The French poet, dramatist, and fiction writer Louis Charles Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), a major romantic poet, is remembered for his Iyric poems, elegant comedies, and the powerful drama "Lorenzaccio," perhaps the finest French play of the 19th century.

Alfred de Musset was born in Paris on Dec. 11, 1810. He was a brilliant student at the Lycée Henri IV and early frequented the important romantic circles. In 1828 he published his first book, L'Anglais mangeur d'opium, an adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. His first volume of verse, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, appeared in 1830. The same year his one-act comedy La Nuit vénitienne failed on the stage, and he decided to write no more for the theater.

In June 1833 Musset met the French writer George Sand. Their ensuing love affair, passionate and somber, was one of the most famous of the romantic period. After a winter together in Venice and infidelity on both sides, the lovers quarreled and separated. Musset returned to Paris ill and broken in spirit. His affair with George Sand inspired his finest poems; but his life thereafter was one of dissipation and sorrow. Musset continued to write and was elected to membership in the French Academy in 1852. He died in Paris on May 2, 1857.

Musset's poems are collected in two volumes: Premières poésies (to 1835) and Poésies nouvelles (1835-1852). In the first volume the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, the poem Ballade à la lune, and Le Spectacle dans un fauteuil remain of interest. Musset's finest poetry is in the Poésies nouvelles, which contains the famous poems inspired by his love for George Sand: La Nuit de mai, La Nuitde décembre, La Nuit d'août, and La Nuit d'octobre. It also contains Lettre à Lamartine, Souvenir, Àla Malibran, Tristesse, Rappelle-toi, and Une Soirée perdue. The four Nuits, or "Nights," and their lovely pendant, Souvenir, trace the poet's gradual recovery from his bitter disillusionment after his affair with George Sand. Musset wrote Souvenir after he had passed once more through the forest of Fontainebleau, where he had been with George Sand 7 years earlier. It concludes on the immortal quality of love.

Musset's theater pieces in verse comprise Les Marrons du feu (in the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, 1830); La Coupe et les lèvres and Àquoi rêvent les jeunes filles (in Le Spectacle dans un fauteuil, 1832); a two-act comedy, Louison (1849); and an incomplete tragedy, La Servante du roi.

After the failure of La Nuit vénitienne on the stage in 1830, most of Musset's later prose comedies were written for the Revue des deux mondes and were published in volume form in 1840. They include Les Caprices de Marianne (1833), Fantasio (1834), On ne badine pas avec l'amour (1834), Barberine (1835), Le Chandelier (1835), Il ne faut jurer de rien (1836), and Un Caprice (1837). In 1845 Musset published Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée. His delightful comedies were not played in France until the late 1840s. Popular recognition led to Musset's writing once again for the stage. He then published On ne saurait penser à tout (1849), Carmosine (1850), and Betine (1851). Musset's comedies, which have kept much of their freshness, are characterized by their elegance, sophistication, irony, and sentiment.

Musset wrote the serious dramas André del Sarto (1833) and Lorenzaccio (1834). The latter has as its protagonist a fascinatingly ambiguous "stranger" or "outsider" with very modern qualities of mind.

Musset's brief tales include such stories as Emmeline (1837), Frédéric et Bernerette (1838), Croisilles (1839), Histoire d'un merle blanc (1842), Mimi Pinson (1843), and Pierre et Camille (1844). La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836) was Musset's famous autobiographical attempt to analyze the causes of the mal du siècle that affected the youth of France after the close of the Napoleonic Wars.

Further Reading

There is a translation of The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset by Andrew Lang and others (10 vols., 1907). In 1962 Peter Meyer published a translation of Seven Plays of Musset, containing Marianne, Fantasio, Camille and Perdican, The Candlestick, A Diversion, A Door Must be Kept Open or Shut, and Journey to Gotha. Biographies of Musset are Paul Edeme de Musset, The Biography of Alfred de Musset (trans. 1877); Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Alfred de Musset, 1810-1857: A Biography (1931); and Charlotte Haldane, Alfred: The Passionate Life of Alfred de Musset (1960). For Musset's drama see Herbert S. Gochberg, Stage of Dreams: The Dramatic Art of Alfred de Musset, 1828-1834 (1967).

For more information on Louis-Charles- Alfred de Musset, visit Britannica.com.

Musset, Alfred de (1810-57). French poet, dramatist, and novelist. Musset grew up in Paris, the son of an important government official with literary interests. He sampled a number of careers, including medicine and banking, but found none satisfactory, feeling he had an overwhelming literary vocation. In 1828 he published a French version of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and in 1830 made his name as a leading Romantic author with a series of narrative poems, the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie. However, Musset's independent spirit indicated that he could not be expected for long to remain identified with any particular literary movement. The poems abounded in verve, couleur locale, metrical inventiveness, and dramatic incident, but they also pointed to Musset's ironic temperament.

He next turned to the theatre. His first theatrical venture, La Nuit vénitienne (1830), was a failure, and after this setback he wrote drama intended to be read rather than performed, what he called Un spectacle dans un fauteuil (1833-4). The first series contained the dramatic poems La Coupe et les lèvres, A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles, and Namouna. There followed his major dramatic works, On ne badine pasavec l'amour and Les Caprices de Marianne. Here he explored the experience of love with a lightness of touch and a verbal dexterity unequalled among his contemporaries. In 1834 he published Fantasio and Lorenzaccio, the play which today ranks as the finest French Romantic historical drama.

In 1836 Musset brought out a novel, La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, in which he drew on the experience of his tempestuous love affair with George Sand in an attempt to provide a diagnosis of the ills of a generation suffering from the mal du siècle. Musset portrayed his contemporaries in a state of spiritual disarray: the religious and moral certitudes of the past had been destroyed, but nothing meaningful had come to replace them. The novel held out the ambiguous hope that the meaning of existence might be revealed through the experience of love. Much of Musset's work reflects the spiritual crisis of his times, sometimes directly, as in L'Espoir en Dieu (1838), more often by the suggestion that a gain in knowledge can lead to doubt, debauchery, and death in a world from which any transcendent meaning and purpose have been drained (see Rolla, 1833).

Musset took up the major themes of Romanticism but he lent them a distinct edge. In his work the stability of the self was undermined and the sense of a secure personal identity was threatened. He returned obsessively to a number of motifs: the irrevocable loss of childhood innocence, a masochistic enjoyment of suffering, an anguished awareness of the distance between appearance and reality, a fascination with the relationship between knowledge, sexual desire, and death. At the same time his work was suffused with irony, with a sense of distance. Not for him the humanitarianism of the Romantics who wanted art to serve the cause of social progress. He remained a subversive, independent, unpredictable spirit, for whom art was the only redemption possible. His most famous poetic achievement, Les Nuits (1835-7), is a sequence of four poems dramatizing the experience of personal crisis and suffering in the form of an exchange between the poet and his muse. The poet confesses the truth of his being in some of the best-known Romantic lyric verse, but he employs a rhetoric of dolorism which may strike the modern reader as self-indulgent.

Musset's really important work belongs to the 1830s, though some his later production deserves attention (Histoire d'un merle blanc, 1842; Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée, 1846). His physical condition declined after 1840 as a consequence of his life of excess. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1852.

[Ceri Crossley]

Bibliography

• Ph. van Tieghem, Musset (new edn., 1969)
• D. Sices, Theater of Solitude: The Drama of Alfred de Musset (1974)

(Louis Charles Alfred de Musset) (älfrĕd' də müsā'), 1810–57, French romantic poet, dramatist, and fiction writer. His first collection of poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1829), exhibited a strong Byronic influence. Four years later he went to Italy with George Sand, but his infatuation with her resulted in disillusionment. Most of his poems appeared first in Revue des deux mondes; they included such famous pieces as the gloomy “Rolla” (1833) and the exquisite love lyrics “La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit d'août,” “La Nuit d'octobre,” and “La Nuit de décembre” (1835–36). His poetry combined classic clarity with the passionate subjectivity of the romantics. Among his plays are Fantasio (1834) and a series of comedies based on proverbs, including Il ne faut jurer de rien (1834) and On ne badine pas avec l'amour (1836). He also wrote some brilliant nouvelles, but from 1840 he passed rapidly into decline. The autobiographical novel Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836), gives an account of his affair with George Sand and reflects the disillusioned mood of many of his contemporaries. His correspondence with George Sand appeared in 1904, and his work was translated in The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset (10 vol., 1905; rev. ed. 1907).

Bibliography

See biography by his brother, Paul de Musset (tr. 1877).

Quotes:

"How glorious it is -- and also how painful -- to be an exception."

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