Alfred de Musset
The Confession of a Child of the Century
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066245221
Table of Contents
CHAPTER VII
PART I
CHAPTER I
THE life must be lived before the history of a life can be written, hence it is not my life that I am writing.
Having been attacked in early youth by an abominable moral malady, I relate what has happened to me during three years. If I were the only victim of this disease, I would say nothing, but as there are many others who suffer from the same evil, I write for them, although I am not sure that they will pay any attention to it; in case my warning is unheeded, I shall still have derived this benefit from my words in having cured myself, and, like the fox caught in a trap, I shall have devoured my captive foot.
CHAPTER II
DURING the wars of the Empire, while the husbands and brothers were in Germany, the anxious mothers brought forth an ardent, pale, nervous generation. Conceived between two battles, educated amidst the noises of war, thousands of children looked about them with a somber eye while testing their puny muscles. From time to time their blood-stained fathers would appear, raise them on their gold-laced bosoms, then place them on the ground and remount their horses.
The life of Europe was centered in one man; all were trying to fill their lungs with the air which he had breathed. Every year France presented that man with three hundred thousand of her youth; it was the tax paid to Caesar, and, without