Project Gutenberg's Child of a Century, Complete, by Alfred de Musset

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Title: Child of a Century, Complete

Author: Alfred de Musset

Last Updated: March 3, 2009
Release Date: October 5, 2006 [EBook #3942]

Language: English

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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILD OF A CENTURY, COMPLETE ***

Produced by David Widger

CONFESSION OF A CHILD OF THE CENTURY

(Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle)

By ALFRED DE MUSSET

With a Preface by HENRI DE BORNIER, of the French Academy

ALFRED DE MUSSET

A poet has no right to play fast and loose with his genius. It does not
belong to him, it belongs to the Almighty; it belongs to the world and
to a coming generation. At thirty De Musset was already an old man,
seeking in artificial stimuli the youth that would not spring again.
Coming from a literary family the zeal of his house had eaten him up;
his passion had burned itself out and his heart with it. He had done
his work; it mattered little to him or to literature whether the curtain
fell on his life's drama in 1841 or in 1857.

Alfred de Musset, by virtue of his genial, ironical temperament,
eminently clear brain, and undying achievements, belongs to the great
poets of the ages. We to-day do not approve the timbre of his epoch:
that impertinent, somewhat irritant mask, that redundant rhetoric, that
occasional disdain for the metre. Yet he remains the greatest poete
de l'amour, the most spontaneous, the most sincere, the most emotional
singer of the tender passion that modern times has produced.

Born of noble parentage on December 11, 1810--his full name being Louis
Charles Alfred de Musset--the son of De Musset-Pathai, he received his
education at the College Henri IV, where, among others, the Duke of
Orleans was his schoolmate. When only eighteen he was introduced
into the Romantic 'cenacle' at Nodier's. His first work, 'Les Contes
d'Espagne et d'Italie' (1829), shows reckless daring in the choice of
subjects quite in the spirit of Le Sage, with a dash of the dandified
impertinence that mocked the foibles of the old Romanticists. However,
he presently abandoned this style for the more subjective strain of 'Le