ce announced that there was "a boy full
of genius among them," and as long as he lived, whatever Paul de Musset's
fraternal sensitiveness may find to complain of, he never retracted or
qualified that first judgment. The _Contes d'Italie et d'Espagne_ followed
fast, and were recited to an enthusiastic audience, who were the more
lenient to the exaggerations and affectations of which, as in most youthful
poetry, there were plenty, since these bore the stamp of their own mint.

Alfred de Musset's first steps in life were made at the same time with his
first essays in poetry. He was so handsome, high-spirited and gay that
women did not wait to hear that he was a genius to smile upon him. His
brother, who is tall, calls him of medium height, five feet four inches
(about five feet nine, English measure), slender, well-made and of good
carriage: his eyes were blue and full of fire; his nose was aquiline, like
the portraits of Vandyke; his profile was slightly equine in type: the
chief beauty of his face was his forehead, round which clustered the
many-shaded masses of his fair hair, which never turned gray: the
countenance was mobile, animated and sensitive; the predominating
expression was pride. Paul relates without reserve how one married woman
encouraged his brother and trifled with him, using his devotion to screen a
real intrigue which she was carrying on, and that another, who was lying in
wait for him, undertook his consolation. One morning Alfred made his
appearance in spurs, with his hat very much on one side and a huge bunch of
hair on the other, by which signs his brother understood that his vanity
was satisfied. He was just eighteen. That a man of respectable life and
notions like Paul de Musset should take these adventures as a matter of
course makes it difficult for an American to find the point of view whence
to judge a society so abominably corrupt. Thus at the age of a college-boy
in this country he was started on the career which was destined to lead to
so much unhappiness, and in the end to his destruction. Dissipation of
every sort followed, debts, from which he was never free, and the habit of
drinking, which proved fatal at last. To the advice and warnings of his
brother he only replied that he wished to know everything by experience,
not by hearsay--that he felt within him two men, one an actor, the other a
spectator, and if the former did a foolish thing the latter profited by it.
On this pernicious reas