- LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MUSSET.
ALFRED DE MUSSET, who belonged to an old and noble family, was born in Paris on December 11, 1810. In his childish years he gave some signs, noted by his brother in the biography which he wrote, of the marked characteristics that belonged later to his life and his writings. He grew up in the atmosphere of an admiration which amounted to adoration of the great Napoleon ; and it is the more curious to note this because of certain passages in one of Musset’s most striking prose work, the Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle. In this he describes the Emperor’s influence upon France with a brilliant and poetical bitterness about which there clings yet some memory of the early veneration of Buonaparte as a being almost more than mortal, in which the two brothers, Alfred and Paul de Musset, were trained as children. ’This,’ said there mother one night in Paul’s hearing in 1815, ’this cannot go on ; the Bourbons do nothing but blunder,- we shall see the Emperor return.’ Paul immediately told the good news to his brother, and thus the reappearance of the Emperor, a surprise to the world at large, was to Alfred de Musset and his brother a foregone conclusion. The fact is curious as showing how, at this early time of his life, Musset was completely filled with the Napoleonic tradition as was a poet of an earlier generation whose genius had the gift of absolute spontaneousness in common with Musset’s -Béranger.
In other respects Musset’s childhood and boyhood may be more aptly said to fit the ideal childhood and boyhood at
