SOURCE: Gamble, Donald. “Developing Drama: The Earliest contes en vers of Alfred de Musset.” Dalhousie French Studies 12 (spring-summer 1987): 3-18.

[In the following essay, Gamble evaluates the narrative and dramatic structure of Musset's early verse works “Don Paez,” “Portia,” and “Les marrons du feu,” published collectively as Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie in 1830.]

Les Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, Musset's first collection of verse, was completed in late 1829 and published in January, 1830. With the exception of an accomplished sonnet, ten chansons still found in anthologies and “Mardoche,” a long poem in the manner of Byron expressly written to round out the volume, the collection contains three contes en vers: “Portia,” “Don Paez” and “Les Marrons du feu.” Characterised as they are by intrigue, violent passion and Mediterranean exoticism, these three poems clearly reflect the literary fashions of their time; that is probably a reason why they are so rarely read in our own, and still less often discussed. As is frequently the case, however, this first collection of the author reveals many of the themes and attitudes that would inform much of his later work; and it is no less significant for questions of style: in the pages that follow I hope to show that it was with these early poems that Musset began his career as a dramatist, and that the origins of his highly individualistic theatrical technique are to be found not in the first volume of Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil, but in the three contes en vers of Les Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie.

The theatricality of the collection was noted even by some of Musset's first critics,¹ and its preface abounds with references to drama and the theatre:

Il est certain que la plupart de nos anciennes pièces de théâtre, à défaut de grands acteurs, demeurent sans intérêt; Molière seul, inimitable, est resté amusant.

Le moule de Racine a été brisé; c'est là le principal grief: car, pour cet adultère tant discuté du fou et du sérieux, il nous est familier: les règles de la trinité, de l'unité, établies par Aristote, ont été outrepassées. En un mot, les chastes Muses ont été, je crois, violées.

(813)²

Even a preface is, according to the young author, “presque toujours, sinon une histoire ou une théorie, une espèce de salutation théâtrale” (813). That modern critics have devoted so little attention to the dramatic aspects of these contes is, therefore, all the more surprising. The tendency to dialogue in particular has been mentioned, however briefly; but this is only one aspect of the theatricality of these poems; others are equally noteworthy: the settings, or tableaux, into which the dialogues are fitted, the acute psychological insight which will constitute a major strength of subsequent dramatic characters, the generally rhetorical and theatrical nature of the language and, finally, the particular role of the narrative voice. Because “Don Paez” and “Portia” illustrate the evolution to a dramatic form, while “Les Marrons du feu” is in effect already a play, it is the first two contes en vers in particular which will be examined here, although “Les Marrons du feu” will also be considered toward the conclusion.

One of the most interesting aspects of “Don Paez” and “Portia” with regard to Musset's later dramatic production is to be found in what may be termed the tableaux. Originally intended as mere background description to support the main themes in accordance with the Cénacle's advocation of the picturesque, these details in fact remain quite separate from the rest of the narration and are much less subordinate to the action that was no doubt first intended. Although too lengthy and too frequent—there are, on balance, two per canto—to be quoted in their entirety here, these passages are easily located, often as distinct units, within the body of each poem.

The first tableau in “Don Paez” comes just after the narrator's introduction, beginning “Un mardi, cet été …” and continues for twenty-one lines to: “En y regardant bien, frère, vous auriez pu, / Dans l'ombre transparente, entrevoir un pied nu” (48). Further glimpses of the beautiful Juana's dwelling and a view of the lovers themselves are provided in the same division, in the fourteen and one-half lines from: “Cependant les rideaux, autour d'elle tremblant, / La laissaient voir pâmée aux bras de son galant” (48). The second canto starts with a scene, thirty-two lines long, of Don Paez walking about the battlements while the other soldiers pass their night in camp gambling and telling tales (49). A second tableau vividly depicts the attitudes of Don Paez and his rival Don Etur as they begin their fight to the death over the capricious Juana; it continues for twenty-six lines from: “Comme on voit dans l'été, sur les herbes fauchées, / Deux louves, remuant les feuilles desséchées, / S'arrêter face à face …” (50). The first fifteen lines of the third canto are devoted to a description of the house of the sorceress Belisa (50); soon after, its interior and Belisa herself are portrayed in the lines starting “Point de lit au dedans,” and ending just before the narration breaks into formal dialogue (50/51). The last tableau of this conte is found in the twenty lines at the beginning of the fourth canto: Juana eagerly prepares herself to receive Don Paez as Madrid is transformed by the magic of the night (52).

With no narrative introduction, “Portia” is begun with a tableau, similar in its organisation to the first one in “Don Paez:” eleven and one-half lines introduce two of the three main characters, the noble Onorio Luigi and his young wife Portia, and establish a time and setting (65). Another, briefer descriptive passage of approximately eight lines from “Cependant que, debout dans son antique salle, / Le Toscan sous sa lampe inclinait son front pâle …” prepares the entry of the mysterious Dalti (66). The second canto of “Portia” is divided between two scenes: one, in the interior of a dark church, is set in the first eleven lines (66); the next, in a remote summer-house on Luigi's estate, is introduced shortly after (66). There is only one tableau in the last canto of this poem, describing the still beauty of Venice by night and the rapid movement of the lovers' gondola over the lagoon; two passages, however, are devoted to it: the first is found in the twenty-four lines which begin the canto (68); another, much shorter, is placed almost at the end of the conte:

L'horizon était vide, et les flots transparents
Ne reflétaient au loin sur leur abîme sombre,
Que l'astre au pâle front qui s'y mirait dans l'ombre.

(69)

The outstanding traits of these tableaux are their generality and the apparent rapidity with which they are sketched: for they are not so much detailed pictures as broad scenes; they do not so much further the plot as furnish a backdrop and create an atmosphere. As the list above demonstrates, the mood, even within a single scene, may be changed; in this case the tableau is altered to express it. This is especially noteworthy in the second canto of “Don Paez,” where the portrayal of the hero is as dramatic as the situation in which he is involved: “A le voir, on dirait à coup sûr / Une pierre de plus dans les pierres gothiques / Qu'agitent les falots en spectres fantastiques” (50)—quite a change from the image he presented at the beginning of the canto: “Seul, en silence, il passe au revers des créneaux” (49). The same development is found in the last division of “Portia” where, to convey the seriousness and even tragedy of her final position, the character of the scenery around Portia is entirely transformed: after the light and playful aspect of the start—“Les pieds dans la rosée, et son masque à la main, / Une nuit de printemps joue avec le matin” (68)—comes the stark and forbidding impact of the conclusion: “L'horizon était vide …” (69). This is, of course, pathetic fallacy for dramatic effect. If we look beyond the tableaux themselves to consider their position within the context of the poems, we find that, like the scenarios and stage settings of a play, they create a colourful background and specific atmosphere to introduce a whole episode of the action or new developments within that action. In conjunction with the quite definitely theatrical cast of much of the remaining structure of these contes, such broad tableaux can be considered to be fulfilling a dramatic function.

The tableaux provide, therefore, an atmosphere in which the action and the dialogue placed after them can be exercised to maximum effect; in fact they are so important that the development of the contes is organised around them: in both “Don Paez” and “Portia,” a separate canto is devoted to each individual tableau-setting, as if it were, in effect, a separate act. If we consider the basic organisation of Musset's earliest plays, we see that it results directly from the technique used in these poems. A most noteworthy example is his first drama in prose, La Quittance du diable, written in April, 1830, only four months after the appearance of the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie. This short play is divided not into acts or scenes, but rather into tableaux, designated as such: “Premier tableau: Un jardin au pied d'une colline”; “Deuxième tableau: Un cimetière. Plusieurs tombeaux”; “Troisième tableau: Un appartement dans le château, éclairé par une lampe” (483; 489; 490). The same dramatic technique is found in La Coupe et les Lèvres and A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles. In describing the décor of this last comédie, another critic, Steen Jansen, has written that

ce qu'on remarque d'abord, c'est la relative indépendance de chaque scène. Elles sont fortement séparées les unes des autres par les changements de décor qui interviennent à chaque nouvelle scène (sauf en deux cas: I, 3-4 et II, 3-4. …). …

Il y a donc un vide—spatial et temporel—entre chaque scène, et le lecteur/spectateur a l'impression de voir défiler une succession d'images qui forment chacune une unité. Si ces images forment pourtant aussi un ensemble, c'est qu'elles illustrent toutes la vie d'un même groupe de personnages.³

This independent scenic structure is one of the main characteristics of what Jansen describes as “une nouvelle technique dramatique”;⁴ as I hope to have shown, it is evident in its earliest stages in the longer poems of the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie.

The single instance in either “Don Paez” or “Portia” where one tableau does not provide the setting for an entire division of the poem, that is, where there is a change of lieu within a single canto, is found in the second part of “Portia,” in which we move from the deserted church of the beginning to an intimate summerhouse for the lovers' meeting. This transfer in mid-canto involved a number of structural difficulties: Musset had not only to find a means of successfully uniting the second scene with the first within the framework of a single division—a problem which solved itself when the two settings each had an individual canto—but he had to do this, if possible, without losing the mood of dramatic suspense which he was evidently intent on creating in preparation for the lovers' tryst and their subsequent discovery by the jealous husband, Luigi. How was the tension to be maintained through a change in setting, when it usually emanated in large part from the nature of the setting itself? A series of direct questions, rapidly piled one upon the other, not only continues the suspense, but also serves to relocate us in the new décor which, in quite characteristic fashion, is presented first:

Où donc, noble jeune homme, à cette heure où les ombres
Sous les pieds du passant tendent leurs voiles sombres,
Où donc vas-tu si vite? …
.....Jeune homme, où donc vas-tu? qui te pousse ou t'appelle?
Pourquoi comme un fuyard sur l'arçon te courber?
.....Mais, près de ce palais, pourquoi ton oeil errant
Cherche-t-il donc à voir et comme à reconnaître
Ce kiosque, à la nuit close entr'ouvrant sa fenêtre?
.....Pourtant au pied du mur, sous les arbres caché,
Comme un chasseur, l'oreille au guet, tu t'es penché.
D'où partent ces accents? et quelle voix s'élève
Entre ces barreaux, douce et faible comme un rêve?

(66/67)

In this way another tableau, suitably adapted to the lovers' encounter that will follow, is presented through the rapid questions which successfully link the two scenes and even develop the dramatic tension introduced in the first (“‘Le ciel / Les garde!’ dit la vieille en marchant à l'autel,” etc., 66). We note, however, that Musset achieved this scenic transition only through his manipulation of the dialogue, and it is to the dramatic character of this second that we must now turn our attention.

Describing the nature of the lyricism in Musset's first collection, Pierre Gastinel noted that it possessed distinctly theatrical overtones, explaining that “chez Musset, le lyrisme tourne toujours au dialogue. Partout le poète trouve moyen de mener une conversation.”⁵ Gastinel considers as dialogue not only the lines attributed to imaginary characters within the framework of the contes, but also the many interjections by the narrator himself. These last will be examined elsewhere in a separate consideration of the rôle of the narrative voice; even disregarding for the moment, however, the presence of this narrator, what remains in “Portia” and “Don Paez” after the tableaux are drawn is for the most part dialogue.

The drift of such dialogue to a purely dramatic form is less evident in “Portia,” where conversation between the characters never works itself beyond the limits imposed by the narrative structure; in “Don Paez,” too, the dialogue is included for as long as is possible within the body of the poem. A statement by the “dragon jaune et bleu” in the second canto, for example, appears as follows:

Lui, bâillant à moitié: “Par Dieu! c'est l'Orvado,
Dit-il, la Juana, place San-Bernardo”.

(49)

But this careful inclusion of the conversation within the framework of the conte grows somewhat confused in the dialogue between Don Paez and his rival Don Etur (II), and finally breaks down altogether in the third division, where Musset begins to introduce each segment of the discussion by the speaker's name:

Don Paez, cependant, hésitant à sa vue,
Elle lui tend les bras, et sur sa gorge nue,
Qui se levait encore pour un embrassement,
Elle veut l'attirer.
                                                  DON PAEZ:
                                                            Quatre mots seulement,
Vieille.—Me connais-tu? Prends cette bourse. …

(51)

This technique is continued in the last canto (IV): Musset no doubt felt he would be correcting any ambiguity for his readers; by the same alteration, however, he also went a long way in changing the viewpoint of his poem, for in labelling each element of speech separately, he was able to develop the independent expression of individual figures to an even greater degree. At this point responsibility for the evolution of the conte is in large measure transferred to the characters themselves: it is the beginning of real drama.

The brief descriptions frequently included in the middle of the dialogues are also noteworthy; carefully placed as they are, such indications could almost be mistaken for stage directions:

Dieu fit que Don Paez l'entendit; et la fièvre
Le prenant aux cheveux, il se mordit la lèvre.

(49)

Comme, à cette parole, il montrait son sein nu,
Don Paez, sur son coeur, vit une mèche noire. …

(49)

—Madame,” dit Luigi s'avançant quatre pas,—
Et comme hors du lit pendait un de ses bras,
De même que l'on voit d'une coupe approchée
Se saisir ardemment une lèvre séchée,
Ainsi vous l'auriez vu sur ce bras endormi
Mettre un baiser brûlant,—puis tremblant à demi:
“Tu ne le connais pas, ô jeune Vénitienne!
Ce poison florentin qui consume une veine. …

(“Portia” 65)

In an assessment of the dramatic potential of the dialogue in these poems we must also note Musset's frequent use of certain linguistic devices, such as the rhetorical question:

JUANA:
M'oubliez-vous, Paez, et l'endroit où nous sommes?

(52)

Mais quand tu m'as noyé de baisers et de larmes,
Dis, qui peut m'en défendre, ou qui m'en guérira?
Tu m'as fait trop heureux; ton amour me tuera!

(“Portia” 67);

apostrophe and hyperbole:

JUANA:
Dieu! vrai Dieu! quelle folie étrange
Vous a frappé l'esprit, mon bien-aimé! mon ange!

(52)

                                                                                                              “Le ciel
Les garde!” dit la vieille en marchant à l'autel

(“Portia” 66);

and dramatic irony:

JUANA:
Qu'avez-vous, mon amour? pourquoi fermer la porte
Au verrou? don Paez a-t-il peur que je sorte?

(52)

Accepting the modern preference for Musset's plays at the expense of his poetry, Henri Lefèbvre has written that Musset's poetic style is in any case best suited to a theatrical audience; his reasons for this judgement are of especial interest here in a consideration of the dramatic attributes of the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie:

Les mouvements oratoires qui passaient par-dessus la tête du lecteur vont au théâtre passer la rampe. Le don d'éloquence, nuisible au lyrisme, devient sur scène une qualité primordiale. Le personnage qui parle éloquemment à l'autre personnage s'adresse, à travers celui-ci, au spectateur; il le vise et l'atteint.⁶

Although another critic has noted an absence of “l'épaisseur du vécu” in “Les Marrons du feu,”⁷ there are in these early contes solid indications of what would prove to be one of the most compelling features of Musset's theatre: his acute, almost intuitive understanding of human psychology.⁸ This is particularly evident in “Portia”; Musset managed to strike just the right chord in his portrayal of the young heroine whose childish naïveté and lack of experience are the source of real tragedy in the story; the figure of her much older husband, Onorio Luigi, is also convincing. It would have been easy to make out of him a conventional Romantic villain, but already such exaggeration was prevented by the instinct to nuance and truth which would lead, one year later, to the subtleties of La Nuit vénitienne. Instead of a jealous monster in the manner of Hugo, we have, in the second canto, a broken-hearted and almost pathetic old man for whom one must feel more than a little pity:

Les amants regardaient, sous les rayons tremblants
De la lampe déjà par l'aurore obscurcie,
Ce vieillard d'une nuit, cette tête blanchie,
Avec ses longs cheveux plus pâles que son front.

(67)

Melodrama is approached with the sudden greying of Luigi's hair, but rarely elsewhere, for in “Portia” especially Musset was moving beyond the dimensions of the usual Romantic stereotypes into the human density of his theatrical characters. At the same time, it is to be noted that the rather simpler psychologies of the figures in “Don Paez” reflect the less complicated mechanism of the plot: in themselves, the characters are not badly drawn.

Further evidence of Musset's knowledge of human nature is found in the observations of the narrator, who comments on these characters and their circumstances even as the contes unfold. In “Don Paez,” his introductory passage itself contains brief but perceptive sketches of certain kinds of women: “Ces bégueules / Qui ne sauraient aller au Prado toutes seules,” and, still worse, “celles / Dont le temps se dépense en intrigues nouvelles” (48). Here again, as in the tableaux, we find Musset's characteristic use of carefully selected detail to convey an impression which is both general and richly evocative:

Celles-là vont au bal, courent les rendez-vous,
Savent dans un manchon cacher un billet doux,
.....Suivre l'imbroglio de ces amours mignons,
Poussés en une nuit comme des champignons.

(48)

A more profound understanding of women is revealed in the fourth canto, when the narrator describes Juana's mood as she awaits her lover:

—Oh! Comme à cet instant bondit un coeur de femme!
Quand l'unique pensée où s'abîme son âme
Fuit et grandit sans cesse, et devant son désir,
Recule comme une onde, impossible à saisir!
Alors, le souvenir excitant l'espérance,
L'attente d'être heureux devient une souffrance.

(52)

An equal perception is found in his comments in “Portia:”—Quel homme fut jamais si grand, qu'il se pût croire, Certain, ayant vécu, d'avoir une mémoire …” (68). It was this understanding which enabled Musset to go to the heart of a personality, or type of personality, and faithfully portray it; the strength of the highly individual figures which resulted is one of the outstanding qualities of his theatre where, in contrast to those of many Romantic dramatists, the characters once again assume their necessary rôle as the source and focus for the action and development of the plot.⁹

Beyond the psychological insights afforded by its frequent intrusions, the dramatic implications of the rôle assigned to the narrative voice in these contes may be less evident. We must remember, however, that the narrator in both poems is endowed, directly in “Don Paez,” rather more indirectly in “Portia,” with a separate identity: the first word in “Don Paez” is “je,” and this chronicler has a character and opinions, as his introduction to the poem makes quite clear: “Je n'ai jamais aimé, pour ma part, ces bégueules / Qui ne sauraient aller au Prado toutes seules …” (48). Everything that occurs in these two contes is bracketed by the narrative voice; nor are we allowed to forget it, for the presence of this narrator is everywhere evident: in his apostrophes to the reader through personal address (such as “vous” and “frère” in “Don Paez;” “vieillards décrépits,” etc. in “Portia”), imperatives, and direct questions, and also in his references to what has already been related (“‘Messieurs,’ cria d'abord notre moustache rousse …”—“Don Paez,” 49). These devices, together with the frequent intrusions considered above, continue the development of an independent narrative personality in each of the poems to the point where it addresses not only readers, but characters within the contes as well—Juana, for example, in “Don Paez:”

          —Voyez-vous, le long de cette rampe,
Jusqu'au faîte en grimpant tournoyer une lampe?

(52);

or Dalti in “Portia:”

Tes voeux sont-ils si haut et si loin avancés?
Jeune homme, songes-y; ce réduit, tu le sais,
Se tient plus invisible à l'oeil, que la pensée
Dans le coeur de son maître, inconnue et glacée.

(66)

Ultimately, therefore, the narrator himself becomes physically present in his drama as an onlooker; this evolution of the narrative voice from omniscience to questioning presence is entirely in keeping with the gradual movement of these poems to a more dramatic form. For the paradox involved in this broad use of direct address is that the very technique which consciously brings the reader into the work also, applied to fictive characters, excludes the narrator from it, that is, maintains between him and his creation, his own imaginary world, a certain distance. The narrator is observer. This division between him and what he narrates is exactly parallel to that between the dramatist and his drama; and as can be seen, the results obtained are rather similar: such distancing is an essential ingredient of traditional dramatic expression. That an autonomous narrator appears later (in the fourth canto) in “Don Paez” than in “Portia” (in the second of three divisions) would indicate—both date from 1829, but there is no exact chronology—that the latter was written first: in “Portia,” this device is used; in “Don Paez,” found as it is toward the end of the conte, wholly integrated into what seems to be the natural progression of the poem, it is used more dramatically.

Because of their importance for the structure of some of Musset's first plays, two functions of the narrative voice within these contes must be especially considered: lending direction and general unity to the poems, and providing comments on the people, places, and situations within them. In “Portia,” and particularly in “Don Paez,” it is the narrator who is one of the most important elements in the general organisation of the conte: linking the various tableaux together, he is in large measure responsible for the structural harmony of the whole. Variations of this initial method are found in some of the plays written shortly afterward, most notably in the Spectacle dans un fauteuil.¹⁰ In the loose arrangement of the very different tableaux of La Coupe et les Lèvres through the figure of Frank, whom events befall, in the broad orchestration of the plot of A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles by Laerte, even in the loose unity of Lorenzaccio centred, according to one critic at least, around the lone figure of the Duke,¹¹ we find traces of the structural pattern which underlies the organisation of the longer contes of Musset's first collection.

In my examination of the tendency to dialogue in these poems, I have written that drama begins at the point where separate speeches are assigned to individual characters, as in the third canto of “Don Paez.” The narrator consequently becomes less significant, and were this to continue, his characters, capable of independent expression, would be endowed with life of their own and grow beyond the framework of the conte. In this case, the structurally autonomous narrative voice would be limited to a semi-independent secondary rôle, that is, reduced to a chorus. This is precisely what occurs in La Coupe et les Lèvres (1832) and On ne badine pas avec l'amour (1834); the information supplied by the omniscient narrator in, for instance, the broad tableaux of “Don Paez” is provided in On ne badine pas avec l'amour by the speeches of the chorus, his structural descendant:

Cependant, les rideaux, autour d'elle tremblant,
La laissaient voir pâmée aux bras de son galant;
Oeil humide, bras morts, tout respirait en elle
Les langueurs de l'amour, et la rendait plus belle.
Sa tête avec ses seins roulait dans ses cheveux. …

(“Don Paez,” 48)

LE Choeur:
Doucement bercé sur sa mule fringante, messer Blazius s'avance dans les bluets fleuris, vêtu de neuf, l'écritoire au côté. Comme un poupon sur l'oreiller, il se ballotte sur son ventre rebondi, et les yeux à demi fermés, il marmotte un Pater noster dans son triple menton. Salut, maître Blazius, vous arrivez au temps de la vendange, pareil à une amphore antique.

(On ne badine pas avec l'amour I/1, 299).

Additional examples would demonstrate the similarity of the preceptive tones of the narrator of “Portia” and the chorus of La Coupe et les Lèvres.

To this point “Les Marrons du feu” has not been mentioned because its form is clearly dramatic: there is less need to discuss its dialogue, the distinctive psychology of its characters, and its dramatic effects, now all completely legitimate. One might well wonder, however, what place the narrative voice and tableaux which figure so pominently in the other early contes have found in it, and it is these two aspects of the play which will be very briefly examined here.

In his analysis of “Les Marrons du feu,” Herbert Gochberg has written that “the form is strictly dramatic. The speaking parts are indicated in the traditional manner and the division into scenes is quite clear.”¹² There still remains, however, a visible trace of the narrative voice of the other poems in the short Prologue to the play: in the first place, the “jeune auteur” who delivers it addresses us no less directly than did the narrators of “Don Paez” and “Portia,” secondly, this initial presentation establishes a cadre, an imaginative framework, which is just as fictitious—given the original appearance of this play in a published collection—as the narrator's introduction to “Don Paez:”

Messieurs et mesdames, c'est une comédie,
Laquelle, en vérité, ne dure pas longtemps;
Seulement que nul bruit, nulle dame étourdie
Ne fasse aux beaux endroits tourner les assistants.
.....N'allez pas nous jeter surtout de pommes cuites
Pour mettre nos rideaux et nos quinquets à bas.
Nous avons pour le mieux repeint les galeries.

(53)

Traces of a narrative presence also surface in the last lines of this play:

L' Abbé
                                                            Mais …—Elle est partie, ô Dieu!
J'ai tué mon ami, j'ai mérité le feu,
J'ai taché mon pourpoint, et l'on me congédie.
C'est la moralité de cette comédie.

(65)

Although this conte is presented in a form which is essentially dramatic, the characters who appear within it are still the puppets of a narrator, or “jeune auteur,” who arranges them in their fantastic postures as he wishes, at will; regardless of the distancing, this is precisely what we have observed in both “Don Paez” and “Portia.” The abbé's final reference to the framework within which he appears—“cette comédie”—underlines it: his actions have been directed to an end, to a “moralité” determined by another; his rôle has merely been to illustrate them, and it is over.¹³

In “Les Marrons du feu,” brief indications for the setting and explicit stage directions largely replace the tableaux and short intra-dialogue descriptions found in “Don Paez” and “Portia.” It is interesting to note, however, that minor changes were made, consisting mostly of additions, in specifications for the décor in editions of this conte which appeared after 1830¹⁴—proof of an increased concern with the suitability and precision of the theatrical form in which it had been cast. For all that, longer, set descriptions, which compose the tableaux of the other two poems and reflect the young Musset's response to the Cénacle's call for the picturesque, are still included in “Les Marrons du feu;” but such broad scenes now spring from the mouths of the characters themselves, as part of the dialogue, rather than from the narrative voice. The vista included in the long monologue of the abbé after he has murdered Rafael is particularly notable; it conveys, as do the most important tableaux of “Don Paez” and “Portia,” a mood as well as a scene: “Maintenant le hibou tourne autour des falots. / L'esturgeon monstrueux soulève de son dos / Le manteau bleu des mers …” (64). The general but penetrating psychological observations elsewhere expressed by the narrative voice are likewise still present, but they too are now presented as the comments of single characters:

comments of single characters:

RAFAEL:
C'est l'historie du coeur.—Tout va si vite en lui!
Tout y meurt comme un son, tout, excepté l'ennui!

(54)

CAMARGO:
—C'est la règle, ô mon coeur!—Il est sûr qu'une femme
Met dans une âme aimée une part de son âme.

.....

Au contraire un coeur d'homme est comme une marée
Fuyarde des endroits qui l'ont mieux attirée.

(57)

That Musset's intuitive understanding of human nature is still being expressed in the words of his characters rather than through their actions indicates, no doubt, that the transition to a purely theatrical form is not complete; at the same time, however, it is important to remember that everywhere in Musset's work is to be found the tendency to precept and maxim of the best classical tradition.

It can be seen, therefore, that if the form of “Les Marrons du feu” is more evidently dramatic than that of the other two contes, it clearly reflects the fundamental organisation of “Portia” and “Don Paez” through the lingering presence of the narrative voice and the descriptive tableaux. In this it resembles most of the plays from the first period of Musset's career, the period in which he wrote, one after another, many of his best works: A Quoi rêvent les jeunes filles (1832), On ne badine pas avec l'amour (1834), Lorenzaccio (1834) … All these plays contain the structural and dramatic elements of the earliest contes en vers. It would be difficult to exaggerate their importance for, refined and reapplied, these elements formed the basis of Musset's innovative dramatic technique: as a result of the cohesion assured by the central narrative voice or single character who replaced him, these plays could be organised around different tableaux and so could become much less traditional, much more flexible; it was this flexibility, this freedom from a more conventional dramatic structure, which in turn made it possible for Musset to express himself entirely as he wished, spontaneously and poetically. It was the dramatic technique that originated with the composition of his first contes en vers which enabled Musset fully to reveal his delicate fantasy and fragile dreams in some of the most enduring dramas of nineteenth-century France.

Notes

1. See Pierre Gastinel, Le Romantisme d'Alfred de Musset, Diss. Paris 1931 (Paris: Hachette, 1933), pp. 139 and 145.

2. All page references are to the Seuil edition (Collection l'Intégrale) of Musset's Oeuvres complètes, edited by Philippe van Tieghem (Paris, 1966). This is the best edition of Musset's complete works now available; van Tieghem, unlike Allem in the Pléiade volume of the theatre, has very rightly preserved the original form of Musset's plays rather than present the subsequent versions adapted for the stage and cut for the censor.

3. Steen Jansen, “Alfred de Musset, dramaturge: A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles et la technique dramatique d'Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil,” Orbis Litterarum, 21 (1966), p. 229.

4. See Jansen, p. 238.

5. Gastinel, p. 103.

6. Henri Lefèbvre, Musset: Essai, 2^e éd. (Paris: L'Arche, 1970), p. 102.

7. See Eric Gans, Musset et le “drame tragique”: Essai d'analyse paradoxale (Paris: Corti, 1974), p. 62.

8. It surfaces, however rapidly, even in the preface to the collection when Musset compares the young author who pays tribute to those who have come before him to “un provincial qui, en entrant au bal, s'incline à droite et à gauche, cherchant un visage ami” (813).

9. There can be very little doubt about the importance Musset assigned even from the outset to intimate psychological description; in the examples I have quoted above from the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie is already to be found ample illustration of the tendency which would be expressed as theory only with the “Dédicace” of La Coupe et les Lèvres two years later in 1832:

   L'un comme Calderon et comme Mérimée
   Incruste un plomb brûlant sur la réalité,
   .....L'autre comme Racine et le divin Shakespeare,
   Monte sur le théâtre, une lampe à la main,
   Et de sa plume d'or ouvre le coeur humain.
   .....Mais s'il m'était permis de choisir une route,
   Je prendrais la dernière …

   (101/102)

10. And later in the intimate first-person optic of many of his contes and nouvelles.

11. In his discussion of the dramatic technique of A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles, Steen Jansen has noted “l'absence d'action principale et unifiante; enfin le rôle dévolu à un personnage central [Laerte] qui—sans être le pôle d'une opposition dynamique entraînant une action—assure l'unité de la pièce, c.-à-d. ici la liaison entre les scènes successives” (p. 238); in the same article he has written of Lorenzaccio that

    de la relative indépendance des actions, il résulte qu'il n'y en a pas une dont on puisse dire sans discussion qu'elle est la principale, et que les autres lui sont subordonnées. Elles forment pourtant un tout cohérent, parce qu'elles sont toutes—sauf une qui oppose Lorenzo et sa mère—déclenchées par des oppositions où l'un des antagonistes est le duc. Le duc est donc le personnage central qui assure l'unité de la pièce. … C'est par cette qualité de lien unifiant seule et non par son caractère propre qu'il acquiert d'abord une fonction dans la pièce”.

    (p. 247)

12. Herbert Gochberg, Stage of Dreams: The Dramatic Art of Alfred de Musset (1828-1834) (Genève: Droz, 1967), p. 33.

13. This view of the theatre as a fantastic personal universe governed only by the caprice of its creator may explain the fascinating fragment which follows, composed by Musset toward the end of his life:

    Dieu dort et le monde est son rêve.

    Dieu dort et … toutes les créations successives ou simultanées qui amusent son sommeil ne sont que des apparences. Le Monde est le rêve de Dieu. Quand Dieu s'éveillera … les apparences retomberont dans leur néant primitif; les simulacres de créations et d'êtres, de globes et de planètes, de systèmes et de vies, s'évanouiront à jamais. Dieu finira de rêver.

    (930/931)

14. See Allem's footnotes (numbers 8, p. 611; 29, p. 614; and 78, p. 617) to Les Marrons du feu in the Pléiade edition of Musset's Poésies complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).