Alfred de Musset: Seven Plays: Marianne; Fantasio; Don’t Trifle with Love; The Candlestick; A Diversion; A Door Must Be Kept Open or Shut; You Can’t Think of Everything

Marianne, Fantasio, Don’t Trifle With Love, The Candlestick, A Diversion, A Door Must be Open or Shut, You Can’t Think of Everything

The seven plays in this collection share a light-hearted tone, though with occasional and unexpected moments of seriousness.

In Marianne, a confirmed cynic intercedes with a married woman on behalf of his best friend. In the eponymous hero of the modern ‘fairy tale’ Fantasio, by turns imaginative, abrupt and perceptive, Musset provides us with a compelling self-portrait. Don’t Trifle with Love shows the dangerous strategems of two childhood sweethearts, supposedly destined for marriage. In The Candlestick, an infatuated clerk is set up as a decoy by his employer’s young wife and her lover. The one-act plays A Diversion, A Door Must be Open or Shut and You Can’t Think of Everything deal, in witty, epigrammatic style, with various aspects of romance: a wife and her friend test her husband’s fidelity, or lack of it; a man wants to propose to his bantering, blase hostess; and a couple in love, one absent-minded, the other forgetful, tries to concentrate long enough to get married.