The middle of the nineteenth century was a hard time for generous-minded and idealistic poets in France. The great revolution had failed, it failed again in 1830 and in 1848, and cruelty and greed and corruption seemed to be the final destiny of civilization. A few strong spirits kept the faith, but the weaker ones drifted away and drowned their sorrows in debauchery and drink. Alfred de Musset was one of these latter, a beautiful and charming youth, gifted with all the graces of life and with the magic fire of genius. He has told his own sad story in a book, “The Confessions of a Child of His Age.” Most of the strong and healthy men of France had been killed off in the Napoleonic wars, and the new generation were the children of weaklings. They drifted aimlessly, having luxury but no duties, and no vision or ideal to inspire them. Musset was born in 1810, of a well-to-do and cultured family. He was impressionable, sensitive, and in the beginning plunged with ardor into the poetical movement headed by Hugo. But soon he lost interest, and gave himself to amorous adventures and to mournful self-pity, an elegant young Byron of the boulevards. It was a time when a poet could make a national reputation by comparing the moon above a church-steeple to a dot on the letter i. Musset, from the beginning to the end of his short life, had no experience of any sort except sexuality, alcohol, and the poetry of men who likewise had no other experience. At the age of twenty-three he met George Sand, a woman of thirty who had run away from her family and was supporting herself as a free-lance novelist. She carried the young poet off to Italy, but their dream of love broke up in a quarrel, and poor Musset had brain fever, and came home, and sat all day in his room for four months, so his brother tells us, doing nothing but crying, except when he played chess. But at the end of the four months he went out and found another love, and then another and another. Any woman would do, according to his philosophy, poetically set forth in an exquisite verse: “What matters the flagon, provided one is drunk?”