At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in Italy. The hours of illusion were followed by months of despair. He knew suffering, not through the imagination, but in his own experience. After a time calm gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue of the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivolously despairing and elegantly corrupt. In _Les Nuits_--two of these (_Mai_, _Octobre_) inspired by the Italian joy and pain--he speaks simply and directly from the heart in accents of penetrating power. Solitude, his constant friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love, shall be his consolers-- "_Apres avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore; Il faut aimer sans cesse, apres avoir aime._" Musset's powers had matured through suffering; the _Lettre a Lamartine_, the _Espoir en Dieu_, the _Souvenir_, the elegy _A la Malibran_, the later stanzas _Apres une Lecture_ (1842), are masterpieces of the true Musset--the Musset who will live. At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind; but the years were years of lassitude. His patriotic song, _Le Rhin Allemand_, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received him. "Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academician; the ungracious reply, "Il s'absinthe trop," told the truth, and it was a piteous decline. In 1857, attended by the pious Sister Marceline, Musset died. Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty, intelligence, _esprit_, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse--these were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructive imagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of an artist's passion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, has borne the lapse of time ill. "J'y ai vomi la verite," he said. It is not the happiest way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis-Quinze boudoir. _Pierre et Camille_, with its deaf-and-dumb lovers, and their baby, who babbles in the presence of the relenting grandfather "Bonjour, papa," has a pretty innocence. _Le Fils de Titien_ returns to the theme of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence. _Frederic et Bernerette_ and _Mimi Pinson_ may be said to have created the poetic literature of the grisette--gay and good, or erring and despairful--making a flower of what had blossomed in the stories of Paul de Kock as a weed.