Page:Musset - On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1884.djvu/49

INTRODUCTION TO ’ FA NT AS 10* $7 The Prince of Mantua . M. Coquelin. The King M. Chery. Marinoni M. Garraud. Spark M. Senechal. Hartman . . . • M. Seveste. Facio ..... M. Prudhon. Rutten M. M ASSET. La Gouvernante . . . Mme Jouassain. Two Pages . . Mlles Lloyd and Barretta. M. Paul Foucher, who was an intimate friend of Musset’s, and also one of the finest critics of that age which dates in popular estimation from 1 830, wrote thus of the production: ’I confess that when I’saw Delaunay come on the stage, with his long light hair and his Bavarian student’s costume, in the first act of Fantasio — I confess that in the first sen- tences of the poet’s strange imagining, in the first wild phrases that he uttered, I underwent one of the most striking emotions in my life. It was as if I saw again, living, the author himself — "Alfred," as he always was to me. The memory of the youthful days we spent together, the night- moths, so to speak, of our early time, came crowding upon me, flitting round the coloured lanterns of Musset’s fantastic Munich. For Delaunay, he was the essence of charm and youth, and in the golden locks that hung on his forehead as in the words he uttered, one felt the breathing spirit of the poet. I almost expected to hear him speak to me when I sat in the balcony, to listen to this sentence that I find written fifteen years ago on a now yellowed sheet of paper by Alfred’s hand : " I write to make you a sharer in my worries and troubles ; you are the only link between me and thought and movement ; you alone can wake me from my nothing- ness and bring me back to an ideal that I helplessly forget — I have no courage left to think."’ M. Sarcey wrote of the same performance : ’ As to the character of Fantasio, Alfred de Musset had no need to seek it in his recollections nor to compose it bit by bit : he took himself for it, and, so to speak, let himself out in his play. He had no set purpose in this to paint his own portrait. It was no premeditated piece of work. He opened his heart