Alfred de Musset

Alfred de Musset (Paris, 1810 – Paris, 1857) was one of the most distinctive voices of French Romanticism. Born into an aristocratic family whose fortune had dwindled, he wrote poetry, plays and fiction in French, and his work combines lyrical feeling, wit and a sharp sense of his own contradictions. He matters because he gave a voice to the melancholy and restlessness of his generation, and because his light, ironic theatre has outlasted many of its contemporaries.

Musset grew up in a household where money was short and his father, though he held important government posts, did little to support his son. His mother hosted gatherings that shaped the boy's taste for society and conversation, and as a child he enjoyed improvising small plays based on old romance tales. He entered the Lycée Henri-IV at nine and won a Latin essay prize in the Concours général in 1827. Through Paul Foucher, Victor Hugo's brother-in-law, he began to frequent the Cénacle and the salon of Charles Nodier at the Arsenal library. He tried medicine, law, drawing, English and the piano, but settled on none of them.

He became one of the first writers to embrace the Romantic style, publishing his Tales of Spain and Italy in 1829. His early years were marked by a dissipated life, with bouts of depression and heavy drinking and opium use, which fed a scandalous reputation that he cultivated with a dandy's flair. Between 1833 and 1835 he had a passionate affair with the novelist George Sand. He later told the story from his own side in the semi-autobiographical novel The Confession of a Child of the Century (1836), while Sand answered with her own account.

His output ranges across poetry, theatre and prose. His verse mixes emotion and irony, as in the Nights and in Rolla. For the stage he wrote short, sparkling comedies such as Fantasio and Lorenzaccio, whose debts to Marivaux, Marmontel and Beaumarchais are clear, yet which carry a mischievous, spontaneous grace all his own. He also wrote short stories, gathered in several collections.

He worked as a librarian at the Ministry of the Interior and later at the Ministry of Public Instruction, posts he lost and regained with shifting politics. He received the Légion d'honneur in 1845 and was elected to the Académie française in 1852. He died in Paris in 1857, his health undermined by years of excess and by a heart condition.

His legacy lives on chiefly in music and in the theatre. His drama La Coupe et les lèvres provided the basis for Giacomo Puccini's opera Edgar, and many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers set his poems. His plays, with their lightness and irony, are still staged and adapted, and he remains the poet of Romantic youth who looked at himself without complacency.