Whilst he was bringing out these charming stories, which are as delicate as if they had been written upon flower petals, De Musset also wrote a few short plays, in which love appears as the terrible force with which man cannot trifle, as the fire with which he cannot play, as the electric flash which kills; and one or two others in which the wit of the aristocratic man of the world sparkles in the tissue of the soulful, highly emotional style.[1] Of these little plays, _Un Caprice_ is the most finished and has the most sparkling dialogue. Not without reason is it included among the works the names of which are carved upon De Musset's tombstone in Père-Lachaise. In this play the erotic caprice, the momentary infatuation, is made to yield to the discipline of marriage. The man in this case is frivolous and untrustworthy; the women, who join forces, have their hearts in the right place, and one of them has, besides, all the charm of high-bred cleverness. Madame de Léry is a _Parisienne_. And no one drew the _Parisienne_ of that day with such genius as De Musset. He stood on the same plane with her. She is the genuine fine lady, but also the genuine woman. The beautiful thing about this character is that in it we see unadulterated, genuine, fresh nature piercing through the extremest refinement of fashionable life--nature, in spite of all the sparkling and tinselly cleverness and all the premature experience and the ennui resulting therefrom; nature even in dissimulation, nature even in the little comedy which Madame de Léry is woman and actress enough to play. "Oh! how true it is," exclaims Goethe in one of his letters, "that nothing is wonderful except the natural, nothing great except the natural, nothing beautiful except the natural, nothing &c., &c.!" In the gay, supercilious, society art of this creation of De Musset's, nature is preserved. The idea underlying _Un Caprice_ is a moral idea. But whereas many writers represent and conceive of love as something so firm and solid that it can be taken hold of and deposited here or there as if it were a piece of granite rock, to De Musset, even when he is most moral, it is always only the most delicately powerful, and consequently most volatile essence of life. At its full strength it can kill, but it can also evaporate.