roidered pen and a piece of her knitting were buried with
him by almost his last request.

Seventeen years! a large bit of any one's life--more than a third of Alfred
de Musset's own term--yet there is hardly anything to say about it. The
"Souvenir," which was written about six months after his recovery, is the
last poem in which all his strength, beauty and pathos find expression: he
never wrote again in this vein: it was the last echo of his youth. He
composed less and less frequently, and though what he wrote was redolent of
sentiment, wit, grace and elegance, and some of the short occasional verses
have a consummate charm of finish, the soul seems gone out of his poetry.
His brother mentions a number of compositions begun, but thrown aside;
there were projects of travel never carried out; he gradually gave up the
society of even his oldest friends: everything indicated a rapid decline of
the active faculties. Unhappily, that of suffering seemed only to
increase--no longer the sharp anguish of unspent force which had wrung from
him the passionate cries and plaintive murmurs of former years, but the
dull numbness of hopelessness. His existence was monotonous, and the few
occurrences which varied it were of a sad or unpleasant nature. His sister
married and left Paris, and his mother subsequently went to live with her
in the country, thus breaking up their family circle; Paul de Musset was
absent from France for considerable spaces of time, so that for the first
time Alfred de Musset was compelled to live alone. Friends scattered, some
died: the Orleans family, for whom he had a real affection, was driven from
France; he fancied that his genius was unappreciated--a notion which,
strangely enough, his brother shared--and although he was the last man to
rage or mope over misapprehension, the idea certainly added to his gloom.
Through the good graces of the duke of Orleans he had been appointed
librarian of the Home Office, a post of which he was instantly deprived on
the change of government; but a few years later he was unexpectedly given a
similar one in the Department of Public Education. In 1852 he was elected
to the French Academy, that honor so limited by the small number of
members, so ridiculed by unsuccessful aspirants, yet without which no
French author feels his career to be complete. His plays were being
performed with great favor, his poems and tales were becoming more and more
popular, his verses were set to