6 PROLEGOMENA. Coelio, Musset has drawn accurately enough his own character in two different phases. On August 15, 1833, there appeared, also in the Revue, Rolla, a strange poem, full of the maiadie du Steele, which has been greatly admired by competent critics. For myself, I confess that the extreme falseness of the sentiment in the concluding lines outweighs the poem’s merits. The impression it made at the time is shown by the fact that the day after its publication a young stranger picked up the end of a cigar which Musset threw away in the street and reverently wrapped it up like a relic. At the end of the year came Musset ’s most disastrous journey to Italy with George Sand. The story of their sub- sequent quarrel has been told from two points of view in the books called Elle et Lui and Lui et Elle. What is certain is that, in the earlier part of 1834, the poet came back to his family bringing, as he himself wrote, ’a sick frame, a crushed soul, and a bleeding heart.’ The first work which he wrote after his return was Gn tie badine pas avec I’ainour. Of this and of Fantasio, which was written before his departure from Italy, and was published during his absence, an account will be found in the proper place. In 1834 Une Bonne Fortune, a charming and touching piece of poetry, appeared, and in 1835 were written Lucie, Barberine, La Nuit de Mai, La Lot sur la Presse, La Nuit de Decembre, and La Confession d’un Enfant du Siecle. On November I in the same year there appeared in the Revue the play called Le Chandelier, a piece both brilliant and powerful, but less agreeable in tone than some more obviously tragic plays from the same hand. The Confession, a work full of beauty, though tinged, as a prose exposition of the poet’s sense of the maiadie du siecle, with a sense of gloom, did not appear until 1 836, when Musset was twenty-five years old, and had already pro- duced work which gave him full claim to a high place among the poets of the century. It may be well to note that, as Paul de Musset wrote, the Confession, in spite of its title, was in no sense an autobiography, and that, unpleasing as some of its passages are of their nature, its pages are stainless when com- pared with the lurid mud-works which sections of the American and English rather than of the French reading public are now
