that he could not always go on being a boy.  The year behind him had been almost sterile, and marked by the loss of many of what he called his illusions.  He had been implored and urged to write by his friends and editors, had made and broken promises without number to the latter, and had become involved in money difficulties to a degree which kept him in constant anxiety and torment.  Yet he steadily rejected all his brother’s affectionate advice and importunities to shake off the deepening lethargy.  He would not write poetry because the Muse did not come of her free will, and he would never do her violence.  He had forsworn prose, because he said everybody wrote that, and many so ill that he would not swell the number of magazine story-writers, who, he foresaw, were to lower the standard of fiction and style.  In short, he always had an excuse for doing nothing, and although he hated above all things to leave Paris, and seldom accepted the invitations of his friends in the country, he now repeatedly rushed out of town to escape the visits of editors, who had become no better than duns in his eyes.  When at home he shut himself in his room for days together in so gloomy a frame of mind that even his brother did not venture to break in upon him:  he even made a furtive attempt at suicide one night when his despondency reached its lowest depth; it was foiled by the accident of Paul’s having unloaded the pistols and locked up the powder and balls some time before.  He grew morbidly irritable, and resented Paul’s remonstrances, which, we may be sure, were made with all the tact and consideration of natural delicacy and unselfish affection, generally by laughing at the poor poet, which was the most effectual way of restoring his courage and good-humor.  One morning he emerged from his seclusion, and with vindictive desperation threw before his brother a quantity of manuscripts, saying, “You would have prose:  there it is for you.”  It was the introduction to a sort of romance called Le Poete dechu, a wretched story of a young man of many gifts who finds himself under the necessity of writing for the support of his orphan sisters, and it described with harrowing eloquence the vain efforts of his exhausted brain.  The extracts in the biography are painfully affecting and powerful, but the work was never finished or published.  Such a state of things could not go on indefinitely, and De Musset fell dangerously ill of congestion of the lungs, brought on by reckless imprudence when already far from well:  the attack was accompanied by so much fever and delirium that it was at first mistaken for brain fever.  This illness redoubled the tenderness and devotion of his family and friends:  his Marraine and Princess Belgiojoso took turns by his bedside, magnetizing the unruly patient into quiescence; but the person who exercised the greatest influence over him was a poor Sister of Charity, Soeur Marcelline, who was engaged to assist in nursing him.  The