Alfred de Musset, the great poet of love, the most spontaneous, sincere, moving, spiritual, ironic, lucid, impertinent, disdainful of rime, was born at Paris in 1810. He was a dandy, the spoiled child of the Romantic movement, with a voluptuous and sombre imagination. But he made a too great sacrifice to fashion and so-called Byronism when he wrote “Rolla.” The crisis of his life came when, with a broken heart, he returned to Paris in 1833, leaving George Sand at Venice. Not until then did he produce his poetical masterpieces, “La Nuit de Mai,” etc., and his prose romance, “The Confession of a Child of the Age,” and those exquisite little theatrical pieces not intended for the theatre, such as “The Chandelier,” etc.
Later, in his “Letters of Dupin and Cotinet,” which he wrote for the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” De Musset broke with Romanticism. He died at Paris in 1857.
THE BEAUTY-SPOT
BY ALFRED DE MUSSET
I
In 1756, when Louis XV, wearied with the quarrels between the magistrature and the grand council, about the “two sous tax,”[7] determined upon holding a special lit de justice, the members of Parliament resigned. Sixteen of these resignations were accepted, and as many exiles decreed. “But,” said Madame de Pompadour to one of the presidents, “could you calmly stand by and see a handful of men resist the authority of the King of France? Would you not have a very bad opinion of such a policy? Throw off the cloak of petty pretense, M. le President, and you will see the situation just as I see it myself.”
It was not only the exiles that had to pay the penalty of their want of compliance, but also their relatives and friends. The violation of mail-secrets was one of the King’s amusements. To relieve the monotony of his other pleasures, it pleased him to hear his favorite read all the curious things that were to be found in his subjects’ private correspondence. Of course, under the fallacious pretext of doing his own detective work, he reaped a large harvest of enjoyment from the thousand little intrigues which thus passed under his eyes; but whoever was connected, whether closely or in a remote degree, with the leaders of the factions, was almost invariably ruined.
Every one knows that Louis XV, with all his manifold weaknesses, had one, and only one, strong point: he was inexorable.