Reading Order
La Coupe et les LèvresLa Coupe et les Lèvres Reading Order
La Coupe et les Lèvres (The Cup and the Lips, 1832) by Alfred de Musset is one of his most ambitious early dramatic poems — a verse play in the Romantic mode that he described as 'a spectacle in an armchair' and never intended for the stage, exploring the doomed aspirations of Frank, a young Tyrolean hunter who rejects the peaceful village life and the love of Déidamia in pursuit of fame, power, and a freer, more turbulent existence. The play is a study of the Romantic temperament that desires something without being able to name it precisely — Frank wants 'more,' but the 'more' is never specified, and the play shows the havoc that unspecified romantic aspiration wreaks on the specific, real human beings who love him. La Coupe et les Lèvres belongs to the German Romantic tradition in its Alpine setting and its use of fantasy elements, but it is distinctively French in its analytical self-awareness: Frank is presented as a type (the Romantic hero), and the play is partly a critique of the type even as it sympathizes with it.
Where to start
La Coupe et les Lèvres is usually published with Namouna and À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles as one of Musset's early verse dramatic works. Read them in order — the three together form a picture of Musset's range in 1832, from the lyric idyll to the mock-heroic epic to the Romantic tragedy.
Complete La Coupe et les Lèvres Book List
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La Coupe et les Lèvres
Alfred de Musset·1832·Available in French in the Pléiade Théâtre complet and in some anthology editions of Musset's works. The 1832 volume Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil contains La Coupe et les Lèvres, À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles, and Namouna. - Buy
Lorenzaccio
OptionalAlfred de Musset·1834·The later dramatic poem that develops Frank's type (the Romantic hero who pursues an impossible ideal at the cost of his own integrity) into the definitive form.
La Coupe et les Lèvres — Frequently Asked Questions
What does the title La Coupe et les Lèvres mean?
The title refers to the French version of the English proverb 'There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip' — meaning that between desire and satisfaction there is always the possibility of failure, that what we reach for we may not obtain. In the play, it expresses the central argument about Frank's Romantic aspiration: he reaches for something (fame, freedom, the absolute) that cannot be obtained, and the gap between his desire and the real world constitutes his tragedy. The cup is always there, lifted to the lips, but it is never drunk — the desire perpetuates itself through the impossibility of satisfaction. This is the structural argument of most of Musset's early dramatic work: the Romantic hero's infinite desire collides with the finite world and is destroyed, but so is everyone around him, because the pursuit of the impossible is also a refusal of the possible — of Déidamia's love, of the village, of peace.
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