Inspirational Quotes by Alfred de Musset (French Poet, Playwright)

Alfred de Musset (1810–57,) fully Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay, was a French Romantic dramatist and poet. He is remembered for his lyric poems, elegant comedies, and the powerful play Lorenzaccio (1834,) possibly the best French play of the 19th century.

Born in Paris, Musset started studying law and medicine but soon realized that he had a talent for writing. At 18, he published a translation of the English Essayist Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (L’Anglais Mangeur d’opium; 1828.) Musset won the approval of Victor Hugo for his first collection of poems, Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; Tales of Spain and Italy.)

After Musset’s first play, La Nuit Venitienne (1830; A Night in Venice,) failed at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, he devised an ‘armchair theatre’ by writing plays intended for reading only and refusing to allow them to be performed. Ten years later, following the massive success of his Un Caprice (1837; A Whim,) Musset allowed other ‘armchair’ plays, On ne saurait penser à tout (1849, You Can Never Think of Everything,) Carmosine (1850,) and Bettine (1851,) to be staged.

In 1833, Musset met the French novelist George Sand (pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin,) and they had a stormy three-year affair. Their romance is traced in his four volumes of Nuits (1835–37; Nights.) Sand’s Elle et Lui (1859; She and He) is a fictionalized account of their affair.

Musset’s other notable works include the autobiographical poem La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1835; The Confessions of a Child of the Century, 1892) and L’Espoir en Dieu (1838; Hoping in God.)

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