not by hearsay—­that he felt within him two men, one an actor, the other a spectator, and if the former did a foolish thing the latter profited by it.  On this pernicious reasoning he pursued for three years a dissolute mode of life, which, thanks to the remarkable strength and elasticity of his constitution, did not prevent his carrying on his studies and going with great zest into society, where he became more and more welcome, besides writing occasionally.  He translated De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, introducing some reveries of his own, but the work attracted no attention.  During this period his father, naturally anxious about his son’s unprofitable courses, one morning informed him that he had obtained a clerkship for him in an office connected with the military commissariat.  Alfred did not venture to demur, but the confinement and routine of an office were intolerable, and he resolved to conquer his liberty by every effort of which he was capable.  He offered his manuscripts for publication to M. Canel, the devoted editor of the romantic party:  they fell short by five hundred lines of the number of pages requisite for a volume of the usual octavo bulk.  He obtained a holiday, which he spent with a favorite uncle who lived in the provinces, and came back in three weeks with the poem of “Mardoche.”  He persuaded his father to give a literary party, to which his friends of the Cenacle were invited, and repeated his latest compositions to them, including “Mardoche.”  Here we have another example of manners startling to our notions:  the keynote of these verses was rank libertinism, yet in his mother’s drawing-room and apparently in the presence of his father, a dignified, reputable man, venerated by his children, this young rake declaimed stanzas more licentious than any in Byron’s Don Juan.  But it caused no scandal:  the friends were rapturous, and predicted the infallible success of the poems, in which they were justified by the event.  “Rarely,” says Paul de Musset, “has so small a quantity of paper made so much noise.”  There was an uproar among the newspapers, some applauding with all their might, others denouncing the exaggeration of the romantic tendency:  the romanticists themselves were disconcerted to find the “Ballade a la Lune,” which they had taken as a good joke, turned into a joke against themselves.  At all events, the young man was launched, and his vocation was thenceforth decided.  In reading these first productions of Alfred de Musset’s without the prejudice or partiality of faction, it cannot be denied that if not sufficient in themselves to ensure his immortality, they contain lines of finished beauty as perfect as the author ever produced—­ample guarantee of what might be expected from the development of his genius.