Octave in _Les Caprices de Marianne_ is a frivolous and in many ways depraved young man, who neither will nor can love any woman seriously. He declares that he disdains to spend more time on the conquest of a woman than it takes him to break the seal on his bottle of Grecian wine. But in one relation, that of friendship, he is as simple-hearted and trusting as a boy. He loves his friend, young Cœlio, with such ardour that he is ready to die for him or to revenge his death, with such fidelity that he scornfully rejects the favour of the lady whom Cœlio vainly worships. He is an ideal friend. A striking contrast to him is Cœlio, a character in whom De Musset, who in this drama divided his own personality, represented the other half of his nature. Cœlio is the youthful lover, whose love is a longing adoration, a passion so melancholy in its ardour that it will kill him if it remain unsatisfied. A halo of Shakespearean romance surrounds his head, his words are music, his hopes poetry. He describes himself in the words: "Il me manque le repos, la douce insouciance qui fait de la vie un miroir où tous les objets se peignent un instant et sur lequel tout glisse. Une dette pour moi est un remords. L'amour, dont vous autres vous faites un passe-temps, trouble ma vie entière." We feel in these male characters how De Musset is maturing as an author. His desire is no longer only to delineate the seething instincts of youth, or the wild play of the passions with its accompaniment of deceit, treachery, and violence; he dwells long and with predilection on the innocent and deep feeling which is only made guilty by outward circumstances, on the love which in reality is pure, and which appears criminal only because it is an infraction of social laws, on the friendship which in its essence is heroic devotion, even when it assumes the degrading form of eloquent panderage--in short upon friendship and love in their purity, on those forces in human life which we are wont to call ideal.