MUSSET, ALFRED de. - French Romantic poet, b. 11 Dec. 1810 in Paris, d. there 1 May 1857. He identified love as the ideal of life and of poetry and, lacking interest in any other problem, even in the face of the religious one he displayed an absent-mindedness that at times, under various influences, gave way to verbal panegyric participation.
In 1830 he published the Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie which, alongside a conventional Spain and Italy, present a break with classical prescriptivism in the use of language and meter and a rebellion against traditional Christian morality. From 1833 date: his second volume of verse Un spectacle dans un fauteuil; André del Sarto; Fantasia; Les caprices de Marianne (prose comedies). They give the measure of his dramatic talent: Lorenzaccio (1834) and On ne badine pas avec l'amour (1834). In the other prose comedies La quenouille de Barberine (1835) and Il ne faut jurer de rien (1836), the Romantic element is tempered by grace, and the keen humor and vivacity that form the beauty of Musset's comedies, among which Le chandelier (1835) is perfect. The novel Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836), which reflects M.'s stormy love affair with George Sand, is centered on the "Romantic malady" already outlined in the short poem Rolla (1835). The prose tales and novellas are valuable for their profound humanity and easygoing form. M.'s poetry, even if fluent, is generally stifled by emphasis and rhetoric, but in the great compositions such as La lettre à Lamartine (1836), the Nuits (1835-37), the very beautiful Souvenir (1841) the poet reaches moments of passionate lyricism, and on the other hand his art also manifests itself in light poems such as Le lever (1829), Madame la Marquise (1829), La chanson de Barberine (1836), Rondeau (1842) where fantasy, tenderness and jest intertwine harmoniously.