The Confession of a Child of the Century

by Alfred de Musset

My greatest fault was imitation of everything that struck me, not by its beauty but by its strangeness, and not wishing to confess myself an imitator I resorted to exaggeration in order to appear original. According to my idea nothing was good or even tolerable; nothing was worth the trouble of turning the head, and yet when I had become warmed up in a discussion it seemed as if there was no expression in the French language violent enough to sustain my cause; but my warmth would subside as soon as my opponents ranged themselves on my side.

It was a natural consequence of my conduct. Although disgusted with the life I was leading I was unwilling to change it:

Simigliante a quella 'nferma
Che non puo trovar posa in su le piume,
Ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma.—DANTE.

Thus I tortured my mind to give it change and I fell into all these vagaries in order to get out of myself.

But while my vanity was thus occupied, my heart was suffering, so that there was always within me a man who laughed and a man who wept. It was a perpetual counter-stroke between my head and my heart. My own mockeries frequently caused me great pain and my deepest sorrows aroused a desire to burst into laughter.

One day a man boasted of being proof against superstitious fears, in fact, fear of every kind; his friends put a human skeleton in his bed and then concealed themselves in an adjoining room to wait for his return. They did not hear any noise, but in the morning they found him dressed and sitting on the bed playing with the bones; he had lost his reason.

There would be in me something that resembled that man but for the fact that my favorite bones were those of a well-beloved skeleton; they were the debris of my love, all that remained of the past.

But it must not be supposed that there were no good moments in all this disorder. Among Desgenais's companions were several young men of distinction, a number of artists. We sometimes passed together delightful evenings under pretext of being libertines. One of them was infatuated with a beautiful singer who charmed us with her fresh and melancholy voice. How many times we sat listening while supper was served and waiting! How many times, when the flagons had been emptied, one of us held a volume of Lamartine and read in a voice choked by emotion! Every other thought disappeared. The hours passed by unheeded. What strange libertines we were! We did not speak a word and there were tears in our eyes.

Desgenais especially, habitually the coldest and driest of men, was inexplicable on such occasions; he delivered himself of such extraordinary sentiments that he might have been considered a poet in delirium. But after these effusions he would be seized with furious joy. He would break everything within reach when warmed by wine; the genius of destruction stalked forth armed to the teeth. I have seen him pick up a chair and hurl it through a closed window.

I could not help making a study of that singular man. He appeared to me the marked type of a class which ought to exist somewhere but which was unknown to me. One could never tell whether his outbursts were the despair of a man sick of life, or the whim of a spoiled child.