MUSSELBURGH 



MUSSET 



363 



beneficial to mussel culture. It is said on good 

 authority that mussels lose any poisonous pro- 

 perties they may have if cooked for ten minutes 

 with carbonate of soda. The wasteful and un- 

 regulated consumption of mussels from the scalps 

 on the British coasts, the reckless destruction of 

 immature mussels, and the wholly inadequate 

 efforts at artificial mussel culture have caused in 

 gome parts of Britain a mussel famine, and necessi- 

 tated large importations from abroad. Great 

 natural scalps on the British coasts are those of 

 the Wash, Morecambe Bay, and the estuary of the 

 Clyde. The lost, from which it is computed 

 that since 1840 one hundred thousand tons of 

 mussels have been taken, is no\v exhausted and 

 unproductive. The cultivation is practised in the 

 Thames estuary and the Medway, in the Teign 

 and Exe, at Montrose, and elsewhere ; but large 

 supplies are imported from Holland. Scotland 

 imports from England, the north of Ireland, and 

 Hamburg. In one year the Eyeniouth fishermen 

 have used nine hundred and twenty tons of mussels, 

 mainly imported, and costing 1800. Yet in Lanca- 

 shire and Norfolk mussels are wasteful!} 1 used as 

 manure. Mussels may l>e cultivated either on 

 natural beds especially where clean gravelly 

 bottoms are exposed at low-water, and where salt 

 and fresh water mix by transplanting spat and 

 protecting young mussel* ; or in deep water, where 

 transplantation may also be practised. In north 

 Germany and north France mussels are successfully 

 cultivated on wicker-work attached to palisades. 

 The Dutch artificial lieds are mainly provided with 

 spat from the coasts of Essex and Rent. 



Mlissclhlirtfh, an old-fashioned town of Mid- 

 lothian, near the mouth of the E*k in the Firtli of 

 Forth, 6 miles E. of Edinburgh by a branch-line 

 (1847). Since 1832 it has united with Leith ami 

 Portobello in return one meml>er, the parliamentary 

 burgh including the large fishing-suburb of Fisher- 

 row, with a small tidal harbour, and the pretty 

 village of Inveresk, whose conspicuous spired 

 church was rebuilt in Isn.'i by 'Jupiter' Carlyle, 

 and occupies a Roman pr;rtoiinm. Musselhiirgli's 

 chief features are iU celebrated golf links (since 

 1817 also the Edinburgh racecourse), Loretto 

 school (marking the site of a famed place of pil- 

 grimage), Pinkie House (1613), the 'Roman' 

 bridge, the quaint tolbooth, and a statue of David 

 Moir. The manufactures include paper, nets, 

 leather, &c. Pop. (1841) 6360; (1881) 7566; (1891) 

 8888. See Paterson's History of Musselbtirgh (1857). 



Milsset, ALFRED DE, one of the most striking 

 figures in the literature of modern France, was 

 born in Paris, llth Decemlier 1810, the son of an 

 otlicial who rose high in the War Office. He was 

 unusually impulsive from his childhood, and pre- 

 cocious alike in sensibility ami in genius, and grew 

 up handsome in person and fascinating in manners, 

 though he retained something of the spoilt child all 

 his life. He thought first of law, next of medicine, 

 then of art, but at eighteen discovered himself to be 

 a poet, and scarcely a year after published his 

 Contes iTE*i>nijne el iFItalie, a collection of unequal 

 poems, of which Portia, Mariloche, and Dun I'm-. 

 at least are still remembered. A splendid and 

 brilliant youth, of equal grace ami assurance, he 

 was warmly received into Victor Hugo's Cenacle, 

 the inner shrine of militant Romanticism ; was 

 crowned with seductive flatteries by the wider 

 world of society ; and in his hunger for pre- 

 mature experience at once Hung himself reck- 

 lessly into the eager pursuit of pleasure in every 

 form. He was eager to feel, and feeling brought 

 offering in its train, but gave him the impulse 

 out of which came his verse ever a part of himself, 

 the answering echo of his own emotions. His piece 



La Nuit Venitienne failed at the Odeon in 1830, and 

 thus turned him from a career in which he was yet 

 to gain triumphs without seeking for them. In 

 1832 lie published Un Spectacle dans KB Fauteuit, 

 comprising two short plays La Cuupe et les Levres 

 and A qitoi revent les Jeunes Filles, as well as the 

 poem of Namouna, written hastily to eke out a 

 slender volume. Next year followed in the pages of 

 the llevue dcs Deux JUunde-i two of his very greatest 

 works, the tragical comedies Andre del Oarto and 

 Les Caprice* de Marianne. It was of Marianne 

 that her creator replied, when asked where he had 

 found her character, ' Nowhere and everywhere ; 

 she is not a woman, she is woman.' Next followed 

 the famous poem of Holla, which has not sustained 

 the applause with which it was received. Then 

 came the fatal journey to Italy with George Sand. 

 He first met her in the summer of 1833, and the 

 intimacy quickly blossomed into love. The pro- 

 jected tour was at first opposed by De Mussel's 

 mother, but George Sand took the extraordinary 

 step of calling upon her one evening, and in a 

 moment of emotion gained her consent. They set 

 out for Venice at the beginning of winter. About 

 the middle of February his letters to his mother 

 and brother ceased ; for six weeks there was silence, 

 then on the 10th April he reappeared alone, broken 

 in health and sunk in the deepest depression of 

 spirits. A quarter of a century Inter, and soon 

 after his death, she gave the world, in the guise of 

 a novel, Elle et Liii, her version of the events 

 which led to the catastrophe. Paul de Mnsset at 

 once retorted with Lui ct Elle ( 1859), a book poor 

 as fiction, but which rings like truth. His account 

 was that she had been grossly unfaithful to him, 

 and that his discovery of this in a state of weak 

 health had brought on an almost fatal attack of 

 brain-fever ; she, on the other hand, explained the 

 infidelity as but a delusion of the fever itself. It is 

 at auyrate suspicions that but one of the pair 

 suffered deeply, while the other went on calmly 

 writing romances, and utilising the experience at 

 once as impulse and material. The Jacques Laurent 

 of her story bears many a trait of the true De 

 Mussel. Despite, or, more probably, in conse- 

 quence of his suffering*, the five years that followed 

 his return were his l>est years of production. 

 Another love quickly followed, only to end as 

 unhappily ; ami that again was succeeded by a 

 series of unworthy and often sordid entanglements, 

 which distracted his heart and were followed by 

 periods of deep depression which alcohol did little 

 to allay. The patronage of the Due ({'Orleans, 

 the warm friendship of a small circle of devoted 

 friends, and his appointment in 1838 to be librarian 

 at the Home Office did something to take him out of 

 himself, but he was ever as capricious in character 

 as in genius, and the feverish activity that some- 

 times seized him soon exhausted itself in splendid 

 projects and unfinished poems. Even his famous 

 Confession (fun Enfant tin Sierle ( 1835), like most 

 of his works, was begun, laid aside, and then 

 finished under a cloud of sorrow. It is not an 

 autobiography, though it owes its sombre colour to 

 its author's personal experience. It is a striking 

 study of moral pathology, full of admirable expres- 

 sion of cynical contempt for the world and of the 

 misery of hopeless doubt ; but, as a work of art, it 

 breaks down pitifully at the close into weakness 

 and platitude. When De Mussel's health gave 

 way about 1840 his literary activity began to 

 decline also. He was already, in Heine's phrase, 'a 

 voung man who has had a splendid past;' he felt 

 himself an old man at thirty, and to the end he was 

 never blessed with anything of the serenity of the 

 Olympians, nor was he even one of those artists who 

 find consolation in their art. The success of Un 

 Caprice at the Theatre Francais in 1847 recalled 



