of music from his young
sister's piano, a game of chess with his mother in the evening, were his
only recreations--his only excitement the letters which still came from
Venice, for which he looked with a sick longing, at which one cannot wonder
on reading them and remembering what a companionship it was that he had
lost. Urged by his brother and his friend M. Buloz, the director of the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, to try the efficacy of work, he completed his play
of _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_, already sketched, in which, of all his
dramatic writings, the cry of the heart is most thrilling. Aided by this
effort, he made a journey to Baden in September, five months after his
miserable return to Paris. The change of air and scene restored him, and
his votive offering for the success of his pilgrimage was the charming poem
called "Une Bonne Fortune." Although he had determined not to see Madame
Sand again, their connection was renewed, in spite of himself, when she
came back from Italy: it lasted for a short period, full of angry and
melancholy scenes, quarrels and reconciliations. Then he broke loose for
ever, and went back to the world and his work.

This episode, of which I have briefly given the outline, was the principal
event of Alfred de Musset's life, the one which marked and colored it most
deeply, which brought his genius to perfection by a cruel and fiery
torture, and left a lasting imprint upon his writings. Although he never
produced anything finer than certain passages of "Rolla," which was
published in 1833, yet previous to that--or more accurately to 1835, when
he began to write again--he had composed no long poem of equal merit
throughout, none in which the flight was sustained from first to last. The
magnificent series of the "Nights" of May, December, August and October,
the "Letter to Lamartine," "Stanzas on the Death of Malibran," "Hope in
God," and a number of others of not less melody and vigor, but less exalted
and serious in tone; several plays, among them _Lorenzaccio_, which missed
only by a very little being a fine tragedy; the greater part of his prose
tales and criticisms, including _Le Fils de Titien_, the most charming of
his stories, and the _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, which shows as
much genius as any of his poems,--belong to the period from 1835 to 1840,
his apogee. Of the last work, notwithstanding its unmistakable personal
revelations--which, if they do not tell the author's stor