. M.
Paul de Musset does not relate that his brother began to versify in his
infancy; but Alfred was indeed hardly more than an infant when he
achieved his first success. The poems published under the title of
"Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie" were composed in his eighteenth and
nineteenth years; he had but just completed his nineteenth when the
volume into which they had been gathered was put forth. There are
certainly--if one considers the quality of the poems--few more striking
examples of literary precocity. The cases of Chatterton and Keats may
be equally remarkable, but they are not more so. These first boyish
verses of Musset have a vivacity, a brilliancy, a freedom of feeling
and of fancy which may well have charmed the little _cenacle_ to which
he read them aloud--the group of litterateurs and artists which
clustered about Victor Hugo, who, although at this time very young, was
already famous. M. Paul de Musset intimates that if his brother was at
this moment (and as we may suppose, indeed, always) one of the warmest
admirers of the great author of "Hernani" and those other splendid
productions which project their violet glow across the threshold of the
literary era of 1830, and if Victor Hugo gave kindly audience to "Don
Paez" and "Mardoche," this kindness declined in proportion as the fame
of the younger poet expanded. Alfred de Musset was certainly not
fortunate in his relations with his more distinguished contemporaries.
Victor Hugo "dropped" him; it would have been better for him if George
Sand had never taken him up; and Lamartine, to whom, in the shape of a
passionate epistle, he addressed the most beautiful of his own, and one
of the most beautiful of all poems, acknowledged the compliment only
many years after it was paid. The _cenacle_ was all for Spain, for
local color, for serenades, and daggers, and Gothic arches. It was
nothing if not audacious (it was in the van of the Romantic movement),
and it was partial to what is called in France the "humoristic" as well
as to the ferociously sentimental. Musset produced a certain "Ballade a
la Lune" which began--

C'etait dans la nuit brune
Sur le clocher jauni,
La lune
Comme un point sur un i!

This assimilation of the moon suspended above a church spire to a dot
upon an _i_ became among the young Romanticists a sort of symbol of
what they should do and dare; just as in the opposite camp it became a
by-word of horror. But this was on