during 
 the three or four months elapsed between the 
 coming of Alfred and his sickness. 
 
 The action of Lorenzaccio puts under our 
 eyes a revolutionary fiasco, with all its train of 
 intrigue and violence, in the splendid and rotten 
 Italy of the sixteenth century. Through these 
 agitations, which are depicted in warm colors, a 
 gloomy tragedy unfolds in a bewildered and des- 
 perate heart, which it fills with a shuddering, 
 despondent grief. Once more we have the his- 
 tory of the irreparable degradation of man bro- 
 ken with debauchery. 
 
 O'er it the sea might roll nor wash away the stain. 
 
 Lorenzaccio de Medici is an ideahst and an 
 Utopian, a repubUcan of 1830. He believes in 
 virtue, in progress, in himian greatness, in the 
 magic potency of words. He was twenty when 
 he saw the demon, the tempter of dreamers of 
 his kind: "A demon fairer than Gabriel: liberty, 
 our country, human happiness, aU those words 
 resound at his coming like the chords of a lyre, 
 the noise of the silver scales of his flashing wings. 
 Tears fall from his eyes, and make earth teem, 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 117 
 
 and in his grasp he holds the martyr's pahn. His 
 words purify the air round his hps; his flight is 
 so swift that none can say whither his course. 
 Beware ! Once in my life I have seen him career 
 athwart the sky. As I bent over my books, the 
 touch of his fingers made my hair to quiver like 
 the feathers of a bird." Ever since this radiant 
 apparition swiftly darted through the study in 
 which Lorenzo was pursuing in peace art and 
 science, the student has been giving up his slug- 
 gard repose. He has sworn to slay tyrants in 
 pure love of mankind, and in some degree also 
 from pride. He has begun to hve with this idea : 
 " I must be a Brutus." 
 
 The ruler of downtrodden Florence is a cruel 
 debauchee, Alexander de Medici. Lorenzo coun- 
 terfeits the same vices to gain his confidence, to 
 creep up to his side, and to assassinate him. He 
 debases himself even to becoming the master of 
 his shameful pleasures, the accomphce in his 
 crimes, an object of reproach, of infamy, of 
 whom his mother can never think without weep- 
 ing, and whom the common folk call Lorenzaccio 
 in their contempt. But finally the hour for cast- 
 ing the mask away has struck. The Duke shall 
 perish, Florence be free. The new Brutus, when 
 about to deal the blow, perceives with consterna- 
 tion that no man can pollute his soul with im- 
 punity. That is an unf orgiven crime for which 
 no atonement can be, which pursues the guilty 
 
118 THE LIFE OF 
 
 man even to the tomb. Lorenzo has put on a 
 mask, a disguise to throw off at will, but debauch 
 has mastered him and gangrened him to the 
 vitals, and there will be no escape: " I have 
 broken myself in to this trade. Vice was a gar- 
 ment ; now it is glued to my skin. Truly a ruffian 
 am I, and whenever I jest about my fellow I feel 
 as sad as death amid my merriment." 
 
 With virtue lost, he has lost faith. His so- 
 journ in the great confraternity of vice has made 
 him despise men, one not even beheving in the 
 cause for which he has given more than hfe. He 
 is about to free his country, offer the republicans 
 a chance to bring freedom back, and he knows 
 that their selfish indifference wiU not profit by 
 it all; that the people, freed from Alexander's 
 yoke, will throw themselves into the arms of some 
 other tyrant. Yet will he slay the Duke, because 
 the design of this murder is the last fragment 
 of that time when he was pure as the hly, and 
 that blood, the tyrant's blood, will wash away his 
 dishonor. 
 
 Philippe: "Why wilt thou slay him, if thou 
 hast such thoughts? " 
 
 Lorenzo: "Why? Canst thou ask that?" 
 
 Philippe: " If thou dost think the murder use- 
 less to thy country, why do it? " 
 
 Lorenzo: "And that thou askest to my face? 
 Look at me, pray. I was fair of face and calm 
 and pure." 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 119 
 
 Philippe: " O the abyss thou openest to me! " 
 Lorenzo : "And dost thou ask why I slay Alex- 
 ander? Shall I drink poison, leap into Arno? 
 Shall I become a specter, and if I smite a skel- 
 eton shall no sound come? If I am the shadow 
 of myself, shall I snap that sole thread that ties 
 my heart to-day to some fibers of my heart of 
 yore? Canst thou imagine that this assassina- 
 tion is all the virtue left me; that for these two 
 years I have been slipping down a precipice, and 
 that the murder is the one blade of grass my 
 nails can clutch? Have I no pride, because I 
 have no shame? Shall I permit my hfe's enigma 
 to expire unspoken? Yea, could I return, could 
 my apprenticeship to vice fade away, I perad- 
 venture could spare that drover. But I love 
 wine and gaming, women also. Understand? 
 If thou honor aught in me, it is the murder, 
 perchance because thou wouldst not do it. They 
 are covering me with mire, these democrats; my 
 ears ring with infamous jibes; men's execration 
 poisons the bread I chew; it is enough to be spit 
 upon by nameless wretches who shower insults 
 on me to be dispensed from butchering me, as 
 they ought. Enough of hearing human gabblers 
 bawhng to the winds: the world must learn 
 whereof I am and what he is. God be thanked, 
 perhaps to-morrow I will kiU Alexander." 
 
 The murder done, he tastes a few moments of 
 unspeakable happiness. 
 
120 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Lorenzo: "How beautiful this night! How 
 pure the sky! Breathe, heart of mine o'ercome 
 with joy! " 
 
 Scoronconcolo: " Come, master; we must be- 
 gone." 
 
 Lorenzo: " How sweet and bahny is the eve- 
 ning breeze ! and in the meadows how the flowers 
 unfold! Nature magnificent ! Repose eternal!" 
 
 Lorenzo: "Ah, God of goodness! What a 
 moment ! " 
 
 This is the hosanna of the creature set free 
 from iU. Short illusion, brief joy! While Flor- 
 ence surrenders to another Medici, Lorenzo feels 
 that vice never will let him loose, and he goes 
 to offer himself to the daggers of the hired assas- 
 sins who pursue. 
 
 In the Cup we saw a sketch of this dramatic 
 personage, but the causes of Frank's wretched- 
 ness lurked under a veil in part, while in this case 
 the warning is as clear as it is painful. Musset, 
 in a rash and libertine youth, has gone downward 
 on the edge of that abyss into which Lorenzo 
 has shpped, and he insists that he must tell his 
 contemporaries that to cUmb up again is im- 
 possible. 
 
 In this drama there are two other personages 
 for which he had but to appeal to souvenirs, 
 memories which were less his own. His gold- 
 smith and his silk-dealer are Paris shopkeepers 
 at the time of Louis Philippe. The goldsmith 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 121 
 
 was doubtless a subscriber to the National, and 
 had Armand Carrel's portrait in the back shop. 
 The silk-dealer is a monarchist — ^he takes the in- 
 ventory of stock, and knows that courts make 
 trade good. One criticizes everything that the 
 court does and holds it to account when custom- 
 ers don't pay, the other rubs his hands when 
 there is a baU at the Tuileries. 
 
 The Merchant : " I declare such fites delight 
 me, they do. You're in bed, quiet and still, with 
 a corner of the curtain drawn back; you watch 
 the lights now and then as they come and go in 
 the palace ; you catch a bit of dance-music with- 
 out paying for it, and you say, that's my stuff 
 dancing, my fine sUks, the good Lord's own, on 
 the dear bodies of those fine and loyal gentle- 
 men." 
 
 The goldsmith also opens shop : " More than 
 one dances and gets no pay, neighbor; the ones 
 they soak with wine, and then rub up against 
 the walls with the least respect." 
 
 The discussion goes on as they take their shut- 
 ters down. " The Lord preserve his Highness ! " 
 concludes the shopkeeper as he goes in again. 
 " The court is a fine thing." 
 
 " The court! The people carry it on their 
 backs, don't you see? " is the goldsmith's retort 
 from the threshold of his shop. 
 
 These good people had never in their lives seen 
 the Arno nor the Ponte Vecchio. They lived in 
 
122 THE LIFE OF 
 
 the Rue de Bae at the corner of the quay, and 
 they supphed their wares to our grandmothers. 
 
 The remainder of Musset's dramatic work has 
 love for its ahnost exclusive subject, but it is 
 infinitely diversified. The love of the young girl, 
 of women, of coquettes, of the Christian wife, 
 love in Alfred de Musset at different ages and 
 in aU his moods: the frank stripling or the man 
 already blasCj gay or melancholy, ironical or pas- 
 sionate. For he has put himself into aU his 
 swains in his unwearied desire to tell us his 
 thought as to that thing which he esteemed most 
 divine in this world. " The ideas of Musset as 
 to love," said Jules Lemaitre, " reach far back, 
 across the ages, to those of the primitive poets. 
 Love is the first-born of the gods, the force mov- 
 ing the universe." It is not, as Valentine declares 
 to Cecile, the eternal thought which makes the 
 spheres to gravitate, but the love eternal. These 
 worlds live because they seek one another, and 
 the suns would fall into dust if one of them 
 ceased to love. " Ah! " exclaims CecUe, " all of 
 life is there. Yes, aU life." Love so understood 
 is lifted to the rank of a holy mystery. Pagan, 
 if you wiU, but grand and poetic. 
 
 The Chandler ought to come first in a life of 
 Musset, though not written till 1835. This play 
 brings him forward at the hour of charm and 
 danger at which the collegian was grown to 
 man's estate and was awaking as a poet. The 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 123 
 
 adventure of Fortunio, minus the denouement, 
 happened to him in 1828, during the summer 
 spent at Auteuil. Jacqueline lived in the en- 
 virons of Paris. For sake of the happiness of 
 gazing at her, playing \vith her fan, or bringing 
 a piUow for her, Musset would cross Saint- 
 Denis plain unceasingly, and in those days there 
 was no railway nor tramway. But he was seven- 
 teen, the heroic age of love, and he was romantic 
 also. 
 
 He gave Fortunio his face and shape. " A 
 httle blond fellow," says Jacqueline's servant. 
 " That's it," answers her mistress, " I see him 
 now. He has not a bad face, with his fair locks 
 over his ears and his little innocent look. He 
 is running after grisettes, this gentleman with 
 the blue eyes? " 
 
 We may beheve that at that age he had also 
 the timid but passionate heart of his hero; that, 
 like him, he was more or less an angel of candor 
 and a little monster of effrontery; and if the 
 part breathes a delicate fragrance of poetry, that 
 does not impair the resemblance. Be that as it 
 may, the personage is very winning — a cherub 
 fuU of emotion, and touched with melancholy. 
 How different he is from Beaumarchais' little 
 scamp who, with his smart ways, runs after any 
 petticoat. What a contrast to our cherubs of the 
 end of the nineteenth century, with their sterile, 
 calculating souls! The declaration of Fortunio, 
 
124 THE LIFE OF 
 
 third clerk to the notary, to his fair mistress has 
 not grown obsolete in form, as it is irreproach- 
 ably simple. The declaration, in its essence, be- 
 longs to a departed race of adolescents whose 
 hearts are young, who fear not to let the tears 
 tremble on their eyelids. The rhetoricians of our 
 day would make merry at its simple eloquence; 
 they are better trained in a,rguments to touch 
 the heart of some corrupt httle bourgeoise. 
 
 Jacquehne: " That was a pretty song you sang 
 just now at table. Whom was it made for? 
 Would you let me have it, all copied out? " 
 
 Fortunio: " It's written for you; I am dying 
 of love, and my Hfe belongs to you." 
 
 Jacqueline: " Indeed! I thought that the re- 
 frain forbade you to tell her name? " 
 
 Fortunio: " Ah! Jacqueline, have pity on me; 
 this is not the first day I suffer. For two years 
 I have followed the print of your feet through 
 the hornbeams. For two years, without your 
 knowing of my existence, you never went out or 
 in, your hght and trembling shadow never ap- 
 peared behind your curtains, you never opened 
 your window, you never stirred out of doors 
 without my being there and seeing you. I could 
 not come near, but, thank God ! your beauty be- 
 longed to me as the sun to every one; I sought, 
 I breathed it, I lived on the shadow of your life. 
 You spent the morning on the threshold of the 
 door, and every night I came back and shed tears 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 125 
 
 there. If any words, fallen from your lips, made 
 their way to me, I repeated them every day. 
 You cultivated flowers, and my room was filled 
 with them. In the evening you sang at the piano, 
 and I knew, word for word, all your romances. 
 Whatever you loved, I, too, loved, and I iatoxi- 
 cated myself with all that passed through your 
 lips or within your heart. Alas ! I see you smile. 
 God knows my suffering is real, and that I am 
 dying of love for you." 
 
 The Jacquehne of history was insensible to this 
 sweet eloquence, as also to the reproaches where- 
 with Fortunio overwhelmed her when he discov- 
 ered that he had served as a screen for Captain 
 Clavaroche. She did not repent of the crime 
 agaiost love when she deluded the green, con- 
 fiding heart in which her perverse skill had caused 
 passion to burst forth, when she dropped into it 
 the serpent poison of suspicion of which he was 
 never cured, when she played " with all that is 
 most sacred under heaven like a cheat playing 
 with loaded dice." The harm which she herself 
 had done made her smUe. 
 
 Follies of Marianne appeared on the 15th of 
 May, 1833. In this play Musset put a share of 
 himself into his personages: Octave, the preco- 
 cious libertine with a brilliant exterior hiding a 
 whited sepulcher wherein sleeps the dust of 
 youth's generous illusions, is Musset, his wicked 
 ego inspired with sensuahty and blasphemy, the 
 
126 THE LIFE OF 
 
 slayer of his genius. " I cannot love," says 
 Octave. " I am but a heartless debauchee; I do 
 not respect women; what love I may inspire is 
 like the love I feel, the passing intoxication of 
 a dream. My merry mood is but the mask of 
 the actor; my heart is older than my cheery 
 spirits; my senses are blunted, too surfeited for 
 more." 
 
 Coeho the lover is Musset again, the Musset of 
 his better moments — bashful and sensitive, and 
 somewhat saddened by Octave and his immoral- 
 ity, so that he uselessly expostulates with him. 
 How marked this duality was in Musset has been 
 pointed out already: "All who knew Alfred 
 know how he resembled at once Octavio and 
 Coelio, although these two figures seem at the 
 antipodes to each other." Strangers themselves 
 knew it. On one of the first occasions when 
 George Sand saw Musset, she told him how peo- 
 ple asked her whether he was Octave or Ccelio, 
 and said that she had answered " both, I should 
 think." Some days later he wrote her a letter 
 to recall the anecdote, to accuse himself of show- 
 ing only the Octave, and to beg leave to make 
 Coelio speak. And this was his declaration, the 
 beginning of their romance. He also said of 
 himself, knowing well his want of equilibrium, 
 " I weep or I burst into laughter." 
 
 This sort of doubling caused inward dialogues 
 whereof we have an authentic sample. The con- 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 127 
 
 versation of Uncle Van Buck with his good-for- 
 nothing nephew, at the opening of Prudence 
 Spurns a Wager ^ is historic. This is a talk which 
 Musset had with himself one morning in his bed- 
 room, after some foohsh conduct. His better 
 ego had wrapped him in his gown, the symbol of 
 virtue, had seated him in a respectable family 
 armchair, and had given the other ego a very tart 
 scolding, and the latter answered with Valen- 
 tine's impertinences. Some days after the dia- 
 logue was written, and the whole piece came 
 springing from it. The following, from the 
 first scene of the Follies of Marianne, has the 
 appearance of having occurred in the same 
 room before a mirror, after the retvu'n from a 
 bal masqu^. 
 
 Coeho : " What masquerade is this? Isn't that 
 Octave? " 
 
 Octave: "My good sir, how is that graceful 
 melancholy doing? " 
 
 Coeho: " Octave! You are crazy, with a foot 
 of rouge on your cheeks! Where did you get 
 that accouterment? Not ashamed, and in broad 
 daylight? " 
 
 Octave: " O Coeho! You are mad, with a foot 
 of white on your cheeks! Where did you find 
 that broad black coat? Not ashamed, and in 
 mid-carnival? " 
 
 Coelio: "What a hfe! Either you are tipsy, 
 or I am not myself." 
 
128 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Octave: " Either you are in love, or I am my- 
 self." 
 
 Moral of the sermon: Octave wiU undertake 
 to introduce his friend to the fair Marianne. 
 
 To complete the resemblance between his two 
 heroes and his own two egos, Musset condemned 
 the debauchee to become the involuntary execu- 
 tioner of the nobler personage. The Ccelio of 
 real life was continually assassinated by Octave, 
 who also breathed out his remorse in poetical 
 lamentations, as he does in the piece. " I alone 
 in the world have known him. For me only that 
 sUent existence was no mystery. The long eve- 
 nings we spent together are like fresh green in the 
 dust ; they shed upon my heart the only drops of 
 dew which have faUen there. Coeho was the 
 better part of me ; it has gone up to heaven with 
 him. . . . This tomb is mine; I am lying 
 beneath this cold stone. For me they sharpened 
 their swords, and me they killed." Having said 
 so much on the ill he was doing himself, Musset 
 picked up his hat and went back to uproarious 
 dinners and long suppers in the forest shade. 
 Ccelio came back to life only to be killed anew, 
 and each time his life was a Uttle more frail. 
 
 As for the subject of the piece, it is contained 
 in one of the epigrams in Namouna: "A woman 
 is like your shadow: run after her, she will flee; 
 fly from her, she will run after you." 
 
 Again, Fantasio is concerned witH a crime 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 129 
 
 against love. Written before the Italian jour- 
 ney, this work was published on January 1, 1834. 
 Princess Elsbeth, daughter of a king of Bavaria, 
 a Bavaria situated in the blue reahn of fancy, 
 has through mere policy consented to wed the 
 Prince of Mantua, and she weeps when alone 
 because her fiance is an imbecUe whom she could 
 not possibly love. She is not ignorant that it is 
 the lot of kings' daughters to marry the first 
 comer according to the exigencies of politics, but 
 it aU costs her suffering through her romanesque 
 governess's fault, for the latter has been teach- 
 ing her homely sentiments. Elsbeth gently re- 
 proaches her : " Why did you let me read so many 
 stories and fairy-tales? Why did you sow in 
 my poor thoughts so many strange and mysteri- 
 ous fiowers? " The harm is now beyond rehef. 
 In contempt of policy and etiquette her young 
 heart swells with love-germs all ready to unfold, 
 and these must be blighted when she becomes the 
 wife of a horrible idiot. Elsbeth is all resigna- 
 tion in order to spare the two kingdoms a war. 
 A sacrifice, inspired by the Christian idea that 
 love ought to be immolated to higher duties, ap- 
 pears a monstrous sacrifice to Musset, who, dis- 
 guised as Fantasio, goes to tell the young Prin- 
 cess so, and this new incarnation is not one of the 
 weakest in point of resemblance. 
 
 He was Fantasio — always by fits and freaks 
 — toward his twentieth year. His talk was at 
 
130 THE LIFE OF 
 
 that day rich in the unforeseen, as in the dialogue 
 with the plain, respectable Spark. His conduct 
 upset aU prevision, his own included. His humor 
 was to go on by jumps and somersaults, accord- 
 ing as he was passing through this or that mental 
 state defined by Lemaitre with enlightening sa- 
 gacity. " Fantasio is a Bohemian, and Musset 
 has lent him his soul. Fantasio is uneasy because 
 he knows too much of love. He beheves himself 
 in despair, he sees how ugly and useless the world 
 is — ^because he is no longer a lover. Like Musset, 
 he has the love of love, and after each experi- 
 ment an unconquerable disgust, and after that 
 an invincible need of making the experiment 
 again, and in ever-recurring surfeit a desire that 
 always revives; in short, the great human mal- 
 ady, the only malady: impatience at being but 
 ourselves, impatience that the world is only what 
 it is, and imperishable illusion rising endlessly 
 from imperishable despair." Fantasio in the com- 
 edy piously undertakes to break ofi" a match that 
 would be an offense against the divine Eros. 
 He rigs himself out in the hump and periwig of 
 the court clown, buried the night before, and gets 
 into the palace. 
 
 Read the rest who will, for it is not to be ana- 
 lyzed. It is a pleasant dream, all in dialogue, and 
 we must allow it to luU us without exacting too 
 much logic or fearing to let imagination wander. 
 The initiated would like to ferret out symbolic 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 131 
 
 meanings in the play. The first meeting of the 
 Princess and Fantasio may be recalled: 
 
 Elsbeth : " There must be some one behind 
 those bushes. Is it the ghost of my poor clown 
 that I can see among those blue flowers, sitting 
 in the grass? Answer me. Who are you? 
 What are you doing there, picking those flow- 
 ers? " 
 
 Fantasio: "I am an honest flower-gatherer, 
 and I wish your bright eyes good day." 
 
 George Sand alludes to this in one of her 
 glowing letters sent to Musset during a quarrel; 
 we have already cited some fragments from it. 
 Here is something hitherto unpublished, written 
 after coniing home from the Itahens at midnight. 
 She had been there unattended. " Here am I, 
 in my sailor hat, alone, distressed at coming in 
 among these black-faced men. And look at me; 
 I am in mourning, hair cut short, eyes ringed, 
 cheeks hoUow, looking stupid, old. And up there 
 are all those blonde, white, dressed-up ladies, 
 rose-colored feathers, big curls, bouquets, and 
 bare shoulders. And where am I? Lo ! up there, 
 over me, the field where Fantasio is gathering his 
 blue flowers!" 
 
 The denouement of Fantasio is aU smiles. 
 Eros is victorious : sweet Elsbeth will not marry 
 her booby of a suitor. It is true that two peoples 
 will cut each other's throats; but the death of 
 some thousand men never was an important mat- 
 
132 THE LIFE OF 
 
 ter in a fairy-tale, where they can be brought to 
 life again with a touch of the wand, any more 
 than purses of gold thrown by fair princesses 
 to their needy subjects, any more than anything 
 that may be shocking if we have the ill luck to 
 see the piece on the stage. Pasteboard trees and 
 an electric sun are much too real for Fantasio. 
 
 No Trifling with Love is perhaps Musset's 
 dramatic masterpiece. The piece is of narrower 
 scope and less power than Lorenzaccio, but it is 
 perfect. Written after coming home from Italy, 
 it proclaims the masculine resignation of the 
 Souvenir, to the woes which love brings in its 
 train: 
 
 O nature ! O my mother ! And yet have I less loved ? 
 
 " I would love, but would not suif er," says 
 Camille, tutored at a convent in every kind 
 of downy, namby-pamby precaution. " Poor 
 child," answers Perdican, "you talk of some 
 sister who appears to have had a destructive in- 
 fluence on you; she has been deceived, has de- 
 ceived herself, and is desponding. Are you sure 
 that were her husband or her lover to stretch 
 out his hand through the grating in the parlor, 
 she would not stretch out hers?" 
 Camille: " What? I did not hear." 
 Perdican: "Are you sure that were her hus- 
 band or her lover to come and teU her to suffer 
 again, she would say no? " 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 133 
 
 CamiUe: "I think so." 
 
 By the time she says this she no longer be- 
 lieves it, and Perdican's farewell pierces her heart 
 hke a sharpened arrow. 
 
 "Farewell, Camille! Back to the convent, 
 and when you hear those hideous tales which have 
 poisoned you, answer what I say: All men are 
 liars, fickle, false, tattlers, hypocritical, proud 
 and base, contemptible and sensual; all women 
 are perfidious, tricky, vain, inquisitive, and de- 
 praved . . . but there is one holy and sub- 
 lime thing in the world — the union of two of 
 these beings, imperfect and frightful as they are. 
 In love we are often deceived, often wounded, 
 and often unhappy, but we love; and when 
 we are at the brink of the grave we turn 
 to look back, and we say: Often have we suf- 
 fered, sometimes been deceived, but we have 
 loved." 
 
 He goes forth to defy rashly the vindictive 
 divinity who allows none to trifle with love. Per- 
 dican's cruel trifling with a poor peasant girl 
 causes two to be victims: the guileless Rosette, 
 who being deceived dies, and the proud Camille, 
 who is to waste away beneath her veil with sor- 
 rowing over a happiness of which she has had 
 but a glimpse. Love has taken vengeance on 
 two foolish beings who have not been truthful 
 to him. 
 
 It was Musset's last drama. A beam of cheer- 
 
134 THE LIFE OF 
 
 fulness came and rested upon him, and Barberine 
 shows us how an intelligent woman makes those 
 beardless simpletons repent who openly profess 
 to disbelieve in woman's virtue, just to make us 
 believe that they have always been irresistible. 
 Noiselessly, quietly, Barberine gives young Ro- 
 semberg a lesson which he will always bear in 
 mind, and perhaps with no great bitterness. He 
 is so much a child that he is just the one to find 
 amusement in earning his supper at the spinning- 
 wheel. " He is a young man of good family," 
 she writes to her husband, " and not vicious. AU 
 he needed was to learn to spin, and I have taught 
 him. Should you see his father at court, tell him 
 to have no anxiety about him. He is in the top 
 tower-room, where there is a good bed, a good 
 fire, and a spinning-wheel and distaff, and he is 
 spinning. You will think it extraordinary that 
 I choose this for him, but as I noticed that he 
 needed only a power of reflecting, I thought it 
 was for the best to teach this trade, which allows 
 him to reflect at leisure while it makes him earn 
 a living. You know that of yore our tower was 
 a prison; I lured him to it by telling him to await 
 me there, and then I locked him in. The wicket 
 in the wall is very convenient; they hand him 
 his food through it, and he is doing well, for he 
 has the healthiest look in the world, and one can 
 see him get fat." 
 
 Rosemberg is so free from spite that he is 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 133 
 
 growing stout! A good little fellow, and he 
 wiU not try it again. 
 
 We have spoken of the Chandler and told the 
 origin of Prudence Spurns a Wager ^ in which 
 CecUe is near akin to Barberine. She also un- 
 dertakes, young as she is, to correct the young 
 coxcombs who fancy they know women because 
 of successes achieved in the side scenes or at in- 
 ternational charity bazaars. The punishment is 
 very mild this time. Valentine has played very 
 badly a mean part; he was a fool, and it is no 
 fault of his that he did not become odious. Nev- 
 ertheless, his faults are forgiven, and at the de- 
 nouement he weds Cecile. The chaste love of a 
 young woman has been a shield to this mauvais 
 sujetj preserving him from punishment. If 
 some straight-laced reader, deeming him vmde- 
 serving of indulgence, blames his unmerited good 
 fortune, she does not see one of the fairest privi- 
 leges of her sex, that of purifying by honest 
 affection hearts tainted by easy pleasures, and 
 forcing their portals for the incoming of respect 
 and duty. Few pages have been written as 
 glorious for woman as the scene of the meeting 
 in the forest, at the end of which the conquered 
 libertine returns thanks to innocence, in a wild 
 burst of joy and gratitude, for having compre- 
 hended nothing that he has said. 
 
 Valentine: " Not afraid? Did you come here, 
 and never trembled? " 
 
136 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Cecile: "Why? What should I fear? You, 
 or the night? " 
 
 Valentine: "Why not me? Who gives you 
 confidence? I am young, you are beautiful, and 
 we are alone." 
 
 Cecile : " Well ! What harm in that ? " 
 
 Valentine: " I know; there is nothing wrong, 
 but hsten, and let me fall down on my knees." 
 
 Cecile: " What ails you now? You are shiver- 
 ing." 
 
 Valentine: " It is fear, it is joy." 
 
 Valentine, having just made discovery of pu- 
 rity, worships it upon his knees. He is saved, 
 but it is a narrow escape. 
 
 Musset afterward wrote two more little prov- 
 erbs, and they are fuU of wit: in 1837 A Ca- 
 price ^ and in 1845 The Door Must he Either 
 Open or Shut. The graceful Carmosine was 
 written in 1850. Among a number of tiny, tame 
 pieces, the last. The Donkey and the Stream, 
 of 1855, has a right to be named, because of one 
 pretty httle part, that of the ingenue. Her name 
 is Marguerite, and but yesterday she was playing 
 with her doU. With nose perked up and eye 
 alert, she has brought home from the convent 
 her theories as to marriage and how to make the 
 men step, which she applies with energy, at the 
 risk of tears, when the lover pretends to take her 
 outbursts too seriously. Her lively profile forms 
 a dainty close to a procession of young ladies 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 137 
 
 which has no pendant in our dramatic hterature. 
 Musset had not lost a moment when he spent 
 nights waltzing — not always in time, as one of 
 his partners assures me — and chattering with his 
 dancing-mate. In discussing the cut of a dress 
 or the rules of a cotilhon figure, he had been fath- 
 oming that being, as close and enigmatical as 
 a flower-bud, the young girl. Cecile, Elsbeth, 
 Carmosine, and that little Marguerite, though 
 there is hardly a glimpse of her, will be his wit- 
 nesses before posterity when men accuse him of 
 having found his delight in audacious pictures 
 of sensual inspiration. Their charming shadows 
 will attest that his imagination was not without 
 its people of virginal figures, and the ulcer of 
 contempt never was secretly gnawing his soul at 
 the sight of yoxmg maidens, whether peasants or 
 noble ladies. 
 
 Elsbeth perceives that she is romanesque, re- 
 proaches herself, and at the same time feels a 
 certain thankfulness to herself for the defect. 
 Family interest demands her marriage to an ab- 
 surd blockhead. Too good and too straightfor- 
 ward to allow her dreams to come between her 
 and her duty, she tastes a secret pleasure in feel- 
 ing that duty causes her a pang, and that she 
 is not one of those positive and cold young 
 women whose dreams are cheerful and not iron- 
 ical like hers, when about to take a lout as hus- 
 band. I shall be a lady after all, which may 
 
138 THE LIFE OF 
 
 amuse me; I shall take a fancy to my dresses, 
 and so on — ^to my teams and my new livery: 
 " Happy it is that in marrying there is some- 
 thing else than a husband. It may be that I shall 
 find happiness hidden among my wedding-pres- 
 ents." She has a solid fund of sound sense and 
 clear judgment, but she has had an opportimity 
 to read a number of Enghsh novels, and in her 
 small acquaintance with the world has been con- 
 fused by their decent romanesque sentimentality. 
 
 CecUe has no liking for novels, none for ro- 
 manticism in action. She, at a glance, saw that 
 Valentine, with all his pretentions to clear-head- 
 edness and to experience, takes for reality what 
 is only literature, and her reproaches are very 
 nice: "What do you mean by jimaping into a 
 pit? Risking your Ufe, and for what? You con- 
 trived to be received by us, and your wishing to 
 succeed without help I understand; but the rest, 
 of what use is that? Do you like novels? " 
 
 Valentine: "Sometimes . . ." 
 
 Cecile: " I own that novels do not please me 
 particularly. Those I have read amoimt to noth- 
 ing but Hes, I think, everything invented on pur- 
 pose. They are always talking about nothing but 
 seductions, tricks, intrigues, and a thousand im- 
 possible things." 
 
 She is not the one to play the misunderstood 
 woman, the plague of romanticism, whom we 
 have not yet shaken off, and who, in disguise 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 139 
 
 after disguise, has not ended her appearances. 
 Cecile, according to her promise, will give her 
 husband good bouillon, and will love him with 
 all her honest little heart, because he is her hus- 
 band, and without insisting that he be genius or 
 hero. She is altogether his superior. Valentine 
 is giddy and fast. Cecile will be his reason and 
 his conscience. Call to mind her talk with the 
 dancing-master: "Mademoiselle, with all I say, 
 you do not make the right movement. Now turn 
 your head slightly, and round your arms." Ce- 
 cile: " But, sir, if you do not want to fall, you 
 must certainly look straight ahead." She wiU 
 look ahead for two, this modest and exquisite 
 creature, and her husband wiU reward her with 
 esteem and confidence. 
 
 Camille has heard more of the evils of life; she 
 is less guileless than Cecile. Musset designed to 
 bring out the difference between a girl reared at 
 home and one brought up in a convent. The 
 former, in holy ignorance of danger, hastens to 
 the rendezvous appointed in the woods at night 
 by a man whom she has known but a day, and 
 who she thinks is her fiance. The other answers 
 her playmate, who tries to clasp her hand, in the 
 phrase invented in the convent, which Cecile 
 would not comprehend: "I do not like to be 
 touched." Poor CamiUe! Just eighteen, she 
 has never read an improper book. Yet there is 
 neither confidence nor joy in life within her 
 
140 THE LIFE OF 
 
 youthful heart, touched with a blight through the 
 confidences of those who, after shipwreck in the 
 world, find in convents a shelter against it and 
 themselves. " Do they know," asks Perdican, in 
 consternation at her precocious disenchantment, 
 " do they know that they are committing a crime 
 when they come and whisper in the ear of a 
 maiden the words of a matured woman? Ah! 
 What a lesson for them to give you! " CamiUe, 
 as she listens to these bitter stories, sees hvmianity 
 through a horrid dream; and she prays God to 
 have nothing of the woman left in her. 
 
 As she leaves the shadows of the cloister, her 
 nightmare is dissolved. " You were going away 
 without taking my hand," says her cousin; " you 
 wished never to see again either that wood or 
 that poor little fountain which is watching us all 
 in tears; you denied the years of childhood, and 
 that plaster mask which the nuns fixed on your 
 cheeks refused to me a brotherly kiss; but your 
 heart beat, it forgot its lesson through not know- 
 ing how to read, and you have come again and 
 sat down on the grass where we are." CamiUe 
 is in love, and her dazzled eyes reopen to the 
 truth. Now she beheves in love, life, happiness, 
 and in Perdican. With joy she welcomes suffer- 
 ing. Her pride melted and she became a weak 
 woman again, when their imprudence separated 
 her from Perdican. Poor Camille! 
 
 The other young girls in Musset's plays have 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 141 
 
 the same family air as the chorus coryphSes. All 
 these chaste heroines have two features in com- 
 mon. They are true to their calling, to unfold 
 through love and wedlock, and they are very hon- 
 est, simple-hearted Rosette included, whom Per- 
 dican misleads by deceitful words. They pos- 
 sess the charm of healthy natures, and could 
 have been conceived only by a poet who, through 
 lost illusions and through failures, treasured an 
 unimpaired respect for young girls. Musset at 
 all times saw the Ninons and the Ninettes of real 
 life with the eyes of a believer, and they inspired 
 him, in recompense therefor, with the purest ele- 
 ment of his work. 
 
 The history of Musset's dramatic productions 
 is singular. The pieces long slept in the collec- 
 tion of the Revue des Deux Mondes; they were 
 not particularly noticed at the time of their ap- 
 pearance, and were soon forgotten. Nor did 
 their publication in book form in 1840 make any 
 noise either. They were almost unknown when 
 Madame Allan, then in St. Petersburg, heard 
 some one praising a little Russian comedy which 
 was being given in a minor theater. She wished 
 to see it, found it to her taste, and asked for 
 a translation in order to perform the play before 
 the imperial court. Some one, to simplify mat- 
 ters, sent her a book entitled Comedies et Pro- 
 verbes par Alfred de Musset — the little Russian 
 work was the Caprice. 
 
142 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Such was the success of Madame Allan with 
 the piece that, on coming home to Paris, in 1847, 
 she brought it in her muif, and on the 27th of 
 November played it, against wind and tide, at 
 the Comedie Franchise. No one, or almost no 
 one, knew whence it came. And then it was 
 badly written: " ' Rebonsoir, cheref In what 
 language is that? " said Samson in suffocating 
 astonishment. On the morrow, a complete re- 
 vulsion. Theophile Gautier, in his feuiUeton, 
 wrote : " This little act, played last Saturday at 
 the Fran9ais, is decidedly a great literary event. 
 Since Marivaux, nothing has been brought out 
 there so fine, so dehcate, so sweetly humorous as 
 this tiny masterpiece, hidden in the pages of a 
 review, where the Russians of St. Petersburg, 
 the snow-bound Athens, had to find it in order 
 to make us take it." Theophile Gautier next 
 praised the " prodigious cleverness, the perfect 
 craft, the marvelous divination of stage matters 
 of this proverb, not written for the boards and 
 nevertheless more adroitly managed than any- 
 thing of Scribe's." 
 
 The Illustration gave a lively picture of the 
 pubhc surprise at the discovery of Musset as a 
 dramatic author : " An unexpected event for 
 everybody at the Fran9ais was the complete, 
 gigantic, stunning success of a wee little one- 
 act comedy." Next comes an eulogium on the 
 poet, and thereupon the chronicler returns to the 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 143 
 
 Caprice: " The wit flashes like diamonds, each 
 scene is f airyUke, and yet it is true, it is nature. 
 The spectator is enraptured." 
 
 Admiration so great staggers us somewhat, as 
 in the Caprice we see a piece charming, no doubt, 
 somewhat better than smart, offhand stage dia- 
 logue, but among Musset's productions one of 
 the least. 
 
 However this may be, the way was now open, 
 and everything else passed through the opening. 
 The Door Must be Either Open or Shut was 
 played on the 7th of April, 1848. Prudence 
 Spurns a Wager was performed on the 22d of 
 June following, on the eve of the insurrection. 
 " I thank you," writes the author to Tattet, " for 
 your letter. Nothing has happened to my broth- 
 er and me but fatigue. At the moment of 
 writing this I am doffing my uniform, which I 
 have hardly taken off since the insurrection be- 
 gan. I will not say a word about the horrors 
 now over. It is all too hideous. 
 
 " Amid the above charming eclogues, poor 
 Uncle Van Buck, you see, has been up to his 
 neck. Yet his success was complete, and no ex- 
 aggeration. It was the immediate eve of the 
 insurrection; I found the haU fiUed, lined with 
 pretty women, clever people, a parterre of great 
 excellence for me, very good actors — everything, 
 in fact, for the best. I had my own evening, 
 and I took it, so to speak, on the fly. . . . 
 
144 THE LIFE OF 
 
 Next day, good morning! Actors, managers, 
 author, prompter — we all had our guns in our 
 fists, with the cannon for an orchestra, the con- 
 flagration for illumination, and a pit full of rav- 
 ing vandals. The militia was so plucky that the 
 spectacle happily made our hearts beat lustily. 
 They were, most of them, mere boys. I had 
 never dreamed of anything like it." 
 
 In August the Chandler had its turn, Andre 
 del Sarto in November, and they even went so 
 far as to play the unplayable Fantasio and the 
 Nights. 
 
 One of the causes of this prodigious success 
 was that Musset, in the theater, appeared to be 
 an innovator and a realist. His pieces were not 
 made by formula, by the romantic or the classic, 
 and they possessed that loftier truth which is the 
 poet's privilege. " Each scene is a fairy-scene, 
 and yet it is true, it is nature." These words 
 are a summary of the impressions of the first 
 spectators, some of whom went so far as to re- 
 proach Musset with being too much la nature. 
 Auguste Lireux notes it a propos of the first 
 presentation of the Caprices^ in 1851. " We are 
 not habituated to natural pieces, and the fancy 
 which resembles truth itself, which properly dis- 
 tinguishes Musset." People at that time were 
 too fond of the false to endure the truth readily, 
 and he sums up the play in this way : " A too 
 cruel, too true history! " 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 145 
 
 Some, nevertheless, were scandalized at the 
 sudden rapture of the public. Sainte-Beuve, 
 who never attached great importance to Musset's 
 plays, at first applauded the popularity of the 
 Caprice. When he saw that the matter was look- 
 ing serious, and that the longer pieces were taken 
 for something more and better than playful ban- 
 ter, his indignation prompted him to write in 
 his Journal: " Yesterday I saw Musset's httle 
 piece. Prudence Spurns a Wager ^ at the Fran- 
 9ais. There are extremely pretty things in it, 
 but I was struck with its incoherence and scant 
 good sense. In truth, the characters are taken 
 from a very strange world: the lecturing uncle, 
 a surly fellow, who winds up tipsy; the young 
 man, who is rather a coarse fop than an intelli- 
 gent and amiable being; the girl, an arrant httle 
 puss, a mere milliner from Rue Vivienne, pre- 
 sented to us as a Clarissa, not formed to convert 
 a libertine otherwise than by a caprice of which 
 he will repent fifteen minutes afterward; the 
 insolent and commonplace baronne, suddenly 
 brought out at the end like a mother of mercy — 
 aU that is loose, inconsistent, and without se- 
 quence. It comes from a world which is fabu- 
 lous, or seen in song and feasting when wine has 
 done its work. A spirit of detail and an unfore- 
 seen drollery compose the thing, mending the 
 rents in the tissue at every moment. But there 
 are people who imagine in all earnestness that 
 
146 THE LIFE OF 
 
 in this play they have the supreme good tone 
 of the most refined society lately gone by, while 
 the truth is that such things never existed any- 
 where else than in the fumes of the poet's fancy 
 on his way home from smokers' parliament. I 
 am wrong; there are young men, and even young 
 women, who so far are infatuated with this Mus- 
 set style that they have begun to imitate it, in 
 their way, as much as they can, and to model 
 themselves after this pattern. In this case the 
 original came after the copy, and is not at all 
 an original. Alfred de Musset is the caprice of 
 a blase, hbertine epoch." One must feel a little 
 touch of vexation at the critic whose decision has 
 been reversed by the majority. We cited this 
 clumsy, dull page because it fixes the moment 
 when the glory of Musset, after a confinement 
 within narrow circles, began to rise higher. The 
 success of Caprice did more for his reputation 
 than aU his poems put together. Within a few 
 days he became popular, and his verses profited 
 thereby. The dramatic author had given an im- 
 pulse to the poet, so that when least expecting 
 it he began to soar skyward. 
 
 Musset's prose works embrace, besides, the 
 Novels, Tales, Miscellaneous Works, and the 
 Confession, which last has almost always had 
 the strange fortune to be judged by defects or 
 its poorest pages, even by its admirers. The 
 youth of thirty years ago read like devotees 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 147 
 
 the declamations in the two earlier parts, wherein 
 Musset is but an indifferent pupil of Rousseau 
 and Byron. The youth of to-day condemn the 
 book from the same chapters, and seem not to 
 know the idyl which succeeds them: "While 
 walking one evening in the linden path, where 
 it enters the vUlage, I saw a young woman step- 
 ping forth from a house which stood apart. She 
 was very simply dressed, and so veiled that I 
 could not see her face; yet her shape and her 
 gait appeared so charming that for a while I 
 followed her with my eyes. She was crossing 
 a meadow near by when a kid, feeding at large 
 in a field, ran up to her; she caressed it, and 
 looked this way and that as if to find an herb 
 to its hking. Near me I saw a wild mulberry; 
 I plucked down a branch and went forward, 
 branch in hand. The kid came on, very slowly 
 and with a timid look, then stopped, not daring 
 to take the branch from my hand. Its mistress 
 made a sign to embolden the kid, but its look 
 was anxious. She came a few steps toward me, 
 put her hand on the branch, and the kid took it 
 forthwith. I made her a bow, and she went her 
 way." 
 
 This is the first meeting with Brigitte. Not 
 less charming is the picture of the unpretentious 
 home of the pale young woman with the great 
 dark eyes. The story broadens and rises with 
 the triumphant return of love into those two 
 
148 THE LIFE OF 
 
 hearts — they had thought themselves to be all 
 worn out — and the scene of the avowal is of a 
 grave sweetness. One evening they are on Bri- 
 gitte's balcony, contemplating the splendors of 
 night. " She leaned upon her elbow, her eyes 
 fixed upon the sky; I bent beside her and watched 
 her as she dreamed. Soon I raised my eyes my- 
 self; a voluptuous melancholy intoxicated us 
 both. Together we breathed the mild fumes 
 which floated out from the hornbeams, and we 
 watched the last faint white glimmerings which 
 the moon was dragging downward as she sank 
 behind the black masses of the chestnuts. I re- 
 membered a certain day when I had gazed with 
 despair on the boundless void of the beautiful 
 sky, and the memory made me tremble. Now all 
 was overflowing ! I felt a hymn of thanksgiving 
 rise in my heart, I felt our love soaring toward 
 God. My arm encircled the waist of my dear 
 mistress; she softly turned her head: her eyes 
 were drowned in tears." 
 
 The rambhngs by night in the forest of Fon- 
 tainebleau are pecuharly beautiful, likewise. 
 George Sand and Musset walked there to- 
 gether in the autumn of 1833. Their feet fol- 
 lowed the same paths as Octave and Brigitte, 
 their hands clung to the same bushes as they 
 clambered up and down the rocks. They ex- 
 changed in faint tones the same confidences. 
 Brigitte's male attire, her cottonade blouse. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 149 
 
 which has been a reproach to Musset as a fault 
 in taste, was her travehng costume, the one in 
 the first Traveler's Letter. We have seen the 
 emotion of George Sand when she happened 
 upon the hardly disguised tale of their unfor- 
 tunate passion in the Confession. This scrupu- 
 lous exactitude explains and excuses the some- 
 what prolonged passages in the fifth part — a 
 tedious recital of quarrels so painful that his 
 rival's victory at the end of the volume is a re- 
 hef to the reader. 
 
 As a whole, it is a work of art of great un- 
 evenness, now declamatory, now rising higher, 
 sometimes tiresome, but a book of price through 
 its sincerity, and a great honor to Musset, as he 
 gives everywhere in its pages, without hesita- 
 tion or reserve, the nobler part to the woman 
 whom he has loved, and who yet had not been 
 free from reproach. Now that all the veils are 
 lifted, such is the light in which the Confes- 
 sion stands. 
 
 The Tales and Stories are Uttle narratives 
 without pretensions, written with wit or senti- 
 ment, according to the subject. In these Musset 
 has twice or thrice attained perfection. The 
 pearl of the Tales is the White Blackbird, in 
 which one may see the ill consequences of being 
 a romantic in a family for generations devoted 
 to classic verse. At the first note which the hero 
 risks the father bounds to his feet: " What's that 
 
150 THE LIFE OF 
 
 I hear? Is that the way the blackbird whistles? 
 Is that the way I whistle? Is that whistling? 
 Who taught you to whistle so against aU usage 
 and rule? " 
 
 " Very sorry, sir," I answered, with humility, 
 " I whistled as weU as I could." 
 
 " That's not the way we whistle in my family," 
 retorts my father, beside himself. " For centu- 
 ries we have whistled from father to son. . . . 
 You are no son of mine; you are no merle." 
 
 M. de Musset-Pathay took things in a less 
 tragic fashion, but after the first volume written 
 by his son he earnestly believed that that was 
 not the way to whistle. 
 
 The white blackbird, repulsed by his kindred, 
 is not recognized by the feathered cenacles when 
 he asks for an asylum, because he is unhke any- 
 body else. He takes to singing for himself, and 
 becomes a famous poet. The sequel is not less 
 transparent. He weds a white blackbird, who 
 writes novels with all the facility of George 
 Sand: " She never rubbed out a line or made a 
 plan before setting to work." She had the ad- 
 vanced ideas, also of the author of Lelia^ at aU 
 times taking care to attack the government, by 
 the bye, and to preach emancipation for black- 
 birds." The feathered poet is sure that he has 
 the bird of his dreams, matching his color as well 
 as his genius. Alas! his wife had deceived him. 
 She was no white blackbird; she was only a bird 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 151 
 
 like all the blackbirds; she was dyed, and she 
 faded ! 
 
 The stories are strewn with personal souvenirs. 
 When the love is not Musset in flesh and blood, 
 it is seldom that he has no feature, no adventure 
 in common with his. Almost always the heroines 
 are drawn from life, as also the landscape, in- 
 teriors, episodes. He invented but little. He 
 wrote from " human docmnents," and recounted 
 "things of the hfe he had hved," in the same 
 fashion as our naturalist novelist. But he did 
 not see with the same eyes. 
 
 Musset in his plays used a poetical prose which 
 has few rivals in our language. It is highly 
 musical. The harmony of it caresses the ear, 
 the rhythm is sweet and strong. The movement 
 follows with pliant faithfulness the course of the 
 idea, now in peace, now in haste and passion. 
 The epithets are better than sonorous and rare; 
 they have the power of evocation. The ensemble 
 is picturesque and eloquent, never ceasing to be 
 limpid. The art in this is very simple and 
 delicate. 
 
 His offhand prose is perfect, a frank and 
 transparent language in which the expression is 
 right, and the turn of the phrase natural and 
 clear cut. The familiar letters are hvely, and 
 easy also. Some of these were printed in the 
 Posthumous Works, but all that I have com- 
 pared with the originals have been altered. In 
 
152 THE LIFE OF 
 
 those days the duties of the editor were under- 
 stood otherwise than now. Paul de Musset did 
 not confine himself to trimming, but he insisted 
 on elevating the style which he considered too 
 negligent. At a pinch he would modify the sense 
 a little. Musset had written to his marraine, 
 a propos of love, " I have burned my wings 
 passably in due and proper time and place," but 
 Paul prints it, " They have burnt my wings 
 passably . . ." Elsewhere Musset said, re- 
 garding an article for which he was asking cer- 
 tain information, " I prefer writing a mere medi- 
 ocre but honest page to composing a poem in 
 false gilt coin." That Musset should be able 
 to write a mediocre page was not to be admitted ; 
 and in the volume we read, " I prefer writing a 
 simple page." " Rosine was not Spanish, but 
 she was witty," is changed to " Rosine was not 
 frolicsome " in the notice of Mademoiselle de 
 Plessy. Pages are entirely rewritten, so that 
 Musset, if he had seen the volume, would have 
 been thrilled with admiration and gratitude for 
 the patient zeal of his brother; but perhaps he 
 would have recalled a kind of work and play 
 combined which, in the time of his youth, aristo- 
 cratic ladies had taken up with a rage. In the 
 spring of 1831 the ladies of the Faubourg Saint- 
 Germain passed their days sticking sealing-wax 
 in circles on small bits of cardboard, which thus 
 became candle-sconces. Unable to see anything 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 153 
 
 useful in this work, Musset asked: "Are the 
 shops all out of sconces? Whence comes this 
 rage for hoh^ches'i " Probably his brother's 
 picking work would have seemed to him hardly 
 more useful than the manufacture of sconces of 
 sealing-wax. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE LAST YEARS 
 
 MussET felt an inability to write coming over 
 Tiim and growing into powerlessness, and he was 
 not ignorant of the cause of it. He knew that 
 he was himself destroying his own intellect day 
 by day, and he watched the disaster with despair 
 in his soul, his wiU overthrown, incapable of 
 guarding against himself. The evil was of long 
 standing. Sainte-Beuve says, in 1837, " I saw 
 Musset the other day, very amiable, and nice in 
 complexion and face, and so broken and impaired 
 in stamina underneath." 
 
 He suffered cruelly while his fate was being 
 accomplished. In 1839, as his brother tells us, 
 he was about to kill himself. The year following 
 Tattet showed to Sainte-Beuve a scrap of paper 
 which he had caught up that very morning in 
 the country, on Musset's table. The verses on 
 it were written in pencil: 
 
 I've lost my strength and life of late. 
 And many friends and merry cheer. 
 And all that pride's no longer here 
 
 Which made men think my genius great. 
 154 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 155 
 
 The causes of this anticipated death are fright- 
 fully sad. We should bear in mind the frailty 
 of the human machine, the irrepressible rioting 
 of his nerves, and we shall get glimpses of the 
 physical frailties which caused him to lose the 
 mastery and control over himself. One evening 
 in 1844, after his marraine had talked to him in 
 a very serious manner, as she had hopes of lead- 
 ing him to regain control of himself, he lifted 
 the veil which hid his misery until she burst into 
 tears. " I am not able to repeat what he told 
 me. That is beyond my strength. Only you 
 must understand that he defeated me at every 
 point." On the morrow Musset sent her the son- 
 net printed in the Biography: " Let fools calum- 
 niate; I hardly care." Let us pass by, turning 
 our heads aside, our hearts full of compassion. 
 Let us feel the pity of it, when a misery can 
 drive genius to such a suicide. 
 
 Musset asked no indulgence from the public. 
 " The world has no compassion except for iUs of 
 which men die." In his family he gave way to 
 deep sadness, which kept growing with each 
 endeavor to dispel his trouble. One evening, 
 on returning from a pleasxu*e-party, he wrote: 
 " Among those who haunt taverns, there are 
 some who are merry and rosy, others pale and 
 taciturn. Can there be a more painful spectacle 
 than that of a suffering libertine? Some I have 
 seen whose laugh made me shudder. He who 
 
156 THE LIFE OF 
 
 desires to subdue his soul with the arms of the 
 senses can intoxicate himself at his ease; he can 
 put on an apathetic and unmoved exterior; he 
 can lock up his thought in an unbending wiU; 
 his thought will not cease to low in the brazen 
 buU." His thought did its duty, and continued 
 to " low." His sick and diseased wUl failed in 
 its duty, and came not to aid him. This moral 
 death struggle lasted more than fifteen years. 
 
 In public, or in his letters, he wore a pleasant 
 look and kept up his spirits. His uncommon 
 mobility made the task rather easy. He would 
 amuse himself hke a child with the veriest trifles. 
 The minor misfortunes of life, which he never 
 considered it in good taste to take too seriously, 
 had the mighty gift even of reawakening his ani- 
 mation. We may assert that his repeated tifi^s 
 with the national guard, when he would not do 
 duty, were wholesome. Generally he got the 
 worst of it, and had to spend the night in the 
 guard-house. When he found himself actually 
 under lock and key in Cell 14, set apart for art- 
 ists and writers, he found it so preposterous that 
 he laughed in his own face, in prose and verse. 
 Every one has read My Prisons, written at No. 
 14. The poem has a pendant, which is not so 
 well known. In a letter to Augustine Brohan, 
 he says : " I am in irons, groaning amid the dun- 
 geons. This is not to prevent my coming to see 
 you to-morrow. But I write you this from the 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 157 
 
 bottom of the cellular system. At the present 
 moment I am in that famous No. 14, the one 
 ill engraved in the Diable a Paris. The cause 
 is patrol duty, as I have not slain anybody." 
 
 After such gleams of cheerfulness he sank 
 back and became as gloomy as ever. To the 
 too well-founded reasons for melancholy which 
 have been related were added various annoyances, 
 and among them his scant success. He was al- 
 ways unpretentious — a little less assuming as he 
 grew older — and compliments horrified him so 
 that he appeared haughty and disdainful. " You 
 speak to me," he wrote to Madame Jaubert, 
 " about people who at times are eager to tell 
 me of the pleasure I have afforded them. On 
 my word of honor, nine out of ten compliments 
 are intolerable to me. I do not say that I con- 
 sider them false, but they give me a mind to cut 
 and run." In 1838 he says to Tattet : " You too ! 
 Tu quoque. Brute! You are paying me comph- 
 ments. As they come from you, I take them 
 with a hearty good-will. Do not call me illus- 
 trious; you might render me sorry that I am not. 
 When you want to pay me a compliment, caU 
 me your friend." 
 
 But one may be unassuming and all in vain; 
 there is an indifference which grieves and dis- 
 courages a writer, and the poet of the Nights 
 had had a hard experience of it. At all times 
 there had been young men who knew Bolla by 
 
158 THE LIFE OF 
 
 heart. The crowd had ahnost forgotten Musset, 
 for all the brilliancy of his debut, because after 
 writing Bolla he had detached himself from the 
 group of innovators. He had forsworn the ro- 
 mantic form at the moment of the triumph of 
 romanticism. The press paid no further atten- 
 tion to him, the public in general lost interest 
 in him, and his finest works were greeted, one 
 after the other, by the silence of indifference. 
 In 1833 Heine exclaimed with astonishment: 
 " Among the fashionable he is as unknown as 
 an author as a Chinese poet could be." Madame 
 Jaubert reports this remark, and adds that Heine 
 told the truth. The salons of Paris, her own 
 included, knew only the Ballad and the Anda- 
 lusian. One evening at her house, Geruzez took 
 it into his head to repeat, before some thirty 
 persons, the duel in Don Paez. The audience 
 listened in surprise. Not one of them had read it. 
 Counting for so little in the intellectual move- 
 ment, and, moreover, being somewhat, a little too 
 much, apart from pubhc affairs, Musset, as he 
 grew older, had the emptiest existence. To him, 
 of all great writers, it would be befitting to apply 
 what has been said with such good sense respect- 
 ing the dangers which come from the hterary in- 
 fluence of the salon and of women. Musset lived 
 far too long the life of the salon and in the 
 society of women. By dint of riming bouquets 
 a Chloe for his rosy little darlings, and of court- 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 159 
 
 ing the plaudits of their tiny pahns, he lost the 
 habit of virile thinking and effort at the time 
 when it was a question of life and death. 
 
 His days were woven of mere nothings when 
 he ceased to give them to labor. His letters bear 
 witness to that. The events of those long years 
 are certain short journeys and many ridiculous 
 passions. In 1845 he passes a part of the sum- 
 mer in the Vosges. On returning he writes to 
 his faithful Tattet : " Nothing Uf ts the heart or 
 beautifies the mind like these long trips about the 
 kingdom. Incredible is the number of houses, 
 peasants, flocks of geese, beer-glasses, stable- 
 boys, aldermen, warmed-up dishes, village cures, 
 hterary persons, high dignitaries, hop-fields, 
 vicious horses, and broken-down donkeys pass- 
 ing before my eyes. . . ." 
 
 " I came back with a young beauty of forty- 
 five or forty-six, who was on the way from War- 
 saw to the Batignolles in the diligences of Notre- 
 Dame-des-Victoires. The fact is history: She 
 would eat a PoUsh cake of the color of Marolles 
 cheese, weep from time to time, and ask what 
 o'clock it was, all because a big gentleman, seven 
 or eight feet long, had, to all appearances, had 
 a squabble with her; this gentleman was called 
 mon bien-aimej at all events, this was the only 
 name I heard her call him." The bien-aime had 
 gone off in a sulk to the back seats, leaving 
 Musset face to face in the coupe with Dulcinea. 
 
160 THE LIFE OF 
 
 "Fancy my situation! Happily, her Ariadne 
 face made me think of Bacchus. So at Voic I 
 bought a bottle of excellent wine for ten sous, 
 good through and through, along with a chicken, 
 and in this way, she weeping, I tippling, we 
 journeyed sadly. O my friend, how many ex- 
 cruciating dramas, sufferings, palpitations may 
 reside in the three compartments of the coach! " 
 
 Madame Jaubert was the titled confidant in 
 heart matters. The next letter refers to the fall- 
 ing out with Princess Belgiojoso: "Marraine! 
 The lad is discomfited! Do you know what the 
 poor creature did? He wrote, heart open. . . . 
 They gave him a rap on the head. The answer 
 they made him, O Marraine! was a response not 
 fit for print. . . . And know you what the 
 poor ninny began by doing as he got the answer, 
 immortal or at least worthy to be immortal? He 
 — I — ^began to weep, and cried like a calf for a 
 full half -hour. 
 
 " Yes, Marraine, hot, scalding tears as in my 
 best days, my head in my hands, both elbows on 
 my bed, heel on my cravat, knees on my new 
 coat, and lo ! I sobbed like a chUd having his face 
 washed, and more, I had the advantage of suf- 
 fering like a hound when they are sewing him 
 up. . . . My room was a very ocean of bitter- 
 ness, as the good people say. . . ." 
 
 This deep despair brought out Sur une Morte 
 — ^lines of excessive cruelty. Musset seemed to 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 161 
 
 be making his endeavor to win a reputation for 
 frivolity in a country where that finds the least 
 forgiveness. However, the hour of his glory was 
 at hand. It is very hard to trace the latent, de- 
 liberate working which goes on in the public 
 mind tUl it ends in an explosion of renown, above 
 all when a writer is concerned whose work has 
 been long in print. We may note a few indica- 
 tions, hazard guesses ; there still remains the ele- 
 ment of mystery. The revulsion in Musset's 
 favor was preceded by symptoms which assur- 
 edly were very full of meaning. But yet they 
 are far from explaining everything. 
 
 In the spring of 1843 the very indifferent 
 Lucrece of Ponsard showed how tired everybody 
 was of romanticism. Musset was fated to profit 
 by this revolution in taste. For other reasons, 
 which form the mystery here, his poems began 
 to find a way to every heart ; many persons were 
 discovering him. This went on so fast that, three 
 years after the success of Lucrece and the failure 
 of the Burgraves, we meet with protests against 
 the excess of favor shown him by the young. In 
 the earlier months of 1846 Sainte-Beuve copies 
 into his Journal a letter, in which Brizeux says : 
 " What might well astonish you is the exclusive 
 infatuation for Musset. I have small liking for 
 that art in the solemn chateaux of Louis XIV., 
 but the entresol of Saint-Georges Street suits 
 me no better." Sainte-Beuve accompanies these 
 
162 THE LIFE OF 
 
 lines with a note to make them worse. This up- 
 ward flight which Musset had suddenly taken 
 appears to him ridiculous, as well as a thing to 
 be regretted, and he talks of it in a bitter way. 
 The burst of popularity occasioned by the suc- 
 cess of the Caprice finished the work of putting 
 him out of humor. We already have seen his 
 prosecuting tone as to II ne faut jurer, and 
 toward the end of 1849 we find him coming back 
 to the popularity of the Caprice, and writing: 
 " People overdo everything. In Musset's suc- 
 cess there is the genuine and there is mere in- 
 fatuation. It is not merely the lofty and the 
 delicate element which people like. Our dissi- 
 pated young men adore in Musset an expression 
 of their own vices, and in his poetry they find 
 nothing finer than certain racy breakings forth, 
 in which he strikes out like a madman. They 
 take the want of human refinement for a token 
 of force." Useless display of sullen vexation. 
 It lay no longer in any one's power to prevent 
 Musset from moving up to the first rank by the 
 side of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. After a 
 riot of tinsel and plumes, which had lasted twenty 
 years, there had come a return to truth and natu- 
 ralness. Having acquired a taste for Musset 
 through seeing his dramatic works played, those 
 who had applauded him the night before at the 
 rran9ais opened his later poems, and the sim- 
 plicity of his language enraptured them. They 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 163 
 
 came upon verses of a frank and high-flavored 
 reahsm which suited the unwonted needs of their 
 minds, and not less startled were they by the sin- 
 cerity of his feeling. To the Muse's question 
 in the Night of August: 
 
 Thy heart is poet or is 't thou ? 
 
 they also would have answered, without hesitat- 
 ing, " It is thy heart," and this drew them toward 
 the author as toward a friend to whom we can 
 unbosom ourselves. All surrendered to Musset. 
 What he became in a short time for the younger 
 generation he continued to be down to the war, 
 and no one has shown this better than Taine. 
 The page written in 1864 is the first and most 
 discerning page touching the almost irresistible 
 seductive charm excited for twenty years by 
 Alfred de Musset: 
 
 " He is dead, and yet we seem every day to 
 hear him speak. The chat and pleasantry of art- 
 ists in a studio, a pretty young girl at the theater 
 bending over the edge of the box, a street scoured 
 by the rain and the glitter of the blackened pave- 
 ments, a fresh, cool morning, aU smiles, in the 
 Fontainebleau woods — there is naught that does 
 not bring him back before us, as if living a sec- 
 ond life. Was there ever a more thrilling, truer 
 accent? He, at the least, was one who never told 
 any lies. He said only what he felt, and as he 
 felt it so he said it. He thought aloud. He 
 
164 THE LIFE OF 
 
 made everybody's confession. We did not ad- 
 mire, we loved him; he was a poet — ^nay more, he 
 was a man. In him each man detected his own 
 sentiments, no matter how fleeting or deeply felt. 
 He threw off" constraint and yielded to inspira- 
 tion, and he possessed the last of the virtues 
 which remain among us — generosity and sincer- 
 ity. He had the most precious of the gifts which 
 can cast a speU over a civiHzation grown old — 
 namely, youth. How he spoke of that hot youth, 
 the tree that has a tough bark, that with its 
 shadow covers all things — ^highways and hori- 
 zons! With what impetuosity did he hurl about 
 and clash together love and jealousy, the thirst 
 for pleasure and aU unbridled passions which 
 mount with the tides of virgin blood from the 
 deeps of a youthful heart! Has any man felt 
 them more? He was too fuU of them, he sur- 
 rendered to them, he was intoxicated with them. 
 Too much did he ask of things. He longed to 
 taste all of Ufe at one draft, bitter and eager. 
 He did not pluck it as a flower and enjoy its 
 fragrance; he tore it away like clustered fruit, 
 crushed and wrenched and bruised it, and stood 
 there, with hands smeared, as much athirst as 
 before. Then burst forth the sobs which echoed 
 in aU hearts. What! So young and already so 
 weary! The Muse and her peaceful beauty, na- 
 ture and her immortal freshness, love and her 
 beatific smile, all the swarm of heavenly visions 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 165 
 
 hardly pass before his eyes when all the specters 
 of debauch and death flock in, amid curses and 
 sarcasms." " StiU, such as you behold him, we 
 continue to love him; we can listen to none other, 
 and by his side all others seem chill and false." 
 He was " never false; he felt the pangs of which 
 he sang; he was more than a poet — ^he was a 
 man." Even so must all speak, and it is for 
 that reason that we have so much loved Musset, 
 and that no other poet can supplant him in our 
 hearts. 
 
 He was still fit to enjoy his popularity, less, 
 however, than if the hour had struck ten years 
 sooner. From 1840 onward, diseases swept down 
 upon him: pneumonia, pleurisy, heart-complaint 
 (which was to carry him off), and then nerve 
 storms, followed by attacks of fever and deliri- 
 um. Each assault left him more nervous and 
 overwrought, too sensitive, restless, excessive in 
 all things, whether in isolation with his aches and 
 his despondency, or flinging himself, with new 
 passion, into pernicious enjoyments. Charming, 
 despite it aU, in his better hours, and leaving an 
 ineffaceable impression upon all who, broken 
 loose from college, came to his door to have sight 
 of the poet of youth: "It was no longer that 
 image of an adolescent almost, a kind of Muse's 
 cherub, preserved for us by David d' Angers in 
 his wonderful medallion; but how different was 
 that handsome, grave, resolute, almost energetic 
 
166 THE LIFE OF 
 
 face from Landelle's portrait, in which the dull, 
 lusterless eye is void of light, and life seems ex- 
 hausted! A head of hair stiQ abundant, but re- 
 ceiving from many a silver thread the changing 
 tint which is not without its harmony, crowned 
 a countenance which, though cold and gloomy 
 when in repose, both grace and wit would soon 
 revive, and then leave palhd or embrowned, and 
 betraying the disease which already afflicted 
 him." Throughout the visit poetry was the 
 topic. " If my pen," said Musset, " is not for- 
 ever broken in my hand, Suzette and Suzon wiU 
 not be the subject of my song." His young in- 
 terlocutors having aUuded to the Hope in God, 
 and to other pages of similar inspiration, he 
 went on: " Yes, I have drawn from that spring 
 of poetry, but my wish now is to draw more 
 freely from it." 
 
 It is in this way that one loves to represent 
 Musset toward the end : a grave and earnest man 
 who, at least in thought, breaks away from the 
 mire in which he was too often accustomed to 
 wallow. The influence of a humble religieuse 
 .had done much to promote serious thinking. 
 During an attack of pneumonia, in 1840, he had 
 been nursed by Sister Marceline, so often men- 
 tioned in his letters. He writes to his brother 
 in June, 1840: " My lines to Sister Marceline I 
 shall finish out one of these days — next year, 
 within ten years, whenever it pleases and if it 
 pleases me — ^but I shall not publish them, and 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 167 
 
 I will not so much as write them. It is too much 
 to have repeated them. I have said so many- 
 things to idle meddlers, and I shall say so many- 
 more, that I have good right, once in my life, 
 to compose a few strophes for private use. My 
 admiration and my gratitude for this saintly 
 woman shall never be soiled with ink from the 
 printer's tampon. This is settled, so do not speak 
 of it again. Madame de Castries approves, and 
 says that it is good to have a secret drawer in 
 the soul, provided we put into it only wholesome 
 things." 
 
 At the time of this second sickness he had sent 
 for Sister Marceline. The convent, with great 
 prudence, sent him some one else. He writes 
 to his Marraine : " Instead of her, they have let 
 fly at me a big mama — fat, florid — who eats for 
 four and is not prone to melancholy. She nursed 
 me very well, and she bored me dreadfuUy. Ah! 
 how rare they are — Sister Marcelines ! How few 
 beings there are in this world who can do more, 
 when you are sick and suff'ering, than give you 
 a cup of tea! How few there are who know 
 how to cure and soothe you at the same time! 
 Whenever Marceline would come to the bedside, 
 little cup in hand, and say, with her little choris- 
 ter voice, ' What a dreadful knot you are tying 
 there!' (she meant that I was knitting my 
 brows), the poor dear soul would have cheered 
 up Leopardi himself! " 
 
 At long intervals Sister Marceline would come 
 
168 THE LIFE OF 
 
 to inquire after his health, chat a few moments, 
 and disappear. Musset deemed these visits to be 
 the favors of a mysterious and consoling force. 
 Once only did he have her to nurse him again. 
 On the 14th of May he writes to Tattet: " I have 
 just had pneumonia. When I say that, it is 
 pleurisy I mean, but the name does not alter 
 the case. You understand, I had religieuses to 
 attend to me. My good Sister MarceUne came 
 back, then a second with her — ^kind, gentle, with 
 the charm they all possess, and, besides, a woman 
 of intelligence." 
 
 Sister Marcehne had treated the soul as weU 
 as the body, and, with a pious touch and the bold- 
 ness of pure hearts, dressed the moral wounds 
 open to her eyes. The language which she used 
 with Musset was new to him. It was austere 
 and it was consohng, but how much she won for 
 God no man has ever known; and yet it is certain 
 that peace came into the sick-chamber with Sister 
 Marceline, and, alas! departed with her. Mus- 
 set's last years were most painful in spite of the 
 keenly appreciated delights of growing fame. 
 The heart-disease caused him tiresome agitation. 
 He was always restless and in torture, and he 
 was sleepless. His last verses, written in 1857, 
 depict this state of anguish, with no rest or any- 
 thing else to alleviate it. "I feel my heart stop- 
 ping suddenly, my strength to struggle worn and 
 wasted away." It was truly a deliverance for 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 169 
 
 him — ^his death. On the evening of May 1, 1857, 
 he was worse, and confined to the bed. Sister 
 Marceline was not at hand, but her patient face 
 flitted before the eyes of the dying man, for the 
 last time allaying his pain. Toward one o'clock 
 in the morning Musset murmured, " Sleep ! At 
 last I am to sleep! " and he closed his eyes, never 
 to open them again. Death had taken him 
 gently in his sleep. They buried with him a 
 plain little tricot knitted by Marceline, and a 
 pen, embroidered with silk, which the sister had 
 made for him seventeen years before. On the 
 pen was this : " Bear your promises in mind." 
 
 The burial took place in gloomy, damp weath- 
 er. " We were twenty-seven in aU," says Arsene 
 Houssaye. Then where were the students? How 
 could they allow the bier to hold their darling 
 poet, and move almost alone along the path to 
 the grave? 
 
 His star attained its zenith during the second 
 empire. At that time he enjoyed a dazzling re- 
 nown. To seat him beside Lamartine and Victor 
 Hugo was no longer contemplated, but his faith- 
 ful admirers were for putting him a little in 
 front, at the head of the three. While the real- 
 istic current carried away certain people toward 
 Balzac, whose great success dates from the same 
 epoch, other men, the dreamers and the more 
 sensitive, stopped at the beginning of the way, 
 close by the poet who had never hed, although 
 
170 THE LIFE OF 
 
 he refrained from uttering everything: Baude- 
 laire would put them to shame for loitering over 
 a poetry of " silken ladders," but he wasted his 
 time and trouble. He wrote to Armand Fraisse, 
 in terms which are too coarse to be given in fuU: 
 " You feel poetry like a mere dilettantist. That 
 is the true way to feel it. From that word which 
 I underscore you can guess that I experienced a 
 certain surprise at observing your admiration for 
 Musset. Except at the age of first communion, 
 I could never endure that dandy-in-chief, with 
 his impudence worthy of a spoiled chUd, calling 
 on heaven and hell in mere table d'hote adven- 
 tures, his muddy torrent of blunders in grammar 
 and meter." Baudelaire's voice cried in the wil- 
 derness, as is shown by Sainte-Beuve's note at 
 the foot of the page: " Nothing is a better test 
 of the literary generations which succeeded us 
 than the enthusiastic admiration, the almost fran- 
 tic infatuation, which seized aU the yoimger men 
 — the gluttons for Balzac, and the dainty for 
 Musset." 
 
 His glory had flashed beyond the limits of 
 France, and a distinguished British writer — 
 Francis Palgrave — devoted an essay to him, 
 which becomes doubly interesting to us through 
 the unexpected quahty of certain ideas and cer- 
 tain comparisons. After noting the fact that 
 Musset had overleaped the barriers of Paris, Pal- 
 grave passes to a survey of his works. He finds 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 171 
 
 hardly anything but what is blameworthy in the 
 Confession, which in his eyes is violent, extrava- 
 gant, and very false, for all its pretensions to 
 realism. As an offset to this, he puts the Stories 
 by the side of Werther and the Vicar of Wake- 
 field. 
 
 The verse makes him think, not of Byron, as 
 we might have expected, but of Shelley, of Ten- 
 nyson, and " perhaps " of the poets of the age 
 of Elizabeth. The lines are "musical, and not 
 declamatory." Enghshmen, according to Pal- 
 grave, prefer Musset to Lamartine, because he 
 is less absorbed in his ego, and to Victor Hugo, 
 because he does not weary them with antitheses. 
 Certain pieces of his possess a peculiar and in- 
 definable grace, a beauty as of the ancient world, 
 a something recalling j3Eolian and Ionian perfec- 
 tion. The Tales of Spain and of Italy are de- 
 cidedly fantastic, he thinks, but full of vigor. 
 The verdict as to the man is of exquisite delicacy. 
 He would have made us bear in mind, had we 
 been tempted to forget it, that we ought to speak 
 reverently of great poets : When men molded of 
 that clay fall, they should be judged with a ten- 
 der respect. We who are of less fine and sensi- 
 tive constitution, unable to enter into the mys- 
 terious sufferings of genius, into its wrestlings 
 with its angels, we ought not to forget that in 
 a certain sense, and in reality, those men suffer 
 for us; that in themselves they sum up our un- 
 
172 THE LIFE OF 
 
 conscious aspirations; that they put before our 
 sight the spectacle of conflicts severer than ours, 
 and that they are truly the confessors of human- 
 ity. We admit readily that many of Musset's 
 first poems, as well as the Confession, would not 
 be in their place in an Enghsh parlor; that they 
 are works to be kept for those alone who have 
 courage enough, with love of truth, and purity 
 of soul, to make such pictures of the abysses of 
 human nature of worth in framing their course of 
 life. But, granting all that, we do not think that 
 men can read Musset without discerning in his 
 genius something of which the history of French 
 poetry has never hitherto furnished an example. 
 German opinion has not been less favorable to 
 him. An entire volume has been devoted to him 
 by Paul Lindau, who concludes that Musset, if 
 not the greatest poet of his time, is its most poetic 
 temperament. No one equals him in depth of 
 poetic intuition, nor is any one as sincere and 
 as true. It may be that his feelings are un- 
 healthy, but he has experienced them, and has 
 given an expression to them which is at all times 
 perfectly candid. He detests the comedy of sen- 
 timent, and he hates phrases. He lives in unceas- 
 ing fear of self-delusion, preferring self -con- 
 tempt to self-deception. This absolute integrity 
 and candor is what captivates us and wins us 
 again, the thing which endears him to us. Grill- 
 parzer said that the spring of all poetry was in 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 173 
 
 the truth of the sensation; Musset's poetry is, all 
 of it, explained by this truth. When he is wrong, 
 he is still in real earnest. Lindau also recalls the 
 fact that Heine called Musset the foremost lyric 
 of France. 
 
 To this glory nothing has been wanting, not 
 even the dangerous honor of originating a school 
 and of being imitated as a poet may be imitated 
 — ^in his method, in his choice of subjects, his 
 vocabulary, his whims, his minor defects of every 
 sort. Inmmierable were the songs, the flippant 
 madrigals, the little bits of unsavory, free-and- 
 easy verse, the licentious pieces more hke the 
 younger Crebillon than Musset, the Ninons and 
 Ninettes of Breda Street, the contraband mar- 
 quises and Andalusians out of the BatignoUies — 
 of all these Musset would now be the grandsire, 
 responsible for them before posterity, had any- 
 thing of them survived. It is a blessing that all 
 that is forgotten, for the f amUy was not desira- 
 ble. Musset of the best days, of the great days, 
 Musset of the Nuits could bring inspiration ; he 
 could kindle the spark slumbering in others' 
 hearts, but he could have no disciples, for he 
 had no processes and no manner — ^he, the most 
 personal of poets. You cannot obtain from any 
 man his heart and nerves, or his poetic vision or 
 his Ijrrical emotion. In a word, you cannot ob- 
 tain his genius from him, and there was almost 
 nothing to borrow from Musset save his genius. 
 
174 THE LIFE OF 
 
 The same causes which raised him so high in 
 the favor of the many are now turning away 
 from him the approval of the new school, that 
 which grows great upon the ruins of naturahsm. 
 Our young men no longer like the natural, either 
 in idiom, thought, feeling, or even in things. A 
 taste for the singular has got hold of them again, 
 and one for the distortion of the real. Whether 
 they style themselves decadents or symbohsts, it 
 is mere romanticism, disguised and debaptized, 
 springing up anew in their productions, but yet 
 easy to detect beneath the mask, and in spite of 
 altered labels. It has grown to be far more 
 mystic. It has lost the arrogance which recalled 
 Corneille and the heroines of the Fronde, and 
 it has borrowed from the moral or mental some- 
 thing scant and flabby, but hard to delineate. It 
 is helped along by a complicated and learned art, 
 tested by which the art of the Cenacle is merely 
 child's play, but which seems rather Byzantine 
 when compared with the bold and potent devel- 
 opment of the romantic phrase. This is the 
 same, with thinner blood, weaker temperament — 
 yes, it is the same old romanticism. What in- 
 terest could the poet of the Souvenir awake, with 
 his simple sorrows within all men's scope and 
 with his classic French, in those merely curious 
 as to rare sensations — the inventors of decadent 
 writ? Accordingly, Musset has been one dis- 
 dained by them. The violence also of his feel- 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET 175 
 
 ings has been an injury to him with the later 
 generations. It is with wonderment that they 
 contemplate the ravings of passion and storms 
 of sensibility in the folk of 1830. They are too 
 practical or too intellectual to devour their own 
 hearts ; the woes which Musset cursed and blessed 
 by turns with equal vehemence inspire them with 
 nothing more than the ironical pity usually be- 
 stowed upon ridiculous misfortunes. What at- 
 traction can a poetry possess which is all senti- 
 ment and passion in the eyes of youth who call 
 sentiment mere weakness, love an infirmity? 
 None, assuredly. And they have forsaken Mus- 
 set, after pronouncing him to be all out of fash- 
 ion, as much in substance as in form. He will 
 bide his time. His great fault hes in being still 
 too near to us. The ideas and literary forms of 
 yesterday always shock because they form an 
 awkward restraint, and because we make haste 
 to be free of them. It is only when they have, 
 for good and all, yielded the ground, and can 
 no longer offer hindrance to any one, that we 
 judge of them with impartiality. So, for exam- 
 ple, Lamartine, after an almost total eclipse, is 
 now coming forth again from clouds which once 
 enshrouded him. So Vigny is having a second 
 aurora, more brilliant than the first. For Musset 
 the time has not yet come. Before men return 
 to him they must have quite left him, and Musset 
 continues to reign, like a tyrant, without sharing 
 
176 LIFE OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 
 
 the throne with another, over a great many gray 
 and grizzled heads, who really cannot listen to 
 another. 
 
 A few years more and the generations who 
 submitted to him wiU have vanished. Then, for 
 him, it will not be an hour of oblivion, but rather 
 an hour of justice, serene and unclouded. Pos- 
 terity is to make its own choice among his works, 
 and when it shall hold in the hollow of its hand 
 the bunch of leaves in which the soul of an en- 
 tire epoch shudders and weeps with Musset, it 
 wiU exclaim, understanding his sovereign em- 
 pire and repeating the words of Taine : " He 
 was more than a poet, he was a man." 
 
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