In his last plays De Musset exalted the feminine fidelity and purity in which he believed, though it had not fallen to his lot to find them. In _Barberine_ the idea of which he took from an old legend, he had already depicted an ideally faithful wife of the type of Shakespeare's _Imogen_. But the play was an uninteresting one. The heroines of the last two he writes are wonderfully beautiful creations. In the little masterpiece, _Bettine_, he has, apparently with the greatest ease, accomplished one of the most difficult tasks for a delineator of character. Bettine enters, and she has not spoken three or four times before we feel that we are in the presence of a strong, brave, tender-hearted, noble-minded woman; and we are conscious of more than this, for we feel certain that she is a woman of parts, an artist, accustomed to triumph, accustomed to feel herself intellectually superior to her surroundings; and to pay little heed to petty conventionalities. It is her wedding morning. She comes singing on to the stage, where the notary is waiting, goes straight up to him, and to his astonishment addresses him as _thou_: "Ah! te voilà, notaire, ô cher notaire, mon cher ami! As-tu tes paperasses?" His official dignity has so little existence for her that she has no hesitation in letting him see her delight because it is her wedding-day. The kindly happiness of her nature overflows on every occasion. She is not brilliant like the aristocratic woman of the world, but frank, large-minded, confident, like the true artist; and her healthy human nature affects us the more pleasantly from being seen against the background of that moral corruption which is represented by her cold and exacting bridegroom. The beautiful little drama, _Carmosine_ the idea of which is taken from a tale of Boccaccio, is intended to show how a strong, ardent, worshipful love, which outward circumstances separate from its object, can be cured by magnanimous kindness and tenderness. Carmosine, a young girl of the middle class, loves King Pedro of Arragon with a hopeless, consuming passion; this feeling makes it impossible for her to give her hand to her faithful and sorrowing adorer, Perillo. She determines to suffer silently and die. But the playfellow of her childhood, Minuccio the singer, is led by his compassion for her to tell the King and Queen of her love. Far from being indignant, the Queen goes to her in disguise and gradually alleviates her suffering with sisterly and queenly words. She tells her that a love so deep and great is too beautiful a thing to be torn out of the heart, and that the Queen herself wishes her to be made one of her ladies-in-waiting, so that she may see the King every day--because such a love, born of the soul's aspiration after the highest, ennobles: