Stimulated by this companionship, Alfred de Musset began to compose.  His first attempt at publication was anonymous, a ballad called “A Dream,” which, through the good offices of a friend, was accepted by Le Provincial, a tri-weekly newspaper of Dijon:  it did not pass unnoticed, but excited a controversy in print between the two editors, to the extreme delight of the young poet, who always fondly cherished the number of the paper in which it appeared.  At length, one morning he woke up Sainte-Beuve with the laughing declaration that he too was a poet, and in support of his assertion recited some of his verses to that keenly attentive and appreciative ear.  Sainte-Beuve at once announced that there was “a boy full of genius among them,” and as long as he lived, whatever Paul de Musset’s fraternal sensitiveness may find to complain of, he never retracted or qualified that first judgment.  The Contes d’Italie et d’Espagne followed fast, and were recited to an enthusiastic audience, who were the more lenient to the exaggerations and affectations of which, as in most youthful poetry, there were plenty, since these bore the stamp of their own mint.

Alfred de Musset’s first steps in life were made at the same time with his first essays in poetry.  He was so handsome, high-spirited and gay that women did not wait to hear that he was a genius to smile upon him.  His brother, who is tall, calls him of medium height, five feet four inches (about five feet nine, English measure), slender, well-made and of good carriage:  his eyes were blue and full of fire; his nose was aquiline, like the portraits of Vandyke; his profile was slightly equine in type:  the chief beauty of his face was his forehead, round which clustered the many-shaded masses of his fair hair, which never turned gray:  the countenance was mobile, animated and sensitive; the predominating expression was pride.  Paul relates without reserve how one married woman encouraged his brother and trifled with him, using his devotion to screen a real intrigue which she was carrying on, and that another, who was lying in wait for him, undertook his consolation.  One morning Alfred made his appearance in spurs, with his hat very much on one side and a huge bunch of hair on the other, by which signs his brother understood that his vanity was satisfied.  He was just eighteen.  That a man of respectable life and notions like Paul de Musset should take these adventures as a matter of course makes it difficult for an American to find the point of view whence to judge a society so abominably corrupt.  Thus at the age of a college-boy in this country he was started on the career which was destined to lead to so much unhappiness, and in the end to his destruction.  Dissipation of every sort followed, debts, from which he was never free, and the habit of drinking, which proved fatal at last.  To the advice and warnings of his brother he only replied that he wished to know everything by experience,