Musset, ALFRED DE, one of the most striking figures in the literature of modern France, was born in Paris, 11th December 1810, the son of an official who rose high in the War Office. He was unusually impulsive from his childhood, and precocious alike in sensibility and in genius, and grew up handsome in person and fascinating in manners, though he retained something of the spoilt child all his life. He thought first of law, next of medicine, then of art, but at eighteen discovered himself to be a poet, and scarcely a year after published his Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, a collection of unequal poems, of which Portia, Mardoche, and Don Paez at least are still remembered. A splendid and brilliant youth, of equal grace and assurance, he was warmly received into Victor Hugo's Cénacle, the inner shrine of militant Romanticism; was crowned with seductive flatteries by the wider world of society; and in his hunger for premature experience at once flung himself recklessly into the eager pursuit of pleasure in every form. He was eager to feel, and feeling brought suffering in its train, but gave him the impulse out of which came his verse—ever a part of himself, the answering echo of his own emotions. His piece
La Nuit Vénitienne failed at the Odéon in 1830, and thus turned him from a career in which he was yet to gain triumphs without seeking for them. In 1832 he published Un Spectacle dans un Faucuil, comprising two short plays—La Coupe et les Lèvres and À quoi rêvent les Jeunes Filles, as well as the poem of Namouna, written hastily to eke out a slender volume. Next year followed in the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes two of his very greatest works, the tragical comedies André del Sarto and Les Caprices de Marianne. It was of Marianne that her creator replied, when asked where he had found her character, 'Nowhere and everywhere; she is not a woman, she is woman.' Next followed the famous poem of Rolla, which has not sustained the applause with which it was received. Then came the fatal journey to Italy with George Sand. He first met her in the summer of 1833, and the intimacy quickly blossomed into love. The projected tour was at first opposed by De Musset's mother, but George Sand took the extraordinary step of calling upon her one evening, and in a moment of emotion gained her consent. They set out for Venice at the beginning of winter. About the middle of February his letters to his mother and brother ceased; for six weeks there was silence, then on the 10th April he reappeared alone, broken in health and sunk in the deepest depression of spirits. A quarter of a century later, and soon after his death, she gave the world, in the guise of a novel, Elle et Lui, her version of the events which led to the catastrophe. Paul de Musset at once retorted with Lui et Elle (1859), a book poor as fiction, but which rings like truth. His account was that she had been grossly unfaithful to him, and that his discovery of this in a state of weak health had brought on an almost fatal attack of brain-fever; she, on the other hand, explained the infidelity as but a delusion of the fever itself. It is at anyrate suspicious that but one of the pair suffered deeply, while the other went on calmly writing romances, and utilising the experience at once as impulse and material. The Jacques Laurent of her story bears many a trait of the true De Musset. Despite, or, more probably, in consequence of his sufferings, the five years that followed his return were his best years of production. Another love quickly followed, only to end as unhappily; and that again was succeeded by a series of unworthy and often sordid entanglements, which distracted his heart and were followed by periods of deep depression which alcohol did little to allay. The patronage of the Duc d'Orléans, the warm friendship of a small circle of devoted friends, and his appointment in 1838 to be librarian at the Home Office did something to take him out of himself, but he was ever as capricious in character as in genius, and the feverish activity that sometimes seized him soon exhausted itself in splendid projects and unfinished poems. Even his famous Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (1835), like most of his works, was begun, laid aside, and then finished under a cloud of sorrow. It is not an autobiography, though it owes its sombre colour to its author's personal experience. It is a striking study of moral pathology, full of admirable expression of cynical contempt for the world and of the misery of hopeless doubt; but, as a work of art, it breaks down pitifully at the close into weakness and platitude. When De Musset's health gave way about 1840 his literary activity began to decline also. He was already, in Heine's phrase, 'a young man who has had a splendid past;' he felt himself an old man at thirty, and to the end he was never blessed with anything of the serenity of the Olympians, nor was he even one of those artists who find consolation in their art. The success of Un Caprice at the Théâtre Français in 1847 recalled him for some time to life and hope, but during his last half-dozen years he wrote nothing of importance. He was elected to the Academy, but not without difficulty, in 1852, and Sainte-Beuve has told us of his coming tipsy to its sittings. 'Musset s'absente trop,' said a member on one occasion; 'Il s'absinthe trop,' was the response. He died of heart disease, May 1, 1857.
Of De Musset's poetry the four pieces entitled Nuits mark the highest reach of his lyrical talent. The Nuit de Mai and that of d'Octobre are perfect and immortal poems, like Milton's Il Penseroso with passion added, says Sainte-Beuve. The Nuit de Décembre is a subtle realisation of that other self that had shadowed all his life. These poems quiver with the quick pulse of life and the throb of suffering, yet the poet's eyes are open throughout to all the innumerable beauties of the universe. The Ode à la Malibran is a splendid tribute of admiration to a great actress; the Lettre à Lamartine, to a master in his own art; L'Espoir en Dieu, a noble expression of the longing of the human soul for certainty; the famous Rhin Allemand, a spirited retort to Nikolaus Becker's too patriotic German poem, which brought him a crop of challenges from foolish German officers. The greatest merit of these poems is that they thrill with real, not simulated passion. 'Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre' was his own judgment of himself, and so far as regards his genuineness it is true. He is the poet of a certain range of personal emotions, of youthfulness, and, above all, of passion, in which respect he follows close upon Byron in power, while far surpassing him in unaffectedness and reality, if not always in finish and exquisiteness of art.
His dramatic work is unique in 19th-century literature of its kind for originality, intensity, and variety, linked to brilliant wit and real dramatic genins. It consisted of comédies, or regular dramas, full of tragic quality and ending with tragic abruptness, and proverbes, the latter short dramatic illustrations of some common saying. Of the former class are André del Sarto, perhaps his greatest work; Lorenzaeio; Les Caprices de Mariannie; and On ne badine pas avec l'Amour. To the class of proverbes belong Fantasio and Barberine, both bright and graceful, if fantastic; Le Chandelier, slight in structure, but absolutely perfect in art; Il ne faut jurer de Rien, more serious, but no less successful; Un Caprice, graceful and brilliant; Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermée, bright and charming; Louison, in verse, less interesting; On ne saurait penser à tout, an extravagance; Carmosine, a charming little masterpiece of romance in miniature; and Bettine, a lively little drama.
Of his largest although not greatest prose work we have already spoken. It remains only to speak of his brilliant and inimitable Nouvelles or short stories and his Contes. To the former belong Les Deux Maîtresses, in which Valentin is said to have been a study of his own character; Emmeline; Le Fils du Titien, perhaps his finest work in prose; Frédéric et Bernerette, which grew out of an unworthy liaison of his own; Croisilles; and Margot. The Contes are Pierre et Camille; Mademoiselle Mimi Pinson, a charming study of the best aspect of that peculiar Parisian product, the grisette, as a work of art an absolute masterpiece; Le Secret de Javotte; Le Merle Blanc; and Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet. His Mélanges and Œuvres Posthumes are less valuable. De Musset's whole work fills but ten small volumes (Lemerre, 1876), but it is not too much to say that these include some of the noblest poetry, greatest plays, and best short stories French literature has yet produced.
See the Life by his brother Paul de Musset (3d ed. 1877); French Poets and Novelists (1884), by Henry James; a study by C. F. Oliphant (1890); and the monograph by 'Arvede Barine' (Grands Ecrivains, 1893). Old and New (1890) is a translation by W. H. Pollock of the Nuits. There is a translation of four of the Comedies in the 'Camelot' series (1890).