Read his masked self-revelation in _Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle_. He tells how he was born at an unlucky moment. Everything was dead. Napoleon's day was past, and, as if there could be no glory except the glory of the Empire, we are told that the days of glory were at an end. Faith was dead. There was no longer even such a thing as two little pieces of black wood in the form of a cross before which one could devoutly fold one's hands; and therefore, as if there could be neither heart nor soul in those who are not attached to Catholic symbolism, we are told that soul was dead. Some who comprehended that the day of glory was past, proclaimed from the rostrum that liberty was a finer thing even than glory, and at these words the hearts of the youthful audience began to beat, as with a distant, terrible remembrance. "But on their way home these youths met a procession carrying three baskets to Clamart, and in the baskets they saw the corpses of three young men who had been too loud in their praises of liberty;" and, as if callous despair were the only mental attitude which the death of martyrs can produce, we are told that their lips curled with a strange smile, and that they forthwith plunged headlong into the maddest dissipation. Such is the basis, the underlying idea, of a whole series of the cleverest masculine characters drawn by De Musset, that remarkable creation Lorenzaccio among the number. In his youth it produced Rolla, the most famous of his typical characters. In none of De Musset's works does the unstable, vacillating, feminine quality in his philosophy display itself more markedly than in _Rolla_. The introduction opens with the well-known wail of longing for the Greece of old with its freshness and beauty, and for the Christendom of old, with its pure aspiration and fervent faith, for the days when the cathedrals of Cologne and Strasburg, of Notre-Dame and St. Peter, knelt devoutly in their mantles of stone and the great organ of the nations pealed forth the hosanna of the centuries. Upon this follows the still more famous passage: