Alfred de Musset and the Prophetic Significance of 1830s Paris(2)

From towards the end of the 1830s, Musset wrote increasingly little, as Karen L. Taylor confirms:

 ‘After 1838, Musset seemed to lose inspiration. He […] was elected to the Académie Française in 1853, the same year that he was appointed librarian to the Ministry of Education, but he no longer wrote […]  Musset’s most creative period was during his youth and ended by 30.’[29]

 In the respect that Musset’s period of greatest glory took place during the frenetic 1830s, he was akin to other artistic legends who have ascended to pre-eminence during decades of unusual incandescence and significance, only to become indelibly associated with the epoch that made their name, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who effectively defined the Jazz Age, and The Beatles, who will forever be associated with the Swinging Sixties, even while they were unable to survive it as a functioning entity. Yet, like his close contemporary Théophile Gautier, Musset attained respectability in late middle age, receiving the Légion d’honneur in 1845, at the same time as another contemporary, Balzac, while being elected to the Académie française in 1852. He died four years later at the early age of 46 from a case - allegedly syphilitic in origin - of aortic regurgitation, thereby lending his name to one of the latter’s symptoms, which subsequently became known as ‘De Musset’s sign’:

 ‘[…] de Musset’s sign is named after the patient, not the doctor. De Musset was a French poet and novelist who died of syphilitic aortic regurgitation in 1853.’[30]

 Delicate as a child, he’d attained a powerful degree of physical soundness by his twenties; however, as recounted by Paul de Musset, his health started to decline from 1840, which marked both the year marking the end of the revolutionary 1830s, and Musset’s own thirtieth birthday (on December the 11th) and thence in a sense, the end of his youth:

 ‘His heart […] had always remained his most delicate organ. In 1840, on coming out from a ball at the Opera, he contracted an inflammation of the lungs […] once on his feet again, he continued to neglect precautions, and every winter brought relapses. Eventually, in 1844, he had another attack of inflammation of the lungs. Soon after that he showed symptoms of an affection of the aorta, and a strict regime was ordered, which he declined to follow […] In 1855, the progress of his illness became more rapid.’[31]

 His was ultimately a tragic life of what some might describe as unfulfilled promise, in despite of the fact that his reputation has ascended by degrees since his death, to the extent that he currently what Susan McCready describes as ‘the most performed playwright of the nineteenth century.’[32] She goes on to write:

 ‘Musset’s road to redemption had begun in 1847, when his Caprice, a play written in 1837, was performed at the Comedie-Francaise for the first time […] By the time Emile Fabre took the helm of the Comédie-Française in 1915, a shift in the way Musset was appreciated both as a poet and playwright was underway […] From the beginning of his tenure, Emile Fabre wished to pay homage to Musset by adding his name to the list of playwrights whose birthdays were traditionally celebrated at the Comédie. Musset was thus promoted to the select group of Moliere, Corneille, Racine and Hugo.  The canon was indeed under review.’[33]

 Moreover, both La Confession d’un enfant du siècle, and the actual events at its heart, continue to inspire creative artists, having recently birthed no less than two moving pictures in the shape of Diane Kurys’ Les Enfants du Siècle from 1999, loosely based on the real life romance between Musset and Sand, and more recently, a faithful adaptation of the novel itself by Sylvie Verheyde, featuring singer-songwriter Pete Doherty as Octave, and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Brigitte. And if anyone can rightly be called a poète maudit in the classic tradition, but within a millennial context, it is dandy-bohemian Doherty; while Charlotte Gainsbourg is the deeply gifted daughter of chanson genius Serge, himself a latter-day poète maudit of the old school.

 As to the age of his passing…it appears to be quite a common one for great poets whose flaming, beautiful youths were garlanded with the most magnificent promise imaginable, for as well as Musset, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde both died at 46, and together they might serve as a testimony to the awful truth of the brevity of even the most glorious of youths.

[1] The Poets and Poetry of Europe, intr. and biographical notices by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1871), p. 850.

[2] Francine du Plessix Gray, Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet: Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert’s Muse (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore: Simon and Schuster, 1994) p. 223.

[3] Sylvia Kahan, In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octatonic Explorer (Rochester: university of Rochester Press, 2009), p. 12.

[4] Kahan, p. 12.

[5] Tim Farrant, Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007), p. 17.

[6] Karen L. Taylor, The Facts on File Companion to the French Novel (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007), p. 276.

[7] Alfred de Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Paris: Larousse, 1900) p. 9.

[8] Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century, transl. by T.F. Rogerson (Philadelphia: George Barrie and Sons, 1899), p 15.

[9] Arnold Hauser, Social History of Art, Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 199.

[10] Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural and Historical Encyclopaedia, Volume 1: A-J, edit. by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson (Santa Barbara, Denver and Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2004) p. 122.

[11] Musset, p. 12.

[12] Rogerson, p. 20.

[13] F. W. Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period: 1788-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 165.

[14] Stokoe, p. 165.

[15] The Reception of Byron in the German-Speaking World, edit. by Richard A. Cardwell  (London and New York: Continuum, 2004) p. 245.

[16] Linda Kelly, The Young Romantics: Writers & Liaisons, Paris 1827-37 (London: Starhaven, 2005), p. 105.

[17] Alfred de Musset, The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset: Volume Two, transl. by George Santayana, Emily Shaw Forman and Marie Agathe Clarke (New York: James L. Perkins and Company, 1908), p. 3.

[18] Paul de Musset, The biography of Alfred de Musset, transl. by Harriet W. Preston (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877), p. 2.

[19] Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 21.

[20] Alfred de Musset, Poésies nouvelles (Paris: Charpentier, 1857), p. 15.

[21] Musset, The Complete Writings, p. 21.

[22] Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 47.

[23] Christian Theological Tradition, edit. by Catherine A. Cory and Michael J. Hollerich (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 384.

[24] Craig A. Lockard, Societies, Networks and Transitions: A Global History (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008), p. 868.

[25] Maria Filomena Monica, Eca de Queiroz, p. 311.

[26] Anthony Adams and Witold Tulasiewicz, The Crisis in Teacher Education: A European Concern? (), p. 20.

[27] Germaine Mason, A Concise Survey of French Literature (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), p. 176.

[28] Felicia Hardison-Londré, The History of World-Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1999), p. 241.

[29] Taylor, p. 276.

[30] Oxford Handbook of Clinical Examination and Practical Skills, edit. by James Thomas and Tanya Monaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 131.

[31]Alfred de Musset, The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset: Volume Ten, transl. by Mary W. Artois and Francis A. Schneider (New York: James L. Perkins and Company, 1908 ), p. 72-73.

[32] Susan McCready, Staging France Between the World Wars: Performance, Politics and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon (Lanham, Boulder, New York, London, Lexington Books, 2016) p. 103.

[33] McCready, pps 103-104.