Such a lack-lustre rule as Louis Philippe's could not but be abhorrent to De Musset. His haughty, wildly defiant answer to Becker's _Rheinlied_, points to lyric possibilities in him which might have developed under other political conditions. As things were, he felt himself restricted to being the poet of youth and love; and when youth was past he was incapable of reviving his powers. His virtues were as fatal to him as his vices. Proud and distinguished, he had not a trace of the ambition which leads a man to husband his intellectual resources, not an atom of the desire of gain which compels to industry, or of the egotism which makes the writer attribute supreme importance to his own work. He lived his life with such greedy haste that at forty he was as exhausted as a man of seventy, without having attained to either composure or wisdom. His premature physical exhaustion brought intellectual exhaustion in its train. He was destitute of that higher instinct which compels the author to live altogether for his art, and he had not a trace of the social or political instinct which bends the productive mind to the yoke of duty to others. He was so incapable of self-control that the slightest temptation proved irresistible. His life became as absolutely aimless as his art was; there was no cause he desired to advance, nothing that he was determined at any cost to say; and his character was too uncontrollable, too little reflective, for self-development, as Goethe understood it, to be the aim which rendered all others superfluous. When Alfred de Musset died in 1857, his creative capacity had been extinct for several years. [1] His tour in Italy with George Sand lasted from December 1833 to April 1834. In 1834 he wrote _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_ and _Lorenzaccio_; in 1835 _Barberine_ (his most insignificant play), _Le Chandelier, Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle_, and _La Nuit de Mai_; in 1836 _Emmeline_ and _Il ne faut jurer de rien_; in 1837 _Un Caprice, Les deux Maîtresses_, and _Frédéric et Bernerette_; in 1838 _Le Fils du Titien. Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermée_ was written in 1845, _Bettine_ in 1851, _Carmosine_ in 1852. XI GEORGE SAND