Pierre et Camille Reading Order

What is the significance of the deaf-mute condition in Pierre et Camille?

Musset uses Pierre's deafness and mutism with great precision. The condition is not merely a sentimental device but a metaphor that runs through the whole structure of the story: Pierre's inability to speak his love to Camille mirrors the general Romantic predicament of the gap between inner feeling and its outward expression. The Romantic tradition is full of characters who cannot say what they feel — Adolphe cannot tell Elléonore he no longer loves her, Octave in La Confession cannot form a stable attachment at all — but in those stories the silence is a failure of will, a consequence of ambivalence or cowardice. In Pierre's case the silence is a condition, not a failure: he is as certain of his feeling as any character in the tradition, and the question is whether love can be communicated without speech. Musset's answer, handled with characteristic delicacy, is that it can — that the understanding between Pierre and Camille is achieved through the same kind of attentiveness and sympathy that all genuine human understanding requires, and that the absence of speech makes this attentiveness more explicit rather than less possible.