"Aujourd'hui l'art n'est plus--personne n'y veut croire. Notre littérature a cent mille raisons Pour parler de noyés, de morts, et de guenilles. Elle-même est un mort que nous galvanisons. Elle entend son affaire en nous peignant des filles, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elle-même en est une et la plus délabrée Qui de fard et d'onguents se soit jamais plâtrée." This attack upon the fantastic immorality of the ultra-Romantic literary productions was so youthfully, recklessly sweeping that it seemed to be made upon the whole of contemporary literature. And it was possibly not purely an accident that it was written the same year in which _Marion Delorme_ was published, that drama which with all its faults is most chaste and spiritual in conception, but which undeniably has a courtesan for its heroine. De Musset at the same time showed plainly that he was becoming ever more and more indifferent to youthful ideals. Almost all the poets of the young school, headed by Hugo, sided with struggling Greece; Alfred de Musset wrote admiringly of his Mardoche that "he had a greater regard for the Porte and Sultan Mahmoud than for the worthy Hellenic nation now staining the white marble of Paros with its blood." What was the cause of this indifference and supercilious world-weariness? Blood that was much too hot; a too passionate heart too early disappointed. In his first youth De Musset's faith in his fellow-men had been irreparably shaken, and distrust engendered bitterness and scorn. It is useless to seek the origin of his dark view of life in any single event, though he himself believed that it was to be accounted for by the fact, to which he constantly alludes, that he was betrayed in his early youth by a mistress and a friend. It was no doubt a severe blow to a youth of his honourable, truthful character to find himself thus deceived; but it is also certain that, whilst the wound was still fresh, he examined it through the poetic magnifying glass and made literary capital of it. It was the fashion to have love woes and to succeed in consoling one's self. But De Musset suffered more than many who read his wanton youthful effusions are apt to imagine. To conceal his sensitiveness, to evade the satire of cynics, he for a time affected extreme coldness and hardness. Such affected cynicism makes as unpleasant an impression as any other affectation. Taine wrote a famous essay on De Musset, the admiration in which is as blind as it is touching; it culminates in the exclamation: This man at least never lied! Unless we consider assumed superciliousness and cold-heartedness truthful, we can scarcely endorse the assertion. But a turning-point in the spoilt, arrogant young man's life was at hand.