Byron’s Don Juan is at times exotic in his tastes, but, as I have said, he is not on the whole very nympholeptic--much less so than the Don Juan of Alfred de Musset, for example. Musset indeed suggests in many respects a less masculine Byron--Mademoiselle Byron as he has been called. In one whole side of his art as well as his treatment of love he simply continues like Byron the eighteenth century. But far more than Byron he aspires to ideal and absolute passion; so that the Musset of the “Nuits” is rightly regarded as one of the supreme embodiments, and at the same time the chief martyr, of the romantic religion of love. The outcome of his affair with George Sand may symbolize fitly the wrecking of thousands of more obscure lives by this mortal chimera. Musset and George Sand sought to come together, yet what they each sought in love is what the original genius seeks in all things--self-expression. What Musset saw in George Sand was not the real woman but only his own dream. But George Sand was not content thus to reflect back passively to Musset his ideal. She was rather a Galatea whose ambition it was to create her own Pygmalion. “Your chimera is between us,” Musset exclaims; but his chimera was between them too. The more Titan and Titaness try to meet, the more each is driven back into the solitude of his own ego. They were in love with love rather than with one another: and to be thus in love with love means on the last analysis to be in love with one’s own emotions. “To love,” says Musset, “is the great point. What matters the mistress? What matters the flagon provided one have the intoxication?”[162] He then proceeds to carry a love of this quality up into the presence of God and to present it to him as his justification for having lived. The art of speaking in tones of religious consecration of what is in its essence egoistic has never been carried further than by the Rousseauistic romanticist. God is always appearing at the most unexpected moments.[163] The highest of which man is capable apparently is to put an uncurbed imagination into the service of an emancipated temperament. The credo that Perdican recites at the end of the second act of “On ne badine pas avec l’Amour”[164] throws light on this point. Men and women according to this credo are filled with every manner of vileness, yet there is something “sacred and sublime,” and that is the union of two of these despicable beings. The confusion of ethical values here is so palpable as scarcely to call for comment. It is precisely when men and women set out to love with this degree of imaginative and emotional unrestraint that they come to deserve all the opprobrious epithets Musset heaps upon them. This radiant apotheosis of love and the quagmire in which it actually lands one is, as I have said, the whole subject of “Madame Bovary.” I shall need to return to this particular disproportion between the ideal and the real when I take up the subject of romantic melancholy.