Reading Order
À quoi rêventÀ quoi rêvent les jeunes filles Reading Order
À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles (What Young Women Dream Of, 1832) by Alfred de Musset is the lyric comedy that completes the Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil volume — a verse play in two acts about twin sisters Ninon and Ninette, who dream of the ideal lover, and the father who decides to find out what they dream of by hiring two young men to play their ideal lovers. The play is deliberately light and whimsical — almost a fairy-tale — and it represents a different side of the 1832 Musset from the tragic aspiration of La Coupe et les Lèvres and the ironic Byronic digression of Namouna. It is the version of the Romantic dream of love from the woman's side: what the young girl dreams of when she imagines the ideal, and how that dream relates to the real world that will eventually have to satisfy it. The play ends happily, with both sisters engaged to the young men their father hired, and the dream turning out to be closer to reality than anyone expected.
Where to start
Read À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles as part of the complete Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil — after La Coupe et les Lèvres and Namouna, it functions as the lyric idyll that provides emotional relief from the darker and more ironic works. Its brevity (around 30 pages) makes it a perfect pendant to the others.
Complete À quoi rêvent Book List
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À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles
Alfred de Musset·1832·Available in French in the Pléiade Théâtre complet and in the Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil collection. Rarely translated separately into English. - Buy
La Coupe et les Lèvres
OptionalAlfred de Musset·1832·The dark companion work from the same 1832 volume — the masculine aspiration against the feminine dream of love.
À quoi rêvent — Frequently Asked Questions
What does À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles say about Romantic love?
The play's gentle argument is that the Romantic dream of the ideal lover is not as disconnected from reality as the Romantic tradition might suggest — that the ideal the young women dream of is recognizable in the real young men who come to play the part. This is an unusually comfortable position for Musset, who usually shows the Romantic ideal either being destroyed by reality (La Coupe et les Lèvres) or being used to destroy the real people who don't measure up to it (On ne badine pas avec l'amour, Les Caprices de Marianne). In À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles, the dream and reality are reconciled rather than opposed, which reflects the play's place in the 1832 volume as the lyric relief from the darker arguments. The title itself is a question rather than an assertion — the play's answer is that young women dream of something real, something that can be found in the actual world, and that this is fortunate.
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