And he! His was in a far higher degree the artistic temperament. His work was a fever, his sleep was restless, his impulses and passions were uncontrollable. When he conceived an idea he did not sit brooding over it silent and sphinx-like as she did; he was overpowered and trembled, "plus étourdi qu'un page amoureux d'une fée," to quote an expression of his own. And when he seated himself at his desk to work out his idea he was constantly tempted to throw away his pen in despair. The process was so slow; the thoughts came crowding, demanding instant expression; violent palpitation of the heart was the result; and if the smallest temptation presented itself--an invitation to sup with friends and beautiful women, or a proposal to make a country excursion--he fled from his work as men flee from an enemy. She "knitted" her novels; he wrote his works in a brief, burning, blissful ecstasy which gave place on the following day to disgust with what he had written. He thought it bad, and yet was incapable of re-writing it, for he hated his pen as the galley-slave hates his oar. In spite of all his youthful arrogance he writhed and moaned as if in constant anguish, and the reason was that within his slender, pliant frame dwelt a giant of an artist, who felt more deeply and strongly and lived harder and faster than the man in whom he was incorporate could bear, and who conceived greater ideas than the brain which was his organ could bring into the world without the most distressful birth-throes. When the poet flung himself into every kind of dissipation, it was chiefly from the need of deadening the suffering that his genius caused him. He, the youth of two-and-twenty, the spoiled son of aristocratic parents, living at home, protected by a brother's vigilant affection, and with no real experience except of a few love affairs, had the knowledge of life, the suspiciousness, the bitterness, the misanthropy of a man of forty; and where his knowledge was insufficient, he eked it out with assumed indifference and cynicism. She, the woman of twenty-eight, with Bohemian and royal blood in her veins (she was a great-granddaughter of Maurice of Saxony), with the gravest experiences of life behind her, now without family, fortune, home, or the support of any male relative, separated from her little children, reduced to elective affinities, leading the life of the literary Bohemian, bearing a man's name, wearing male attire, and living like a man among men, was, nevertheless, in the depths of her soul, naïve, passionless, enthusiastic, tender-hearted, and as eagerly receptive of everything new as if she had had no experiences to speak of, and had never been disillusioned. He, so original in his art, so irregular in his life, was, nevertheless, in many ways narrow-minded. We men easily become so, especially those of us who, like De Musset, are born in a good position and learn early to reverence custom and to dread ridicule.