rent, in "Elle et Lui," is
a sufficiently vivid portrait of a highly endowed, but hopelessly
petulant, unreasonable, and dissipated egotist. We are far from
suspecting that the portrait is perfectly exact; no portrait by George
Sand is perfectly exact. Whatever point of view she takes, she always
abounds too much in her own sense. But it evidently has a tolerably
solid foundation in fact. Herr Lindau holds that Alfred de Musset's
life was literally blighted by the grief that he suffered in Italy, and
that the rest of his career was a long, erratic, unprofitable effort to
drown the recollection of it. Our own inclination would be to judge him
at once with more and with less indulgence. Whether deservedly or no,
there is no doubt that his suffering was great; his brother quotes a
passage from a document written five years after the event, in which
Alfred affirms that, on his return to Paris, he spent four months shut
up in his room in incessant tears--tears interrupted only by a
"mechanical" game of chess in the evening. But Musset, like all poets,
was essentially a creature of impression; as with all poets, his
sentimental faculty needed constantly to renew itself. He found his
account in sorrow, or at least in emotion, and we may say, in differing
from Herr Lindau, that he was not a man to let a grievance grow stale.
To feel permanently the need of smothering sorrow is in a certain sense
to be sobered by it. Musset was never sobered (a cynical commentator
would say he was never sober). Emotions bloomed again lightly and
brilliantly on the very stem on which others had withered. After the
catastrophe at times his imagination saved him, distinctly, from
permanent depression; and on a different line, this same imagination
helped him into dissipation.

M. Paul de Musset mentions that in 1837 his brother conceived a
"passion serieuse" for an attractive young lady, and that the _liaison_
lasted two years--"two years during which there was never a quarrel, a
storm, a cooling-off; never a pretext for umbrage or jealousy. This is
why," he adds, "there is nothing to be told of them. Two years of love
without a cloud cannot be narrated." It is noticeable that this is the
third "passion serieuse" that M. Paul de Musset alludes to since the
dolorous weeks which followed the return from Venice. Shortly after
this period another passion had come to the front; a passion which,
like that which led him to Italy, was destined to have a tr