Alfred de Musset

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Musset, oil painting by Charles Landelle; in the Louvre, Paris (credit: Cliché Musées Nationaux, Paris)

(born Dec. 11, 1810, Paris, France — died May 2, 1857, Paris) French playwright and poet. A member of a noble family, Musset came under the influence of Romanticism in adolescence and produced his first work, Stories of Spain and of Italy, in 1830. After an early play failed, he published historical tragedies (e.g., Lorenzaccio, 1834) and comedies. Although he refused to let them be performed, he is remembered today primarily as a dramatist. His poetry includes light satirical pieces and passionate, eloquent lyrics such as "The October Night" (1837). A fitful love affair with George Sand inspired some of his finest work.

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

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).

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)

Quotes:

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

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Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay^[1] (11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.^[1][2] Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, autobiographical) from 1836.^[2]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Reception 3 Music 4 Works 4.1 Poetry 4.2 Plays 4.3 Novels 4.4 Secondary Literature 5 Notes 6 External links

Biography

Alfred de Musset

Musset^[1] was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris.^[2] His family was upper-class, but he was poor and his father worked in various key government positions, but never gave his son any money. His mother was similarly accomplished, and her role as a society hostess, - for example her drawing-room parties, luncheons, and dinners, held in the Musset residence - left a lasting impression on young Alfred.^[2]

Early indications of Musset's boyhood talents were seen by his fondness for acting impromptu mini-plays based upon episodes from old romance stories he had read.^[2] Years later, elder brother Paul de Musset would preserve these, and many other details, for posterity, in a biography on his famous younger brother.^[2]

Alfred de Musset entered the collège Henri-IV at the age of nine, where in 1827 he won the Latin essay prize in the Concours général. With the help of Paul Foucher, Victor Hugo's brother-in-law, he began to attend, at the age of 17, the Cénacle, the literary salon of Charles Nodier at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. After attempts at careers in medicine (which he gave up owing to a distaste for dissections), law,^[1] drawing, English and piano, he became one of the first Romantic writers, with his first collection of poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1829, Tales of Spain and Italy).^[1] By the time he reached the age of 20, his rising literary fame was already accompanied by a sulphurous reputation fed by his dandy side.

He was the librarian of the French Ministry of the Interior under the July Monarchy. During this time he also involved himself in polemics during the Rhine crisis of 1840, caused by the French prime minister Adolphe Thiers, who as Minister of the Interior had been Musset's superior. Thiers had demanded that France should own the left bank of the Rhine (described as France's "natural boundary"), as it had under Napoleon, despite the territory's German population. These demands were rejected by German songs and poems, including Nikolaus Becker's Rheinlied, which contained the verse: "Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien, deutschen Rhein ..." (They shall not have it, the free, German Rhine). Musset answered to this with a poem of his own: "Nous l'avons eu, votre Rhin allemand" (We've had it, your German Rhine).

The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand,^[1] which lasted from 1833 to 1835, is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Age,^[1] made into a film, Children of the Century), and from her point of view in her Elle et lui. Musset's Nuits (1835–1837, Nights) trace his emotional upheaval of his love for George Sand, from early despair to final resignation.^[1] He is also believed to be the author of Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess (1833), a lesbian erotic novel, also believed to be modeled on George Sand.^[3]

Tomb of Alfred de Musset in Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Musset was dismissed from his post as librarian by the new minister Ledru-Rollin after the revolution of 1848. He was however appointed librarian of the Ministry of Public Instruction in 1853.

Musset received the Légion d'honneur on 24 April 1845, at the same time as Balzac, and was elected to the Académie française in 1852 (after two failures to do so in 1848 and 1850).

Alfred de Musset died in his sleep on 2 May 1857. The cause was heart failure, the combination of alcoholism and a longstanding aortic insufficiency. One symptom that had been noticed by his brother was a bobbing of the head as a result of the amplification of the pulse; this was later called Musset's sign.^[4] He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Reception

The French poet Arthur Rimbaud was highly critical of Musset's work. Rimbaud wrote in his Letters of a Seer (Lettres du Voyant) that Musset did not accomplish anything because he "closed his eyes" before the visions. (Lettre à Paul Demeny, mai 1871) Director Jean Renoir's La règle du jeu was inspired by Musset's play, Les Caprices de Marianne.

Music

Lorenzaccio, which takes place in Medici's Florence, was set to music by the musician Sylvano Bussotti in 1972.

Works

Poetry

• Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, 1829
• Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil, 1832
• Poésies complètes, 1840
• Poésies nouvelles, 1850
  • Les Nuits (Nuits de mai, d'août, d'octobre, de décembre), 1835-1837
• Œuvres posthumes, 1860

Plays

• La Nuit vénitienne, 1830
  • a failure; from this point until 1847, his plays were published but not performed
• André del Sarto, 1833
• Les Caprices de Marianne, 1833
• Lorenzaccio, 1833
• Fantasio, 1834
• On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1834
• La Quenouille de Barberine, 1835
• Le Chandelier, 1835
• Il ne faut jurer de rien, 1836
• Un Caprice, 1837
  • first performed in 1847, and a huge success, leading to the performance of other plays
• Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée, 1845
• On ne saurait penser à tout, 1849
• Carmosine, 1850
• Bettine, 1851
• L'Âne et le Ruisseau, 1855

Novels

• La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, autobiographical), 1836.^[2]

• Histoire d'un merle blanc (The White Blackbird), 1842.

Secondary Literature

• Henri Lefebvre, Musset, 1955
• Mimi Pinson

Notes

Find more about Alfred de Musset on Wikipedia's sister projects:

Quotations from Wikiquote
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French Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Alfred de Musset

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h} His names are often reversed "Louis Charles Alfred de Musset": see "(Louis Charles) Alfred de Musset" (bio), Biography.com, 2007, webpage: Bio9413.
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} "Chessville - Alfred de Musset: Romantic Player", Robert T. Tuohey, Chessville.com, 2006, webpage: Chessville-deMusset.
3. ^ Kendall-Davies, Barbara (2003). The Life and Work of Pauline Viardot Garcia. Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 45–46. ISBN 1904303277. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zppg-I0Bw1UC&pg=PA46&d. 
4. ^ "Twelve eponymous signs of aortic regurgitation, one of which was named after a patient instead of a physician." The American Journal of Cardiology, Volume 93, Issue 10, 15 May 2004, Pages 1332-1333. By Tsung O. Cheng MD.

External links

• Works by Alfred de Musset at Project Gutenberg
• Sand and Musset at the Theater to Paris : "Sand et Musset, les Amants du siècle"
• The New Student's Reference Work/Musset, Alfred de

Preceded by Emmanuel Mercier Dupaty

Seat 10 Académie française 1852–1857

Succeeded by Victor de Laprade

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