Œuvres Complètes De Alfred De Musset — Tome 4

Alfred de Musset was twenty-three when he rewrote the rules of French poetry, and this volume collects the works of a writer who never stopped rewriting them. Here are the legendary Nuits, the great night poems where desire, despair, and divine disillusionment speak in a voice still startling two centuries later. Here too are the plays that made him the bad boy of Romantic theater: Lorenzaccio, the tortured portrait of a prince who cannot act; Les Caprices de Marianne, with its dangerous flirtations and poisonous wit; Fantasio, where a young man soaks his boredom in champagne until it becomes a kind of philosophy. Between the verses and the stages, Musset also wrote prose of surprising darkness, La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, a novel of generational despair that influenced an entire tradition of French fiction. These are the works of a prodigy who burned bright, partied harder, and wrote with a rawness that contemporary readers found scandalous and still find electrifying. For anyone who believes French literature is cold, Musset is the proof it's incandescent.