SOURCE: Le Vay, John. “Musset's ‘La Nuit d'octobre.’” The Explicator 57, no. 4 (summer 1999): 209-12.

[In the following essay, Le Vay observes mythic patterns and imagery of rebirth and redeemed love in Musset's Les nuits poems.]

According to myth, in the fall (October), Attis/Adonis is slain. He goes underground in winter (December), is reborn in spring (May), and attains heroic strength in summer (August).¹ There is something of that pattern in the four “Nights” (Les Nuits) of Alfred de Musset. But the May rebirth is abortive: “le printemps naît” (line 3), but the frozen poet remains in suspended animation: “who can write on the sand / in the teeth of the north wind?” (194-195).² December conforms to the underworld archetype, being dominated by a melancholic, ghostly visitant clad all in black. August begins with a lovelorn, girlish goddess and a world-weary, slightly patronizing poet who has not yet recovered the power of song—one who is not reborn poetically.

For Adonis-Musset, October, or autumn, serves two symbolic functions: It is indeed the time of the slaying of Adonis by the black boar (George Sand), but it is also the time of harvest, and at the end of “La Nuit d'Octobre” the poet gathers a modest golden harvest of poetical sensibility from his love-harrowed heart.

What the wise Muse in the poem tells the petulant poet in the culminating Night is, roughly, that the experience of the emotion of love is what is important; the object of love is, so to speak, immaterial. It is the chagrin d'amour (not the plaisir) that allows one, in hard won serenity (all passion spent), truly to appreciate deep friendship (232), the beauties of the green world (234), “les sonnets de Pétrarque, Michel-Ange et les arts, Shakespeare et la nature” (235-36), and “ineffable harmonie des cieux” (238).

“Couldst thou [she asks] love so well thy new true blue-eyed mistress, hadst thou not been grieved and tormented by the brown-eyed traitoress?” (242-45). The poet, in short, is told that his youthful agon with the femme fatale was good for him:

Pourquoi veux-tu haïr ta jeune expérience,
Et détester un mal qui t'a rendu mielleur?

(255-56)

George Sand, six years his senior had much to teach him:

Elle savait la vie, et te l'a fait connaître;
Une autre a recueilli le fruit de ta douleur.

(264-65)

She, the brown-eyed one (in that bygone “mystérieuse et sombre histoire” [293]), by flaying his heart, had made him a better lover of young blue-eyes, and, much more important, a better poet. The dark one had been appointed by Fate (263) to inspire him by breaking his heart (and she was presently performing the same function for Chopin, though of course Musset does not tell us this).

Magnanimity, says the Muse, is the name of the love game. “When thou findest thou canst weep for her (“plains la” [260]), the perfidious one, then thou wilt be ready for love; then “tu sais aimer” (269).

In the final strophe of “La Nuit d'Octobre,” the poet comes to agree with the Muse: Hate is no good—there is no poetry of hate. So he will banish for good the hateful dark woman; the moment she is erased from his memory will be the moment she is forgiven. But that is not quite what the Muse had in mind: “Do not destroy those days [the Muse says] when thou wast in love with her—they were good days, if brief” (200-01). The dark women, even in her malign aspect, serves a positive purpose in the poet's psychic life. “She is not a devil, she is a woman, and God has caused thee, through her, to divine,” “en suffrant, le secret des heureux” (260-61).

The poet is not quite as magnanimous as the Muse would have him be, but he does profess to have reached the point of “pardon” (297), and is even able to say “let us pardon each other” (298), but only as a prelude to expunging her from his memory. Immediately after the moment of forgiving and forgetting the “femme à l'œil sombre” (166), the east brightens with the rosy glow of dawn, and the poet invites his soul, the Muse,

Viens voir la nature immortelle
Sortir des voiles du sommeil;
Nous allons renaître avec elle
Au premier rayon du soleil!

(310-13)³

And so Musset-Adonis, who missed rebirth in the spring, finds it in the autumn.

It appears, apres tout, that the nouvelle “belle maîtresse” (242), avec “les yeux bleus” (276) et, apparement, les cheveux “blonds” (302), et, bien-heureusement, “le sourire divin” (245), is a straw woman, a fair scarecrow set up to ensure the banishment of that oiselle noire, the black baroness, George Sand. She would, in fact, appear to be an incarnation of the angelic Muse, the “blonde rêveuse” (302), and thus is a kind of pious fiction.

This conclusive “October Night” (1837) is, in fact, the third anniversary of the night (1834) when the poet banished the dark lady of his sonnets:

Va-t'en, retire-toi, spectre de ma maîtresse!
Rentre dans ton tombeau, si tu t'en es levé.

(148-49)

The first October night (described in lines 104-51) had, as far as we can see, no dawn. On the “Night of May” (“La Nuit de Mai,” 1835), in spite of the erotic pulsations of the balmy, perfumed late night and the Muse's dulcet and seductive tones, the still chilly poet cannot rise to her bait.

Once again, the flowerlike (48), blond (51), golden-robed (54) Muse stands in antithesis to the somber baroness (not directly addressed in May), who has engendered in the dejected poet (“triste et silencieux” [57]) “ennui” (60), “melancholie” (96), “pleurs” (141), “sanglots” (152), “douleur” (141), “blessure” (146), “malheur” (187), and even “horreur” (172). The Muse is “his true mistress” (52) and his “dearest sister” (128). In spite of his continuing high regard for her, the poet is able to give her only one rather limp kiss, before she flies (miffed) back to heaven. He excuses himself from singing, saying in parting: “I have suffered a dire martyrdom, and if I were to put it to the lyre, every string would break” (200-02). He has not, we should say, sufficiently distanced his material.

On the “Night of December” (“La Nuit Decembre,” 1835) the golden goddess does not appear, for this is the winter/underworld canto, and Musset spends it in the company of his sable-suited doppelganger. This is his inner self, his blood brother, the personification of his melancholy from which arises his poetry (on the brother's brow is a wreath “of withered myrtle” [45], at his foot “a fallen lute” [58]).

Although the dark brother appears to the poet throughout his life at moments of high sorrow (and, early on, at a moment of “misère d'amour” [27]), he does not appear during the affair of the dark lady until far into the “nuit sombre” (181), when he comes upon the poet mooning over a mesh of black/brown hair (148) and a clutch of love letters. But the dark “inward companion” makes no mention of the dark lady; he simply says, “When thou art in sorrow, come thou with confidence to me” (213-14). Tacitly, he brings the same message as does the Muse: that “melancholie” (111) is the wellspring not only of tears but of poetry. At the end, he does not call himself Melancholy but says: “Je suis la solitude,” which, for a poet, is the same thing.

In the sultry “Night of August” (“La Nuit d'Aout,” 1836) the immortal Muse begins like a naive, lovelorn girl pining for her errant (roué?)⁴ poet; but when the renegade enters (a little hangdog) and says, “Yes, my dear, I'm back, and I'm ready to sing to thee” (18), she quickly regains authority. Although ignorant of the details, she knows that while he has been away from her he has been “yielding to his evil destiny in darkness” (30) and indulging in the kind of fleshly love that “dissipates the treasures of the soul” (61). “Well, yes,” says the poet, “I came to grief, but I shall sing out of my grief” (67). “Ah,” says the Muse, “but thou has damaged thy heart, and “ton coeur est le poète” (81).

Again the fair goddess, a nymph of the wildwood (85), bearing a blue flower (32), directing the poet's gaze “aux cieux” (38), is pitted against the dark harlot, the chain-bearing “fière beauté” (31), bent on dragging the poet down “dans l'ombre” (30). And the poet with the damaged heart, whom the Muse looks so sadly on, must speak the words of wisdom to himself: “Cast out pride from thy bitter heart, and rediscover love: having once loved, one must love without cease” (133-37). Like Dante, he knows he must write “according to the dictates of Love.”⁵ And that brings us back to the conclusion of “La Nuit d'Octobre,” where the Angel of Love is called “ma blonde rêveuse.”

Notes

1. As for any four part work (especially one with a four seasons context), a four elements assignation is indicated: as, for example, May (spring) = air; August (summer) = fire; October (autumn) = earth; December (winter) = water.

2. All translations are my own.

3. These lines echo the opening lines of La Nuit d'Octobre, which predict that his “disastrous” (70) love will vanish like the mist at sunrise.

4. Musset's commerce with harlots may be seen as an adjunct (or reflex) to the black baroness affair.

5. Purgatorio, 24.54, also La Vita nuova, 13.2.

Work Cited

Berthon, H. E., ed. Nine French Poets 1820-1880. London: Macmillian, 1950.