The lamentable story of that Italian journey has been told too often and by too many people to need repetition here.  No doubt Paul de Musset has told it as fairly as could be expected from his brother’s side:  probably the circumstances occurred much as he sets them down.  But he could not make due allowance for the effect which Alfred’s dissolute habits had produced upon his character:  he was but twenty-three, and had run the round of vice; he had already depicted the moral result of such courses in his terrible allegory of “La Coupe et les Levres:”  the idea recurs throughout his works, conspicuously in the Confession d’un Enfant du Siecle, which is Madame Sand’s best apology.  But if his excesses had destroyed his ingenuousness, she destroyed his faith in human nature, and on her will ever rest the brand he set in the burning words of the “Nuit d’Octobre.”

He returned to Paris shattered in mind and body, and shut himself up in his room for months, unable to endure contact with the outer world, or even that of the loving home circle which environed him with anxious tenderness.  He could not read or write:  a favorite piece of music from his young sister’s piano, a game of chess with his mother in the evening, were his only recreations—­his only excitement the letters which still came from Venice, for which he looked with a sick longing, at which one cannot wonder on reading them and remembering what a companionship it was that he had lost.  Urged by his brother and his friend M. Buloz, the director of the Revue des Deux Mondes, to try the efficacy of work, he completed his play of On ne badine pas avec l’Amour, already sketched, in which, of all his dramatic writings, the cry of the heart is most thrilling.  Aided by this effort, he made a journey to Baden in September, five months after his miserable return to Paris.  The change of air and scene restored him, and his votive offering for the success of his pilgrimage was the charming poem called “Une Bonne Fortune.”  Although he had determined not to see Madame Sand again, their connection was renewed, in spite of himself, when she came back from Italy:  it lasted for a short period, full of angry and melancholy scenes, quarrels and reconciliations.  Then he broke loose for ever, and went back to the world and his work.

This episode, of which I have briefly given the outline, was the principal event of Alfred de Musset’s life, the one which marked and colored it most deeply, which brought his genius to perfection by a cruel and fiery torture, and left a lasting imprint upon his writings.  Although he never produced anything finer than certain passages of “Rolla,” which was published in 1833, yet previous to that—­or more accurately to 1835, when he began to write again—­he had composed no long poem of equal merit throughout, none in which the flight was sustained from first to last.  The magnificent series of the “Nights” of May, December, August and October, the “Letter