Ma seule amie a jamais la plus chere.

Ten years after this, in one of the last strains of his unstrung harp, a fragment called “Souvenir des Alpes,” the sad chord is touched once more:  up to the end it answered faintly to certain notes.  Long after their rupture and separation he said that he would have given ten years of his life to marry her had she been free; and it is deplorable that the most fervent and lasting affection of which he was capable should have been thrown back upon him in such sort.

Of marriage there were several schemes at different times:  they fell through because he was averse to them himself, except one to which he much inclined, the young lady being pretty, intelligent, charming and the daughter of an old friend; but on the first advances it turned out that she was engaged to another man.  His biographer regrets this deeply, convinced that such an alliance would have been his brother’s salvation; but even if he could have been more constant to his wife than to his mistresses, the habit of intemperance was too confirmed to admit much hope of domestic happiness.  The same may be opined in regard to the vague hopes which were destroyed by the death of the young duke of Orleans.  When Louis Philippe came to the throne, De Musset made no attempt to approach the royal family on the pretext of the old school-friendship:  it was the duke himself who renewed it in 1836 on accidentally seeing some unpublished verses of the poet’s on the king’s escape from an attempt at assassination.  Louis Philippe himself did not like the sonnet, considering the use of the poetic thou too familiar a form of address:  he did not know who was the author; and when Alfred was presented to him at a court-ball took him for a cousin who was inspector of the royal forests at Joinville, and continued to greet him, under this mistake, with a few gracious words two or three times a year during the rest of his reign, while the poet’s name was on the lips and in the heart of every one else.  The duke’s favor and friendliness ended only with his sad and sudden death.

Paul de Musset tells us that the years 1837 and 1838 were the happiest in his brother’s life.  The love-trouble which had wrung from him the “Nuit de Decembre” was a disappointment, but not a deception, and the parting had caused equal sorrow on both sides, but no bitterness.  After no long interval appeared “a very young and very pretty person whom he met frequently in society, of an enthusiastic, passionate nature, independent in her position, and who bought the poet’s books.”  An acquaintance, a friendship, a correspondence, a serious passion followed, and became a relation which lasted two years “without quarrel, storm, coolness or subject of umbrage or jealousy—­two years of love without a cloud, of true happiness.”  Why did it not last for ever?  The biographer does not give the answer.  It is hinted in a letter to Alfred’s friend, the duchesse de Castries,