Les Caprices de Marianne Reading Order

What is the relationship between Octave and Cœlio in Les Caprices de Marianne?

Octave and Cœlio are contrasting Romantic types who together form something like a complete portrait of the Romantic sensibility. Cœlio is the idealist: he loves Marianne in the pure, devoted, ultimately hopeless way of the Romantic hero who projects all value onto a single object of desire and cannot survive the failure of that projection. Octave is the cynic: he has given up on genuine feeling, pursues pleasure without commitment, and accepts the world as it is rather than as the Romantic imagination demands. The irony is that Octave, who doesn't love Marianne, is the one who succeeds in attracting her — precisely because he doesn't want or need her to be different from what she is. The play suggests that Romantic idealism (Cœlio's position) is structurally more dangerous than Romantic cynicism (Octave's position), because the idealist's demand that the beloved conform to the ideal is itself a form of pressure that distorts the relationship. Some critics have read Octave and Cœlio as two aspects of Musset himself — the satirical social performer and the sincere idealist — divided into two characters so that the contradiction between them can be dramatized.