Alfred de Musset
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Alfred Louis Charles de Musset, (December 11, 1810 – May 2, 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.
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Biography
Musset was born and died in Paris. He entered the collège Henri-IV at the age of nine, where in 1837 he won the Latin essay prize in the Concours général. With the help of Paul Foucher, Victor Hugo's brother-in-law, he began to attend, at the age of 17, the Cénacle, the literary salon of Charles Nodier at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. After attempts at careers in medicine (which he gave up owing to a distaste for dissections), law, drawing, English and piano, he became one of the first Romantic writers. By the time he reached the age of 20, his rising literary fame was already accompanied by a sulphurous reputation fed by his dandy side.
He was the librarian of the French Ministry of the Interior under the July Monarchy. During this time he also involved himself in polemics during the Rhine crisis of 1840, caused by the French prime minister Adolphe Thiers, who as Minister of the Interior had been Musset's superior. Thiers had demanded that France should own the left bank of the Rhine (described as France's "natural boundary"), as it had under Napoleon, despite the territory's German population. These demands were rejected by German songs and poems, including Nikolaus Becker's Rheinlied, which contained the verse: "Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien, deutschen Rhein ..." (They shall not have him, the free, German Rhine). Musset answered to this with a poem of his own: "Nous l'avons eu, votre Rhin allemand" (We've had him, your German Rhine).
The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand, which lasted from 1833 to 1835, is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, and from her point of view in her Elle et lui.
Musset was dismissed from his post as librarian after the revolution of 1848, but he was appointed librarian of the Ministry of Public Instruction during the Second Empire.
Musset received the Légion d'honneur on April 24 1845, at the same time as Balzac, and was elected to the Académie française in 1852 (after two failures to do so in 1848 and 1850).
On his death in 1857, Musset was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Criticism
The French poet Arthur Rimbaud was highly critical of Musset's work. Rimbaud wrote in his Letters of a Seer (Lettres du Voyant) that Musset did not accomplish anything because he "closed his eyes" before the visions. (Lettre à Paul Demeny, mai 1871) On the other hand, director Jean Renoir's La règle du jeu was inspired by his play, Les Caprices de Marianne.
Poetry
- Les Nuits (Nuits de mai, d'août, d'octobre, de décembre), 1835-1837
Plays
- André del Sarto, 1833
- Les Caprices de Marianne, 1833
- Lorenzaccio, 1833
- Fantasio, 1834
- La nuit vénitienne, 1834
- On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1834
- Barberine, 1835
- Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée, 1845
Novel
- La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (autobiographical), 1836
