which are excellent criticisms, and have even more interest than when they appeared, now that the career of one has long been closed and that of the other long completed.  His relations with Rachel lasted for many years, interrupted by the gusts and blasts which the contact of two such natures inevitably begets.  She constantly urged him to write a play for her, and in the year after her debut he wrote a fragment of a drama on the story of Fredegonde, which she learned by heart and occasionally recited in private; but there were endless delays and difficulties on both sides, and the rest was not written.  After various episodes and passages between them, De Musset was dining with her one evening when she had become a great lady and queen of the theatre, and her other guests were all rich men of fashion.  One of them admired an extremely beautiful and costly ring which she wore.  It was first passed round the table from hand to hand, and then she said they might bid for it.  One immediately offered five hundred francs, another fifteen, and the ring went up at once to three thousand:  “And you, my poet, why do not you bid?  What will you give?” “I will give you my heart,” he replied.  “The ring is yours,” cried Rachel, taking it off and throwing it into his plate.  After dinner De Musset tried to restore it to her, but she refused to take it back:  he urged and insisted, when she, suddenly falling on her knee with that sovereign charm of seduction for which she was as renowned as for her tragic power, entreated him to keep it as a pledge for the piece he was to write for her.  The poet took the ring, and went home excited and wrought up to the resolve that nothing should interfere with the completion of his task.  But it was the old story again—­whims and postponements on Rachel’s part, possibly temper and pique on his—­until six months afterward, at the end of an angry conversation, he silently replaced the ring on her hand, and she did not resist.  Four years later the compact was renewed, and although by this time De Musset had to all intents and purposes ceased to write, he struck off the first act of a play called Faustina, the scene of which was laid in Venice in the fourteenth century; but he put off finishing it, and finally let it drop altogether.

In December, 1840, Alfred de Musset was thirty years old, and on his birthday he had one of those reckonings with himself, which the most deliberately careless and volatile men cannot escape.  At twenty-one he had held a similar settlement:  he was then uncertain of his genius, dissatisfied with his way of life and with the use he made of his time:  the result was his adoption of a more serious line of study and conduct, which had led him, in spite of interruptions and aberrations, to the brilliant display of his beautiful and splendid talents, the full exercise of his wonderful powers.  Now another review of his past and survey of his future left him in a mood of discontent and depression.  He felt