Alfred de Musset had at a still earlier date entertained himself by publishing abroad his defection. A man of such masterly and refined intellect could not be blind to the narrowness and imperfections of the doctrines of the school, still less to the childishness with which they were pushed to extremes by certain Hotspurs among its adherents. When he read aloud his poems for the first time in Hugo's house to an assembly of young Romanticists, only two passages were applauded. The one was the sentence in _Don Paez_: "Frères, cria de loin un dragon jaune et bleu qui dormait dans du foin." The "yellow and blue" enraptured them; it was what they called colour in style. The other passage was in the description of the huntsmen in "Le lever": a Et sur leur manches vertes les pieds noirs des faucons." This elementary colour seemed of more value to the youthful audience than all the emotion, passion, and wit of the poems. For it was delineation such as this which distinguished them from the men of the old school, to whom it was only of importance that their readers should learn what happened, not what things were like. To these young men the all-important matter was that for De Musset the visible world existed; but it could not be the most important matter to De Musset himself, whose forte lay in a perfectly different direction, and who felt no desire to compete with Hugo or Théophile Gautier. De Musset was, moreover, above everything else a young aristocrat, the fashionable man of the world who amused himself with literature in his leisure moments. He had no inclination for the companionship of long-haired poets in Calabrian headgear. His earliest relations with the public had been of a somewhat uncertain description. He had tried to astonish and provoke it. Now it met him in the most cordial manner, ready, if he would only adopt another attitude towards it, to forgive him everything, even the ballad to the moon. And De Musset, eager to prove his independence, indifferent to parties, averse to dogma, in reality (as his spiritual kinship with Mathurin Régnier and Marivaux shows) classically inclined, yielded to a certain extent to the vague pressure. He captivated the reading world by the air of whimsical superciliousness with which he now wrote of his own and his late comrades' warlike deeds. In his poem, "Les secrètes Pensées de Rafaël, Gentilhomme français," he declares himself weary of the strife; he has, he says, fought on both sides; hundreds of scars have given him a venerable appearance, and he now--at the age of twenty-one--sits like a worn veteran upon his torn drum. Racine and Shakespeare meet upon his table and fall asleep there beside Boileau, who has forgiven them both. In another poem he writes: