After trying medicine and law, Musset gave himself to literature and to a bohemian and dandyish life. At age eighteen he met Victor Hugo and joined his cénacle. In 1830 he published a set of narrative poems, Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie, which won him considerable fame. He soon began a stormy and short-lived affair with the novelist George Sand, neither the first nor the last of his passions. A novel, Confessions d’un enfant du siècle (1836), deals with the spiritual crisis of modernity. He took a detached and ironic stance toward most things, including politics, but believed in the redemptive power of art.