SOURCE: Hamilton, James F. “From Ricochets to Jeu in Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour: A Game Analysis.” French Review 58, no. 6 (May 1985): 820-26.

In the following essay, Hamilton examines the motif of game-playing and display of structural, thematic, and psychological tensions between spontaneity and calculation in Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour.

Des ricochets! Ma tête s'égare; voilà mes idées qui se bouleversent. Vous me faites un rapport insensé, Bridaine. Il est inoui qu'un docteur fasse des ricochets.

(1, 5)¹

Our understanding of Musset's masterpiece on love has progressed from the study of parallels between the couples Perdican-Camille and Musset-George Sand to the examination of conflicting bipolarities, psychological and temporal.² To this approach must be added structural and ideological dimensions capable of elucidating the play's dramatic mechanism. Only then can motivation, time, and space be grasped as a dynamic whole. The generative principle of this...