ion for which she was as
renowned as for her tragic power, entreated him to keep it as a pledge for
the piece he was to write for her. The poet took the ring, and went home
excited and wrought up to the resolve that nothing should interfere with
the completion of his task. But it was the old story again--whims and
postponements on Rachel's part, possibly temper and pique on his--until six
months afterward, at the end of an angry conversation, he silently replaced
the ring on her hand, and she did not resist. Four years later the compact
was renewed, and although by this time De Musset had to all intents and
purposes ceased to write, he struck off the first act of a play called
_Faustina_, the scene of which was laid in Venice in the fourteenth
century; but he put off finishing it, and finally let it drop altogether.

In December, 1840, Alfred de Musset was thirty years old, and on his
birthday he had one of those reckonings with himself, which the most
deliberately careless and volatile men cannot escape. At twenty-one he had
held a similar settlement: he was then uncertain of his genius,
dissatisfied with his way of life and with the use he made of his time: the
result was his adoption of a more serious line of study and conduct, which
had led him, in spite of interruptions and aberrations, to the brilliant
display of his beautiful and splendid talents, the full exercise of his
wonderful powers. Now another review of his past and survey of his future
left him in a mood of discontent and depression. He felt that he could not
always go on being a boy. The year behind him had been almost sterile, and
marked by the loss of many of what he called his illusions. He had been
implored and urged to write by his friends and editors, had made and broken
promises without number to the latter, and had become involved in money
difficulties to a degree which kept him in constant anxiety and torment.
Yet he steadily rejected all his brother's affectionate advice and
importunities to shake off the deepening lethargy. He would not write
poetry because the Muse did not come of her free will, and he would never
do her violence. He had forsworn prose, because he said everybody wrote
that, and many so ill that he would not swell the number of magazine
story-writers, who, he foresaw, were to lower the standard of fiction and
style. In short, he always had an excuse for doing nothing, and although he
hated above all things to leave Paris, and s