Louis ARAGON (1897-1982). Autograph manuscript signed, Alfred de Musset, [April 1957]; 13pages in-4 (plus 2 versos crossed out), with erasures and corrections (last leaf torn in two and repaired). Fine text on Alfred de Musset, published in Les Lettres françaises, no. 667, April 18, 1957. The manuscript shows erasures and corrections, with two versos of a first draft crossed out. "Of all French prose, there is perhaps nothing that has taught me so much, made me dream so much, baffled me so much, as this almost initial chapter of La Confession d'un enfant du siècle: "Pendant les guerres de l'Empire, tandis que les mari et les frères étaient en Allemagne"... This chapter is perhaps the birth of the modern novel," the dawn of Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola and so on. How many times has he reread this chapter for its sublime phrases, several of which he quotes, while the rest of the novel has always disappointed him: "This extraordinary inequality between the preamble and the novel is, to tell the truth, the whole of Musset"... In his poems too, almost everywhere we find lines (which he quotes) that make him as great as Heine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire... He also talks about his theater, which he doesn't like much apart from Lorenzaccio and the Caprices; but above all, there's Namouna "which is all we can show in our language next to Eugène Onéguine, Namouna which I consider to be one of the greatest poems ever written"... Etc.