But of all De Musset's stories, Emmeline is certainly the most charming. It was inspired by the author's own first worthy attachment after his quarrel with George Sand—a short but happy one, which in its main features resembled that of the story. A young man falls violently in love with a young married lady, whose charms are painted in the most delicate colours, but colours chosen with an accurately observing eye. There is nothing in recent literature which can be compared with this art except Turgenev's most delicate delineations of female character; but Turgenev's women are more spiritual, less real, are beheld with the lover's less critical eye and represented with less artistic boldness. After long admiring the lady without any hope of awakening her interest in him, the young man wins her love and she gives herself to him. Then they abruptly part for ever, because she is too truthful to deceive her husband, and her lover has too much delicacy of feeling to remain in her neighbourhood under such circumstances.
A poem in this story, which the young lover asks his lady to read, seems to me to be the most beautiful of the love poems of De Musset's second period. It speaks the language of ideal feeling. It is the well-known "Si je vous disais pourtant que je vous aime." One verse runs:
"J'aime, et je sais répondre avec indifférence;
J'aime, et rien ne le dit; j'aime et seul je le sais;
Et mon secret est cher, et chère ma souffrance;
Et j'ai fait le serment d'aimer sans espérance,
Mais non pas sans bonheur;—je vous vois, c'est assez."
Whilst he was bringing out these charming stories, which are as delicate as if they had been written upon flower petals, De Musset also wrote a few short plays, in which love appears as the terrible force with which man cannot trifle, as the fire with which he cannot play, as the electric flash which kills; and one or two others in which the wit of the aristocratic man of the world sparkles in the tissue of the soulful, highly emotional style.[1] Of these little plays, Un Caprice is the most finished and has the most sparkling dialogue. Not without reason is it included among the works the names of which are carved upon De Musset's tombstone in Père-Lachaise. In this play the erotic caprice, the momentary infatuation, is made to yield to the discipline of marriage. The man in this case is frivolous and untrustworthy; the women, who join forces, have their hearts in the right place, and one of them has, besides, all the charm of high-bred cleverness. Madame de Léry is a Parisienne. And no one drew the Parisienne of that day with such genius as De Musset. He stood on the same plane with her. She is the genuine fine lady, but also the genuine woman. The beautiful thing about this character is that in it we see unadulterated, genuine, fresh nature piercing through the extremest refinement of fashionable life—nature, in spite of all the sparkling and tinselly cleverness and all the premature experience and the ennui resulting therefrom; nature even in dissimulation, nature even in the little comedy which Madame de Léry is woman and actress enough to play. "Oh! how true it is," exclaims Goethe in one of his letters, "that nothing is wonderful except the natural, nothing great except the natural, nothing beautiful except the natural, nothing &c., &c.!" In the gay, supercilious, society art of this creation of De Musset's, nature is preserved. The idea underlying Un Caprice is a moral idea. But whereas many writers represent and conceive of love as something so firm and solid that it can be taken hold of and deposited here or there as if it were a piece of granite rock, to De Musset, even when he is most moral, it is always only the most delicately powerful, and consequently most volatile essence of life. At its full strength it can kill, but it can also evaporate.
In his last plays De Musset exalted the feminine fidelity and purity in which he believed, though it had not fallen to his lot to find them. In Barberine the idea of which he took from an old legend, he had already depicted an ideally faithful wife of the type of Shakespeare's Imogen. But the play was an uninteresting one. The heroines of the last two he writes are wonderfully beautiful creations. In the little masterpiece, Bettine, he has, apparently with the greatest ease, accomplished one of the most difficult tasks for a delineator of character. Bettine enters, and she has not spoken three or four times before we feel that we are in the presence of a strong, brave, tender-hearted, noble-minded woman; and we are conscious of more than this, for we feel certain that she is a woman of parts, an artist, accustomed to triumph, accustomed to feel herself intellectually superior to her surroundings; and to pay little heed to petty conventionalities. It is her wedding morning. She comes singing on to the stage, where the notary is waiting, goes straight up to him, and to his astonishment addresses him as thou: "Ah! te voilà, notaire, ô cher notaire, mon cher ami! As-tu tes paperasses?" His official dignity has so little existence for her that she has no hesitation in letting him see her delight because it is her wedding-day. The kindly happiness of her nature overflows on every occasion. She is not brilliant like the aristocratic woman of the world, but frank, large-minded, confident, like the true artist; and her healthy human nature affects us the more pleasantly from being seen against the background of that moral corruption which is represented by her cold and exacting bridegroom.
The beautiful little drama, Carmosine the idea of which is taken from a tale of Boccaccio, is intended to show how a strong, ardent, worshipful love, which outward circumstances separate from its object, can be cured by magnanimous kindness and tenderness. Carmosine, a young girl of the middle class, loves King Pedro of Arragon with a hopeless, consuming passion; this feeling makes it impossible for her to give her hand to her faithful and sorrowing adorer, Perillo. She determines to suffer silently and die. But the playfellow of her childhood, Minuccio the singer, is led by his compassion for her to tell the King and Queen of her love. Far from being indignant, the Queen goes to her in disguise and gradually alleviates her suffering with sisterly and queenly words. She tells her that a love so deep and great is too beautiful a thing to be torn out of the heart, and that the Queen herself wishes her to be made one of her ladies-in-waiting, so that she may see the King every day—because such a love, born of the soul's aspiration after the highest, ennobles:
"C'est moi, Carmosine, qui veut vous apprendre que l'on peut aimer sans souffrir, lorsque l'on aime sans rougir, qu'il n'y a que la honte ou le remords qui doivent donner de la tristesse, car elle est faite pour le coupable, et, à coup sûr, votre pensée ne l'est pas."
And the King comes, under pretext of wishing to see her father, and in the Queen's presence says to her:
"C'est donc vous, gentille demoiselle, qui êtes souffrante et en danger, dit-on? Vous n'avez pas le visage à cela.... Vous tremblez, je crois. Vous défiez-vous de moi?"
"Non, Sire."
"Eh bien, donc, donnez-moi la main. Que veut dire ceci, la belle fille? Vous qui êtes jeune et qui êtes faite pour réjouir le cœur des autres, vous vous laissez avoir du chagrin? Nous vous prions, pour l'amour de nous, qu'il vous plaise de prendre courage, et que vous soyez bientôt guérie."
"Sire, c'est mon trop peu de force à supporter une trop grande peine qui est la cause de ma souffrance. Puisque vous avez pu m'en plaindre, j'espère que Dieu m'en délivrera."
"Belle Carmosine, je parlerai en roi et en ami. Le grand amour que vous nous avez porté vous a, près de nous, mise en grand honneur; et celui qu'en retour nous voulons vous rendre, c'est de vous donner de notre main, en vous priant de l'accepter, l'époux que nous vous avons choisi. Après quoi nous voulons toujours nous appeler votre chevalier, et porter dans nos passes d'armes votre devise et vos couleurs, sans demander autre chose de vous, pour cette promesse, qu'un seul baiser."
The Queen, to Carmosine: "Donne-le mon enfant, je ne suis pas jalouse."
"Sire, la reine a répondu pour moi."
In what world does this happen? In what world do we breathe so pure an air? Where does such equity flourish? where is love at one and the same time so humble, so ardent, and so noble? and where are such chivalry, such fidelity, such freedom from jealousy, and such benignity to be found? Where such a king? Where such a queen?