SOURCE: King, Russell S. “Alfred de Musset: Some Problems of Literary Creativity.” Nottingham French Studies 8, no. 1 (May 1969): 16-27.

[In the following essay, King highlights the theme of creative lassitude in Musset's life and writings.]

Baudelaire describes Musset disparagingly as “un paresseux à effusions gracieuses.”¹ Like all writers who believe in, or rely on, artistic inspiration for composing their works, Musset and his critic, Baudelaire, frequently if not permanently feared lest their inspiration might “dry up.” Sometimes this fear is expressed explicitly, sometimes it is transformed into something more subtle, such as we find in, for example, Mallarmé's sonnet beginning Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui. Sartre's condemnation of Baudelaire—whether it be valid or otherwise is irrelevant at this point—could more appropriate be directed against Musset. Musset's refusal to accept responsibilities and act positively would make him an easier target for an existentialist critic. The portrait his brother gives us,² though fascinating in some of the detail, is that of a dull and motiveless existence.

Despite his not inconsiderable output, Musset was always tormented by the notion that he was a literary impotent. It is interesting to examine how this flaw in his personality, if flaw it is, pervades his writings, particularly his more serious writings between the years 1833 and 1838. Long before La Rochefoucauld, in his Maximes (no. 266, and compare no. 630), had recognized the influence of “la paresse”:

“C'est se tromper que de croire qu'il n'y ait que les violentes passions, comme l'ambition et l'amour, qui puissent triompher des autres. La paresse, toute languissante qu'elle est, ne laisse pas d'en être souvent la maîtresse: elle usurpe sur tous les desseins et sur toutes les actions de la vie; elle y détruit et y consume insensiblement les passions et les vertus.”

A paralysing inertia prevented Musset from writing the works of art which he believed it to be his destiny to compose. Herein lies the conflict which he elaborated in the Nuits cycle of poems; it is a trait common to almost all his heroes, albeit indirectly; and it is the mainspring of Musset's own special mal du siècle. Moreover, the action of many of his imaginative writings springs from attempts to overcome this inactivity.

The poem “La Nuit de Mai” provides a clear illustration of Musset's difficulty in composing. This poem takes, typically for Musset, the form of a debate, between the Muse and the Poet, that is, more exactly, between Musset-Poet and Musset-Man, both more or less equal representations of Musset himself. The muse urges the Man to write, enumerating reasons why he should devote himself more fruitfully to his art and even suggests possible subjects. She endeavours to entice the Man away from his present neglect of her, using the combined charm of Mother, Mistress and Sister:

O paresseux enfant! regarde, je suis belle.
Notre premier baiser, ne t'en souviens-tu pas,
Quand je te vis si pâle au toucher de mon aile,
Et que, les yeux en pleurs, tu tombas dans mes bras?(3)

Nonetheless, the Man fabricates unconvincing pretexts for not satisfying the Muse by actual composition and creative activity:

Je ne chante ni l'espérance,
Ni la gloire, ni le bonheur,
Hélas! pas même la souffrance.
La bouche garde le silence
Pour écouter parler le cœur.(4)

Of course, the Muse, and Musset himself, fails to be convinced: the “bouche” is more reliably productive than the heart. Such reasoning echoes the defiant concluding stanzas of “La Nuit d'Août:”

J'aime, et je veux chanter la joie et la paresse …
Aime et tu renaîtras; fais-toi fleur pour éclore.
Après avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore;
Il faut aimer sans cesse, après avoir aimé.(5)

Such is the philosophy Musset chose to follow, alas! during much of his life. He was not persuaded by it, being aware that such an existence, for an artist, leads too easily to sterility, instead of giving the artist a richer background on which to draw in order to enlarge the scope of his art.

Love and suffering are valuable to the poet only when subsequently transformed into art. They are a means to an end, part of a creative process not an end in themselves, a distinction which Musset preferred to ignore after about 1838. The Muse urges:

L'herbe que je voulais arracher de ce lieu,
C'est ton oisiveté; ta douleur est à Dieu.(6)

Significantly the Muse follows these lines by others more celebrated and all too frequently misinterpreted:

Rien ne nous rend si grands qu'une grande douleur
Mais, pour en être atteint, ne crois pas, ô poète,
Que ta voix ici-bas doive rester muette.(7)

Observe the punctuation: there is not as much as a comma between the first and second lines. The first line is considered too often in isolation to reinforce certain almost masochistic tendencies in Musset to wallow excessively in grief, with no reference to the all-important qualifying lines. The poet's suffering cannot, in itself, give the poet greatness. In “La Nuit de Mai,” the Muse fails to convince the Man who, ironically, has the last word:

Mais j'ai souffert un dur martyre,
Et le moins que je pourrais dire,
Si je l'essayais sur la lyre,
La briserait comme un roseau.(8)

Nevertheless the Muse is the victor in that a poem has been produced, even if it is an “art-poem,” that is, a poem about poetry and its creation. The struggle to compose is the subject of the poem, with Musset playing, in the form of a debate, the rôle of the self-conscious artist. “La Nuit de Mai” is a poem about poetry just as Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs is a novel about the/a novel.

“La Nuit d'Août” is similarly conceived. It too is concerned with the inert poet reluctant to practise his art. Further fruitless pretexts are tentatively put forward:

O ma Muse, ne pleurez pas!
A qui perd tout, Dieu reste encore,
Dieu là-haut, l'espoir ici-bas.(9)

But Musset had little or no faith in God and even less hope “ici-bas.”

In “La Nuit d'Août,” the Muse uses an argument dearer, and more disturbing, to Musset: the destructive and paralysing effect on the artist of corruption, pleasure, love, and life and experience in general. The Muse asks:

Que fais-tu loin de moi, quand j'attends jusqu'au jour?
Tu suis un pâle éclair dans une nuit profonde.
Il ne te restera de tes plaisirs du monde
Qu'un impuissant mépris pour notre honnête amour.(10)

Cynicism and scorn are the inevitable result of close contact with, and experience of, life. Nonetheless a parade of cynicism suited Musset, and others of his age, but he was aware of its contaminating effect on the creative powers of the artist. An increasing awareness of this, along with a refusal to accept it fully and honestly, accounts in some measure for the gradual falling off of Musset's artistic career. The more one loves, he feels, the more one loses sight of love; similarly the more one becomes acquainted with life and its complexities, the more one loses faith and hope in one's own life. For Musset, innocence, youth and enthusiastic fervour are essential to the poet. In the apostrophe addressed by the poet to the Muse at the end of “La Nuit d'Août,” the poet defies the Muse:

J'aime, et pour un baiser je donne mon genie.(11)

If the poet so acts, he soon has little further to relate in his art but the analysis and description of the ensuing conflict between his artistic life and his ordinary experiences:

J'aime, et je veux chanter la joie et la paresse,
Ma folle expérience et mes soucis d'un jour.(12)

The conflict between these two selves is of central significance in his mid-career writings. Before this defiance of the Muse, for example, in the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1830), Musset is a more optimistic, enthusiastic and less personal writer. After about 1833, a dominant theme in his works is, directly or indirectly, the problem of creation, and, by extension, action.

For this reason, “La Nuit d'Octobre” is a very fitting sequel to “La Nuit d'Août.” In “La Nuit d'Octobre,” the Muse is summoned to console the repentant, neglectful poet returning after some wounding experience. Just as Gide, amongst others, was to conclude that happiness lies in the search for happiness, Musset is able only to depict the return to the Muse, not what he is capable of achieving after his return. Here, temporarily at least, the poet recognizes the superiority of the Muse, of artistic creation, unlike the conclusion of “La Nuit d'Août.” “Jours de travail! seuls jours où j'ai vécu! O trois fois chère solitude! Dieu soit loué, j'y suis donc revenu, à ce vieux cabinet d'étude.”¹³

What has he to sing about?

Dieu soit loué, nous allons donc chanter! …
Oui, je veux vous ouvrir mon âme,
Vous saurez tout, et je veux vous conter
Le mal que peut faire une femme.(14)

Here the poem draws to a close. Such subject-matter, though of course legitimate, is far from the visionary and imaginative purpose Musset once believed essential to poetry. Once the Muse has successfully consoled the poet, the latter declares:

Maintenant, Muse, à nos amours!
Dis-moi quelque chanson des beaux jours.(15)

Musset is cheating, in pretending that the “affair” with the Muse is beginning. The affair, meaning creation, has already been exhausted.

In the Nuits cycle, the apparent theme is “love.” According to one critic, the “secret” of the Nuits poems and the Confession is Musset's “instabilité en amour”: “son impuissance d'aimer longtemps et fidèlement, d'aimer comme il faut aimer.”¹⁶ By extension and by implication the theme is also Musset's “instabilité en art.” Much attention is paid to the Poet who is weak, generally incapable of sustained creative activity. The reader tends to equate Musset himself with the Poet rather than with the Muse. But the Muse voices more clearly and directly the artistic aspirations of the true, free artist, hampered by the weakness and often invalid arguments expressed by the Poet.

Reasons for his inability to apply himself to his art, to allow his superior artistic nature to dominate his other less worthy instincts, are complex and difficult to distinguish. There is a lack of faith in society, and in French art of the 1830s. At the age of seventeen, in 1827, in a letter to his school friend, Paul Foucher, the brother-in-law of Victor Hugo, he wrote of his uneasiness and sense of futility: “Je t'écris donc pour te faire part de mes dégoûts et de mes ennuis; tu es le seul lien qui me rattache à quelque chose de remuant et de pensant; tu es la seule chose qui me réveille de mon néant et qui me reporte vers un idéal que j'ai oublié par impuissance.”¹⁷ Paul de Musset reports a conversation he had with his brother complaining of judgements made of him: “Ce reproche de paresse est une invention nouvelle qui sent d'une lieue le siècle des manufactures … Parmi ceux qui m'appellent paresseux, je voudrais savoir combien il y en a qui répètent ce qu'ils ont entendu dire, combien d'autres qui n'ont jamais lu un seul de mes vers, et qui seraient bien attrapés si on les obligeait à lire autre chose que Les Mystères de Paris. Le roman-feuilleton, voilà la vraie littérature de notre temps.”¹⁸ Quantity too easily became the yard-stick by which an established writer's reputation was maintained and enhanced. An artist who does not produce or who produces rarely, is too easily condemned for neglect of his art. Of course, in one respect, Musset is putting into the mouths of a philistine public a notion which he himself held much of his life.

If only he could apply himself regularly to his work, like a George Sand or a Balzac. Baudelaire, too, was conscious, and more honestly and lucidly so, of the therapeutic value of regular and dedicated effort: “Une nourriture très substantielle, mais régulière, est la seule chose nécessaire aux écrivains féconds. L'inspiration est décidément la sœur du travail journalier. Ces deux contraires ne s'excluent pas plus que tous les contraires qui constituent la nature. L'inspiration obéit, comme la faim; comme la digestion, comme le sommeil. Il y a sans doute dans l'esprit une espèce de mécanique céleste, dont il ne faut pas être honteux, mais tirer le parti le plus glorieux.”¹⁹ This same theme is re-expressed in a more frenzied, extreme manner towards the end of his Mon Cœur mis à nu. The difficulties in being a “part-time” writer are considerable. It is for this reason that Rimbaud has puzzled and attracted so many readers: when he finally decided to abandon literature, he did so completely.

Rolla and La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle reflect a philistine society incapable of appreciating art. Esteem for a living artist, especially a living poet, was largely diminished. Already in “Les Vœux Stériles,” published in the Revue de Paris, as early as October 1830, Musset bemoans the purposelessness and unimportance of the modern poet, in comparison with his counterpart in Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy:

Temps heureux, temps aimés. Mes mains alors peut-être,
Mes lâches mains, pour vous auraient pu s'occuper;
Mais aujourd'hui pour qui? dans quel but? sous quel maître?
L'artiste est un marchand, et l'art est un metier …(20)

For the artist of the 1830s fulfilment was possible only when, and if, the artist could translate his art into action. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo, Stendhal, Mérimée … all were, or became, in some measure, “public figures” or men of action. There was never any prospect of Musset following suit.

Heureux, trois fois heureux, l'homme dont la pensée
Peut s'écrire au tranchant du sabre et de l'épée! …
Qui que tu sois, enfant, homme, si ton cœur bat,
Agis! jette ta lyre; au combat, au combat!
Ombre des temps passés, tu n'es pas de cet âge.(21)

Like Verlaine, Musset was not generally tormented by public incomprehension; but awareness of the vast gulf separating him and those he was supposedly writing for filled him with a sense of paralysing futility. Gide was able to overcome this by addressing his works to the “lecteur de demain.” Those near to Musset were only partially and occasionally capable of understanding this feeling. Paul de Musset, forever urging his brother to write, recognized some validity in his brother's argument:

“Il m'a battu sur tous les points, qu'il a cent fois raison, que ses ennuis, son silence, ses dédains ne sont que trop justifiés, que s'il voulait les exprimer, il ferait rentrer sous terre ceux qui se mêlent de le blâmer ou de le plaindre, et que tôt ou tard, son immense supériorité sera reconnue par tout le monde.”²²

Such an explanation of his inertia can be only partially valid. Had this pretext been either completely true or completely untrue, Musset, who was basically honest, could more easily have faced up to the reality of the problem. Musset was sincere, even if idle. Believing, in 1838, that a new Golden Age was approaching for the arts, he felt fired with enthusiasm, but this was short-lived. This renascent faith is in part explained by the recent success of the Opera singer Maria Garcia (La Malibran). His enthusiasm was again roused, in 1847, when his plays were rediscovered and first produced in Paris. Despite these temporary changes of fortune, the need for an appreciative, intelligent public is not totally valid. All great writers have complained of being misunderstood. Indeed, to be misunderstood is almost a “prerequisite” of the modern writer, and certainly of the Romantic and post-Romantic poet.

Musset's disharmony with his age and contemporaries is manifested in his identification with a past society. In the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, Musset was doing little more than following a trend in giving his poems an Italian or Spanish backdrop. Nonetheless Musset already felt an attraction towards other vaguely conceived and vaguely known countries.²³ When not specifically concerned with his own problems and those of the society in which he lived, as in the Confession and Rolla, he preferred to turn to other societies in which the artist was happier, enjoying a more fruitful and appreciated existence. Paul de Musset clearly recognized this preference in his brother:

“S'il fût né dans le siècle de Louis XIV, Alfred de Musset eût été de la cour, admis dans l'intimité du Roi; il aurait eu tous les privilèges réservés alors à la noblesse et au génie … Il aurait pris une part active aux plaisirs délicats du seul souverain qui ait jamais connu le grand art de grouper autour de soi tous les talents et de les absorber au profit de sa gloire. Homme du monde par excellence il serait devenu un véritable grand seigneur.”²⁴

Politically and socially, Musset was probably unable, in 1835, to envisage such a society as a desirable alternative to the July Monarchy. Nevertheless, this does not prevent him from wishing that he had been born a century earlier, and feeling resentment that he had not been. “Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux,” he exclaims in Rolla.

Predictably, Musset liked to associate himself with people who also would have been of the court in pre-Revolutionary France. This tendency was already apparent in Musset at the age of eighteen:

“Il ne manqua pas de se lier avec des jeunes gens plus riches que lui, et de vouloir les suivre dans leur train de vie. Les premiers tailleurs de Paris eurent seuls l'honneur d'approcher de sa personne, et il leur donnait de l'occupation. Les promenades à cheval étaient à la mode parmi ses amis; il loua des chevaux. On jouait gros jeu; il joua. On faisait les nuits blanches; il veilla.”²⁵

It would be dishonest to deny an element of vanity and pretentiousness in Musset; but it is only part of the truth. The middle-class society of Musset's writings differs enormously from that of Balzac, Hugo and Sand. His society resembles more closely that of pre-Revolutionary France.

This escape in time is especially evident in his theatre, with the emphasis on Italy, and particularly Renaissance Italy. André del Sarto is set in fifteenth-century Florence; Lorenzaccio in sixteenth-century Florence; Les Caprices de Marianne in Naples at the time of Francis I; Carmosine goes further back to an earlier age, whilst La Nuit Vénitienne and Bettine are of a more contemporary, though indeterminate Italy; Fantasio and Barberine are set in a distant Munich and Hungary.²⁶ These are all places in which Musset felt that he would have been, as an artist, more in harmony with society.

It is not original to draw close parallels between Musset's heroes and his own character. One turns perhaps too readily to the anecdote, or to the second chapter of the Confession and several of the plays. The source of much of his malaise is not to be related to society but to his own character, to his “non-commitment.” At school he had been a good pupil, but for egotistical motives. Later, he was unable to pursue any course of studies: he soon abandoned Law; he gave up Medicine after his first dissection; he tried his hand at painting for which he had some talent; he held an administrative post (an “entreprise de chauffage militaire”), for ten months in 1829, which he was happy to relinquish. For ten years after 1838 he held a Librarianship at the Ministry of the Interior, which was in reality little more than a sinecure. Another librarianship at the Ministry of Public Instruction failed to materialize.

No pattern or sense of regularity was ever imposed on his life. His brother's biography of him is in parts taken up with arguments concerning broken contracts with Buloz, the director of the recently-founded Revue des Deux Mondes, to whom he had promised Contes, nouvelles and other writings. After the failure of La Nuit Vénitienne—the failure was partly brought about by technical mishaps—Musset, unable to bear such humiliation, quickly renounced writing for the theatre.

This picture of an indecisive Musset, unemployed and probably for the most part unemployable, but unable to cope with a life of leisure, is, as it were, the blueprint of all Musset's heroes, whether it be Fantasio, Rolla, Lorenzo or Perdican/Camille in On ne badine pas avec l'amour.

The second section of Rolla gives a remarkably detailed portrait of such a man. Though the anecdote is not based on Musset's personal experience, the poem takes on a vividly personal tone. Clearly influenced by Byron, Rolla is the analysis of Musset's own mal du siècle.

En sorte que Rolla, par un beau soir d'automne,
Se vit à dix-neuf ans maître de sa personne,—
Et n'ayant dans la main ni talent ni métier.
Il eût trouvé d'ailleurs tout travail impossible;
Un gagne-pain quelconque, un métier de valet,
Soulevait sur sa lèvre un rire inextinguible.
Ainsi, mordant à même au peu qu'il possédait,
Il resta grand seigneur tel que Dieu l'avait fait.(27)

Habit was a quality he despised, the mark of lower enslaved classes. He was “débauché jusques à la folie, et dans les cabarets vivant au jour le jour.” His education and position in society are incompatible with the financial means at his disposal. He decides to lead the life he prefers, not, like Valentin in “Les Deux Maîtresses,” on alternate days, but for three years; then he will commit suicide, when his fortune is exhausted. The attraction for Musset of such an anecdote lies in Rolla's dilemma: not having the means to lead the only life he can or desires to lead. Valentin has an occupation, “un avocat sans causes”—a vague profession matching Musset's equally vague profession as a writer: but Rolla had no “talent ou métier.”

The hero of Fantasio is a happier, less bitter brother of Rolla, though he has “le mois de janvier sur le cœur, … solitaire dans la foule … désireux d'être ailleurs …” Most particularly he is “affamé d'action.” In this play one sees Fantasio with his friends Spark and Hartman pleasantly whiling away their time in cafés, cabarets, like Musset who spent much of his life playing chess. Their lives are dominated by boredom, inaction and monotonous repetition:

“Quelle admirable chose que les Mille et une Nuits! O Spark, mon cher Spark, si tu pouvais me transporter en Chine! Si je pouvais seulement sortir de ma peau pendant une heure ou deux!”²⁸

They spend their time imagining new ways to occupy themselves and new ways to escape. “Remarques-tu une chose, Spark? C'est que nous n'avons point d'état; nous n'exerçons aucune profession … Il n'y a point de maître d'armes mélancolique.” Absence of a real occupation leads to introspection. “Cette ville n'est rien auprès de ma cervelle. Tous les recoins m'en sont cent fois plus connus; toutes les rues, tous les trous de mon imagination sont cent fois plus fatigués; je m'y suis promené en cent fois plus de sens, dans cette cervelle délabrée.”²⁹ When, by ruse, he becomes clown at the court of the King of Bavaria, he is happier than before. In part, he, a bourgeois de Munich, is flattered at belonging to a court with its glamour and excitement. This post too must be temporary: “J'aime ce métier plus que tout autre; mais je ne puis faire aucun métier.” Ironically when war is declared between Bavaria and the Prince of Mantua, Fantasio observes: “Eh Madame, si la guerre est déclarée, nous saurons quoi faire de nos bras; les oisifs de nos promenades mettront leurs uniformes; moi-même je prendrai mon fusil de chasse, s'il n'est pas encore vendu.”³⁰ Baudelaire, Vigny, not to mention Stendhal's Julien Sorel, were all much troubled by the vacuum left by the absence of military activity in the post-Napoleonic era. Possibly one of the reasons for the inferior quality of literature during the Revolutionary period and Napoleonic age was that men were able to achieve fulfilment in action.

Much has been said about On ne badine pas avec l'amour, its origin, and parallels have often been drawn between the hero Perdican and Musset on the one hand, and Camille and George Sand on the other. In his plays, especially in Les Caprices de Marianne, often more than one character is a projection of Musset's own character. The “pragmatic” Perdican here corresponds with the poet of the Nuits poems, and the idealist Camille with the Muse. The play is a bitter one. There is no fulfilment for the heroine and the hero proceeds along his haphazard way, from one flirtation to another. Perdican is an angrier Fantasio; of course, he is not prepared, unlike Camille, to make the sacrifice—suicide—of Rolla. Perdican has successfully completed his studies (unlike Musset); he is now, at the age of twenty-one, “Docteur à quatre boules blanches,” of the University of Paris. Perhaps, like his ludicrous father, he is destined to become some vague “homme d'état” … for six months of the year. There is no further reference to an occupation or career for Perdican. He has led a life in the capital similar to that of Musset:

“Vous avez commencé l'expérience de la vie, says Camille. Je sais quel homme vous êtes, et vous devez avoir beaucoup appris en peu de temps avec un cœur et un esprit comme les vôtres.”³¹

Camille instinctively knows that this “métier de jeune homme” is part of the process which will eventually corrupt and contaminate their relationship. Perdican and Musset have become, with experience, too cynical and scheming to be able to achieve the love so much sought by the heroine. Although On ne badine pas is essentially the story of a thwarted idealist, the heroine is thwarted not so much by the impossibility of her ideal, but because Perdican is weak.

Ever since Sarah Bernhardt played the title rôle in Lorenzaccio in 1896, critics have turned with more enthusiasm to this play then to any other of Musset's writings. It has proved the most baffling and rich in interpretations of all. Rolla, Perdican, Fantasio, Valentin and Octave are, in varying degrees, portraits of the inactive Musset. In Lorenzo Musset portrays a hero, like the others, idle, indolent, partially idealistic, but submitting himself to an easy, empty life of pleasure. All Musset's heroes have been in search of an occupation, whether they were aware of it or not. Musset now turns directly to his question.

Lorenzo was once a studious, innocent, young man who preferred his books and solitude, “un rêveur, un philosophe.” He has become ironic, scornful and strangley melancholic; he has lost faith in man, society and all progress whether social or human. The only occupation open to a distinguished member of the Medici family is at the court, where Lorenzo becomes the boon companion of his cousin Duke Alexander de' Medici.³² What is relevant to this essay is the solution which Musset attempts to put forward. The occupation (action) needed to stabilize the mind of Lorenzo, which would be of lasting effect, has here been reduced to a single act, as in Sartre's Les Mouches. This is the attempt of a lazy, weak man: Lorenzo wants to become a man of action, by committing one act. For this reason Lorenzo realizes long before he commits the deed that it will be in vain. He cannot become a man of action; indeed, far from integrating the various facets of his personality by action, and giving expression to it, the act of assassination betrays and destroys his personality. Lorenzo seeks too easy a solution: a life of action requires a continuous effort. Such a solution is no more likely to satisfy than that found by Valentin in “Les Deux Maîtresses,” and even Fantasio's temporary employment as court-clown.

What is interesting in this aspect of Lorenzaccio is that it has similarities with other of Musset's works. In “Croisilles,”³³ for example, the son of a goldsmith endeavours to recover the fortune which his industrious father has lost through no fault of his own. He immediately, and not surprisingly, turns to gambling; and when he loses all, he blames fate. Later he invests all his money in a single cargo, and of course the ship is lost at sea. The hero, like Lorenzo, seeks to achieve by one act—gambling—what normally requires time, effort and determined application.

The parallel is even more obvious in “Le Fils du Titien.”³⁴ What is significant is not the manner in which Musset transformed his relationship with Aimée d'Alton (later Madame Paul de Musset) into that of Beatrix Donato and Pomponio Tiziano. The essence of the anecdote is more relevant: the hero proves himself a painter of genius with one creation. Why should he continue?

“Alfred,” writes his brother, “ne manqua pas … de soutenir cette thèse: qu'un chef d'œuvre suffit à la gloire d'un homme, et que l'artiste de génie, quand il a prouvé une fois ce qu'il sait faire, devrait s'en tenir là et ne point s'exposer au reproche de radotage, comme il est arrivé à Corneille, au Guide et au Titien lui-même.”³⁵

Musset has tried unsuccessfully, if we pay close attention to the last lines of the work—“Il resta ainsi jusqu'à sa mort fidèle à sa paresse”—to argue that Titian's son was a great artist because he had created a great masterpiece. Nonetheless, if only he, like Emily Brontë with Wuthering Heights, could be considered an artist of genius for so little! Why should he be obliged to create so much, so often, to prove himself so frequently? Musset envied such easy fame.

Action, application, method, inspiration are all parts of the creative process. Problems of literary creation must be faced by all serious writers. Paul Verlaine even devoted occasional poems to the subject:

Ce qu'il nous fait, à nous, c'est aux lueurs des lampes,
La science conquise et le sommeil dompté,
C'est le front dans les mains du vieux Faust des estampes.
C'est l'Obstination et c'est la Volonté.(36)

André Gide used his Journaux, and Baudelaire his Journaux Intimes to voice and debate the numerous problems besetting the artist. Hugo, like other Romantics had a passion for Prefaces and Manifestos. Musset disdained these methods, preferring to incorporate his personal problems into his art.

Behind much of the writing of Musset lurks the yearning for action, meaningful action. For Sartre, literary creation is a “deed”; Musset was not really convinced. His weakness and indecision, produced in some measure by his lack of trust in contemporary art and himself, is manifested, directly and indirectly, in numerous ways: his nostalgic escape into past ages in which he felt his role as an artist would have been less demanding on him and more widely appreciated; the debate, not only on love and experience but on art and its creation, of the Nuits cycle; and it is essentially the common trait of most of his heroes. Constantly, throughout his writings, the theme of action, sustained action, and creation are worked out; but never with a lasting or effective solution.

Notes

1. Baudelaire, L'Art Romantique: Théophile Gautier, Edition de la Pléiade, 1954. Interestingly, elsewhere, Baudelaire refers to himself as a “paresseux nerveux,” p. 1028.

2. Paul de Musset, Biographie de Alfred de Musset, Alphonse Lemerre, Paris.

3. Alfred de Musset, “La Nuit de Mai,” in Poésies Nouvelles, Garnier Frères, 1962, p. 36.

4. Ibid., p. 38.

5. “La Nuit d'Août,” p. 50.

6. “La Nuit de Mai,” p. 38.

7. Ibid., p. 39.

8. Ibid., p. 40.

9. “La Nuit d'Août,” p. 49.

10. Ibid., p. 47.

11. Ibid., p. 50.

12. Ibid., p. 50.

13. “La Nuit d'Octobre,” pp. 52-3.

14. Ibid., p. 53.

15. Ibid., p. 59.

16. Alphonse Bouvet, Musset, l'amour, l'érotisme et le messianisme de la souffrance, in Revue des Sciences Humaines, April-June, 1968.

17. Alfred de Musset, Correspondance. Edited by Léon Séché. Letter to Paul Foucher, dated 23 September 1827, p. 12.

18. Paul de Musset, op. cit., p. 286.

19. Baudelaire, op. cit., p. 946.

20. Alfred de Musset, “Les Vœux Stériles,” in Premières Poésies, p. 119.

21. Ibid., p. 120.

22. Paul de Musset, op. cit., p. 290.

23. Musset had not left France before his ill-starred and over-dramatized journey to Italy with Sand in December 1833.

24. Paul de Musset, op. cit., p. 4.

25. Ibid., p. 81.

26. The other plays, contes and nouvelles tend to be embroidered anecdotes set in a contemporary Paris.

27. Rolla, in Premières Poésies, p. 6.

28. Fantasio, in Volume I, of Comédies et Proverbes, Garnier Frères, p. 238.

29. Ibid., p. 239.

30. Ibid., p. 273.

31. Ibid., On ne badine pas avec l'amour, p. 300.

32. Bernard Masson had dealt very lucidly in an article, Lorenzaccio ou la difficulté d'être, Archives des Lettres Modernes, 1962, with many psychological elements in the play. Others have elucidated what we would call the modern, existentialist implications of the work.

33. This nouvelle was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1839.

34. A conte published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in May 1838.

35. Paul de Musset, op. cit., p. 189.

36. In the second section of the Epilogue in Verlaine's Poèmes Saturniens. There is something more than topical, Parnassian sentiments in these lines.