La Grande Mademoiselle

"In their most perfect repose they continued to talk, to whistle, and to scream without ceasing; they did not care at all to hear what the comedians were saying." We differ from the chroniclers as to this last opinion; it is probable that they cared only too much; it was to please the rabble that abominably gross farces were played in the paying theatres. Tragedy was relished only by the higher classes.

An eye-witness, the Abbé d'Aubignac,⁶⁴ wrote: "We see that tragedies are liked better than comedies at the Court of France; while among the lesser people comedies, and even farces and unclean buffooneries are considered more amusing than tragedies." The same d'Aubignac wrote in or about the year 1666: "Fifty years ago an honest woman dared not go to the theatre."⁶⁵ Between the universally ardent desire to enjoy the fashionable form of pleasure and the efforts to make the stage less licentious the purification of the drama was accomplished.

The increasing delicacy of the public taste demanded a reform, and in deference to it the moral atmosphere of both of the popular theatres was renewed at the same time; a new and decent repertory was adopted, and the foul programme of the past was cast away. Popular feeling acclaimed the change and hastened the accomplishment of the reformation.

At the time when the Cid⁶⁶ was played the lower classes had ceased to rule the paying theatres; the masses went out of Paris for their pleasure; to the fairs of Saint Laurent and Saint Germain, and to the entertainments on the Pont-Neuf or the Place Dauphine; they crowded around the trestled planks, they hung about the stands of the charlatans, the buffoons, and the trick players. The paying theatres were filled by the upper middle classes. Women who had not dared to go to the play in 1620 attended the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne as freely as they would have attended or as they did attend the Luxembourg.⁶⁷ The fine world of the quality had found its way to the theatre of the Marais; the Cid was in course of representation when the stage of the Marais and the courtiers thronged to the obscure quarter to witness its marvels. The Cid was played in the private theatres as well as in the Hôtel de Bourgogne. M. Lanson tells us that the comedians were summoned to the Louvre three times and twice to the Hôtel de Richelieu, but the great were too impatient to wait for the play to come to them, they ran to meet it; every one longed to see it not at a future time but on the instant, and therefore they flocked to the Veille rue du Temple.

In 1637 (18th January) Mondory, the actor, who played the part of Rodrigue, wrote to Balzac:

Last night they who are usually seen in the Gold Room and on seats bearing the fleur-de-lys, were visible upon our benches not singly but in groups. At our doors the crowd was so great, and our place was so small, that the nooks which ordinarily serve as recesses for the pages, were reserved for the Knights of the Saint Esprit; and the whole scene was bedight with Chevaliers of the Order.

All women could attend the play at will; and they all ardently wished to attend it, not once but always. They who saw it at Court, or at the houses of the great, were none the less anxious to frequent the paying theatres, where, though the scene had been purged of many of its abuses, the spectacle differed essentially from that presented to the great. Many distinct peculiarities of the old plays had been retained; added to that was the novelty of the place, and the lack of courtly ceremony, and the diversion afforded two different spectacles: the play and the audience. Like the children of the great, the wives and the daughters of the inferior classes abused their privilege and visited the theatre incessantly and the rich and the poor suffered from the influences of the superficial amusement. The play tended to deceive the mind, and to give a false impression of the aims and the needs of life. The majority of women were ignorant; they had never learned anything. If they could read they read works of fiction, and their literature was calculated to foster illusions. Exaltedly idealistic as Astrée had been, the writings of La Calprenède, de Gomberville, and others of their school were still more sentimentally romantic; compared with his successors, Honoré d'Urfé was a realist. The influence of the theatre was shown in the intellectual development of woman, the imagination of all classes was encouraged, the more useful mental agents were neglected, and the minds of the people were visibly weak and ill-balanced; the general impulse was to seek adventures on any road and at any price. The thirst for unknown sensations was a fully developed desire in their day, so we cannot with justice class it as a "curiosity" emanating from the inventive imaginations of the decadents.

The writer, Pierre Costar, wilfully lingered three weeks in a tertian fever so that he might enjoy the sickly dreams which accompanied the recurrent paroxysms of the disease. In our day Pierre Costar would be an opium-eater, or a morphinomaniac.

II

La Grande Mademoiselle owed much of her turn of mind to the dramatic plays that she had watched from infancy. I doubt if she was given any lessons in history, or that she had any lessons of the kind before she reached her twenty-fifth year, when she acquired a taste for reading. All that she knew of history had been gleaned by her from the tragedies that she had seen at the theatre, and as she was refractory to the sentiment of Astrée, it cannot be inferred that she had learned much from d'Urfé; so it may be said that Corneille was her teacher in all branches of learning, that no one of that time was in deeper debt to the influence that he exerted over minds, and that no one so plainly manifested his influence. From the education afforded by Corneille came good and evil mingled. As we follow the course of Mademoiselle's life we are forced to admit that however high and noble were the ideas sown broadcast by Corneille, they were not always devoid of inconveniences when they fell among people whose experimental knowledge and practicality were inferior to their susceptibility to impressions.

In the years which followed the advent of the Cid Corneille was the literary head of France; he had discovered the French scene through the influence of d'Urfé, but his power was his own, and it was an inherent power; he was the creator of a tendency.

The unclean farce, which delighted the lockpickers and the gamblers of the Paris of those days, has no place here, because it has no place in literature. When "good company" invaded the paying theatres the farce followed the canaille and took its place upon the trestled stages of the Pont-Neuf. The farce played a part of its own, in a world unknown to Mademoiselle; but the pastoral demands our attention, not only because it was in high favour in Mademoiselle's society, but because Corneille exerted his influence against it.

In the pastoral, love took possession of the stage, as it had been announced to do, in the play which opened the way for its successors, Tasso's Aminta.⁶⁸ In the prologue the son of Venus appeared disguised as a shepherd, and declaimed, for the benefit of the other shepherds, a discourse which, little by little, became the programme of all imaginative literature:

To-day these forests shall he heard speaking of love in a new way… I will inspire gross hearts with noble sentiments; I will subdue their language and make soft their voices; for, wherever I may be, I still am Love; in shepherds as in heroes. I establish, if so it please me, equality in all conditions, no matter how unequal; and my supreme glory, and the miracle of all my power, is to change the rustic musettes into sounding lyres.

Modern poets and novelists do not insist that all men are equal in passion as they are equal in suffering and in death; but the people of the nineteenth century fully believed in such equality. George Sand expresses her real feelings in La Petite Fadette; and Pouvillon meant all that he said in Les Antibel. The contemporaries of Louis XIII. looked askance upon such theories; in their opinion the love, like the suffering, of the inferior was below the conception of the quality, a thing as hard for the noble mind to grasp as the invisible movement of life in an atom; to be ignorant of the needs, the hopes, the anguish of inferiors was one of the first proofs of exalted nobility. But the nobles knew that the shepherds of the dramatic stage were gentlemen travestied, and, therefore, they bestowed the interest formerly accorded to the heroes of the heroic drama upon the woes of the mimic Celadons of the comedy. Love would have become the dramatic pivot had it not been for Corneille's plays; d'Urfé's characters were "sighing like a furnace" when Corneille took command and gave the posts of honour to "the manly passions"; but not even Corneille could reach such a point at a bound; he attained it by strenuous effort. He began his literary career by writing comedies in verse. Before he produced the Cid, between the years 1629 and 1636, he wrote six plays; an inferior serio-comedy, Clitandre; or, Innocence Delivered, and a tragedy, Médée. To quote M. Lemaître:

We now enter a world which is superficial, because its people have but one object in living: their only occupation, their only pleasure, their only interest is love; all else, all the interests of social life are eliminated… To love… To be loved, … this is the only earthly object, according to the teachings of the drama, and truly, in the long run it becomes tiresome! Such a world must be impossible, because it is artificial; in it hearts are the subjects of all the quarrels; men fight for them, lose them, find them; they are stolen, they are restored to their owners, they are tossed like shuttlecocks through five acts of a play. As they "chassay" to and fro before the reader he loses all sense of their identity, and takes one for the other; in the end the mind is wearied. Excessive handling exhausts the vitality of the subject, and leaves an impression as of something vapid and unsavoury. But Corneille was Cornélien even when he wrote rhymed comedy – he could not have been anything else – and he never would have fallen into rhyme had he not wished to make concessions to the prevailing fashion.⁶⁹

Even when engaged in the most absorbing of intrigues his lovers pretend that they are their own masters, and that they feel only such sentiments as they have elected to feel. At that early day – when Médée and Clitandre were written – the culte of the will had germinated; and time proved that it was predestined to become the chief director of Corneille's work. In La Place Royale Alidor says of Clitandre⁷⁰:

 
Je veux la liberté dans le milieu des fers,
Il ne faut pas servir d'objet, qui nous possède.
Il ne faut point nouirrir d'amour qui ne nous cède,
Je le hais s'il me force, et, quand j'aime, je veux
Que de ma volonté dépendent tous mes voeux,
Que mon feu m'obéisse au lieu de me contraindre,
Que je puisse, à mon gré, l'enflammer ou l'éteindre,
Et toujours en état de disposer de moi,
Donner quand il me plaît et retirer ma foi.
 

In Corneille's plays young girls are raised to believe that they can love, or cease to love, at will; and their pride is interested. Ambition demands that they remain in command of their affections. When old Pleirante perceives that his daughter Célidée is fond of Lysandre he lets her know that he has divined her secret and that he approves of her choice, but Célidée answers proudly:

 
"Monsieur, il est tout, vrai, Son légitime ardor
A tant gagné sur moi que j'en fais de l'estime.
J'aime son entretien, je cheris sa présence;
Mais cela n'est enfin qu'un peu de complaisance,
Qu'un mouvement léger qui passe en moins d'un jour,
'Vos seuls commandements produiront mon amour.'"
 

– Galerie du Palace.

Another ingenuous daughter answers, in an offended tone, when her mother intimates that she seems to be in love with Alcidon, that she

"Knows that appearances are against her! But," she adds, "my heart has gone only as far as I willed that it should go. It is always free; and it holds in reserve a sincere regard for everything that my mother prescribes for me… My wish is yours, do with me what you will." —La Veuve.

The public approved this language. It commended people who married their daughters without consulting their hearts. And who shall say that this way was not the one best fitted for their times? Faith added to necessity engenders miracles, and miracles are what morality demands.

In the great world, the world of the great and the noble, love was mentioned only as Corneille regarded it in his plays. Every one was in love, – or feigned to be in love; on all hands were heard twitterings as of birds in the springtime; but the pretty music ceased when marriage was suggested, for no one had thought of founding a domestic hearth on a sentiment as personal and as ephemeral as love. It was understood that the collective body came first, that the youth – man or maid – belonged to the family, not to self. Contrary to our way of looking at things, it was considered meet and right for the individual to subject himself to a species of public discipline in everything relating to the essential actions of private life; the demand for the public discipline of individuals was based upon the interests of the community. This law – or social tyranny, if you will – covered marriage, and upon occasion Parliament did police duty and enforced it. Parliament forbade the aged Mme. de Pibrac to marry a seventh time – although her six marriages had all been accomplished under normal conditions – because it was supposed that a seventh marriage might entail ridicule. The reason given by Parliament when it forbade Mme. de Limoges to permit her daughter to marry a very honourable man of whom she was fond, and who was supposed to be fond of her, was this: that her guardian and tutor "did not approve of the marriage." The history of this subject of marriage shows us that our great grandmothers did not bear malice against destiny; they were truly Cornéliennes in their conviction that a decorous control of the will constrained the sentiments of an high-born soul, and they married their daughters without scruple, and without anxiety, as freely and as carelessly as they had married themselves. Religion was always close at hand, waiting to staunch the wounds which social exigencies and family selfishness made in the hearts of the unfortunate lovers.

The understanding between Corneille and his readers was perfect; all that he did pleased the playgoers, and when, as he was searching for what we should call "the realistic," he came upon the idea that he might tempt the public taste by presenting a play with a Spanish setting, his critics were well pleased. He wrote the Cid and it was an unqualified success; but its exotic sentiments and the generous breadth of its morals excited vigorous protestations; the piece was met by resistance like that which greeted the appearance of Ibsen's Doll's House.

It is known [said Jules Lemaître] that despite the fact that the popular enthusiasm was prodigious the critics were implacable. Perhaps the criticisms were not all inspired by base envy of the author. I believe in the good faith of the Academy, and to my mind, it seems possible that the criticisms of the Academy were not considered either partial or unjust by every one in France; it may be that there were many thinkers who shared the opinions of Cardinal de Richelieu and the majority of the Academy.

These lines are truth itself; the Cid was an immoral play because it was the apotheosis of passionate love, whose rights it proclaimed at the expense of the most imperious duties. There was enough in the Cid to shock any social body holding firmly fixed opinions adverse to the public exhibition of intimate personal feelings; there were such bodies – the Academy was one of them – they made their own conditions, and the license of the prevailing morals was insignificant to them. The national idea of the superior rights of the family was well-grounded, and when the Academy reproached Chimène because she was "too sensible of the feelings of the lover – too conscious of her love … too unnatural a daughter" – it did no more than echo a large number of voices.

Until he wrote the Cid Corneille was more exigeant than the Academy. The only thing required of lovers by the Academy was that they, the lovers, should govern their feelings and love, or not love, according to the commands of their families or their notaries. The Academy asked nothing of them but to control their actions regardless of their hearts; surely that was indulgence; beyond that there remained but one thing more, – to suppress the mind.

We do not consider it essential [said Sentiments Sur le Cid] to condemn Chimène because she loved her father's murderer; her engagement to Rodrigue had preceded the murder, and it is not within the power of a person to cease loving at will. We blame her because, while she was pursuing Rodrigue, ostensibly to his disadvantage, she was making vows and besieging Heaven in his favour; this was a too evident betrayal of her natural obligations in favour of her passion; it was too openly searching for a cloak to cover her wishes, and making less of the daughter than of the daughter's power to love her lover; in other words, it was cheapening the natural character of the daughter to the advantage of the lover.

The example was especially pernicious, because the genius of the author had rendered it seductive, and because the part which Chimène played assured her of the sympathy of the audience. Corneille was very sensitive to the criticisms of the Academy, and after the Cid appeared something more serious than synthetic form was placed under the knives of the literary doctors; either because the denunciations of his friends bore fruit, or because, in the depths of his heart, he harboured the feelings which the unbridled ardour of the Cid had aroused in the Academy and in the other honest people "who upbraided him, he retreated from the field of sentimental romanticism, and turned his talents in another direction… Nature's triumph over a social convention was never given another occasion to display its graces or to celebrate its truths under his auspices and the love passion was not heard of again until it came forth in Horace (Camille), to be very severely dealt with."

We are led to believe that had Corneille met the subject of the Cid fifteen years later, he would never have granted Chimène and Rodrigue a marriage license.⁷¹ Nor is this all. Having reformed, he was as fanatical as the rest of the reformers; having become Catholic, he was more Catholic than the Pope. He disclaimed love, and would have none of it; he affirmed that it was unworthy of a place in tragedy. In his own words, written some time later:

The dignity of tragedy demands for its subject some great interest of the State, … or some passion more manly than love; as, for instance, ambition or vengeance. If fear is permitted to enter such a work it should be a fear less puerile than that inspired by the loss of a mistress. It is proper to mingle a little love with the more important elements, because love is always very pleasing, and it may serve as a foundation for the other interests and passions that I have named. But if love is permitted to enter tragedy it must be content to take the second rank in the poem, and to leave the first places to the capital passions.

Having chosen his bone in this high-handed fashion, Corneille gnawed at it continually; he could never get enough of it. Love had triumphed in the Cid, but that day was past; in Horace it struggled for existence; in Polyeucte it was vanquished, though not before it had opposed sturdy resistance. It was weak enough in Cinna. After the arrival of Pompée it gave up the struggle, though it was heard piteously murmuring at intervals. When Pompée appeared the ladies disappeared from the drama as if by magic; hardly a woman worthy of the name could be found in literature: a few beings there were draped with the time-worn title, but they were as virile as wild Indians.

A little hardness sets so well upon great souls!

Nothing could be seen but ambition, blood, thirst for power, and Fury, cup-bearer to the God of Vengeance. There was no more love-passion, the manly passions ramped upon the stage like lions, and, with few exceptions, all, male and female, were monsters of the Will.

Long years passed before anything but the Will was heard of. After a long reign the "monsters" disappeared. But they have reappeared in the literature of our century. The worship of the Will, which originated with Corneille, was recently revived by Nietzsche, whose famous "Sur-homme" bears a very strong family resemblance to the Cornélien heroes. "Life," said Nietzsche, "is that which ought always to surpass and to exceed itself." Corneille's personages kept all the springs of their will well in hand. They intended to succeed, to surpass, and to get ahead of themselves if the thing was to be done; and when they were convinced that to surpass themselves was impossible their future looked very dark, and they sold their lives at cut prices, – or threw them in for nothing – letting them go to any one who would carry them away. In the fifth act of the play Horace became very anxious to die because, as he expressed it, he feared that, after what he had done, he should be unable to "surpass himself."

 
"Votre Majesté, Sire, à vu mes trois combats;
Il est bien malaisé qu'un pareil les seconde,
Qu'une autre occasion à celle-ci réponde,
Et que tout mon courage, après de si grands coups,
Parvienne à des succès qui n'aillent au dessous;
Si bien que pour laisser une illustre mémoire,
La mort seule aujourd'hui peut conserver ma gloire."
 

The analogy between the "Sur-homme" and the Cornélien heroes does not end here; logic would not permit that; nothing weakens and enslaves the firm and exalted will as effectually as the sentiment of pity, and both Corneille and Nietzsche enfranchised their ideal humanity. Corneille makes some one assure Horace that there is no great merit in exposing himself to death, but that concession to weakness is of an early period; the advanced man – the man out of the common order – is easily recognised by the fact that he does not hesitate to bring the greatest sufferings upon the beings who are dearest to him.

 
Combattre un ennemi pour le salut de tous,
Et contre un inconnu s'exposer seul aux coups,
D'une simple vertu c'est l'effet ordinaire …
Mais vouloir au public immoler ce qu' on aime,
S'attacher au combat contre un autre soi-même …
Une telle vertu n'appartenait qu' à nous.
 

The lines which follow were written by Nietzsche, and they seem a paraphrase of the discourse of Horace:

To know how to suffer is nothing; feeble women, even slaves, may be past masters in this art. But to stand firm against the assaults of the pain of doubt, to withstand the weakness of remorse when we inflict torment, – this is to be a hero; this is the height of courage; in this lies the first condition of all grandeur.

Corneille's contempt for pity was shared by his contemporaries, and so were his views of marriage as expressed in his first comedies. The seigniors whom he met at the Hôtel de Rambouillet would have blushed to feel compassion. They left the womanish weakness of pity to the inferior beings of the lower orders. The great had always been convinced that elevation in rank raised man above the consciousness of the sufferings of beings of an inferior order; and in the day of Corneille they were fully persuaded that noblemen ought to find higher reasons for justice and for generosity than the involuntary emotions which we of this later day have learned to recognise as symptoms of "nervous disturbance."

I am very little sensible of pity [wrote La Rochefoucauld], and I would prefer not to feel it at all. Nevertheless there is nothing that I would not do for the afflicted, and I believe that I ought to do what I can for them – even to expressing compassion for their woes, for the wretches are so stupid that it does them the greatest good in the world to receive sympathy; but I believe that we ought to confine ourselves to expressing pity; we ought to take great care not to feel it; pity is a passion which is good for nothing in a well-made soul; when entertained it weakens the heart, and therefore we ought to relegate it to beings who need passions to incite them to do things because they are incapable of acting by reason.

The manly characters in Corneille's heroic comedies never lower themselves to the plane of the common people, nor to a plane where they can think as the people think. Corneille was "of the Court" by all his feelings and by all his prejudices, and he shared Mademoiselle's belief that there is a natural difference between the man of quality and the man below the quality, because generous virtues are mingled with the blood which runs in noble veins, while the blood of the man of lower birth is mingled with lower passions. Being a true courtier, Corneille believed that above the two varieties of the human kind – the quality and the lesser people – Providence set the order of Princes who are of an essence apart, elect, and quasi-divine.

In Don Sancho d'Aragon Carlos did his best to prove that he was the son of a fisherman. His natural splendour gave the lie to his pretence. "Impossible that he could have sprung from blood formed by Heaven of nothing but clay."

Don Lope affirms that it cannot be true.

 
Non, le fils d'un pêcheur ne parle point ainsi …
Je le soutien, Carlos, vous n'êtes point son fils,
La justice du ciel ne peut l'avoir permis,
Les tendresses du sang vous font une imposture,
Et je démens pour vous la voix de la nature.
 

He discovers that Carlos is the son of a King of Aragon. His extraordinary merit is explained and consistency is satisfied. On the whole Corneille did nothing but develop the maxims and idealise the models offered to his observation on all sides; as much may be said of the plots of his great plays. His subjects were suggested by the events of the day. Had there been no Mme. de Chevreuse and no conspiracies against Richelieu there could have been no Cinna. And it is possible that there might not have been such a work as Polyeucte had there been no Jansenism.⁷²

Corneille did not understand actuality as we understand it. His tragedy is never a report of real occurrences, that is evident. But he was besieged, encompassed, possessed, by the life around him, and it left impressions in his mind which worked out and mingled with every subject upon which he entered. He was guided by his impressions, – though he did not know it, – and by their influence he was enabled to find a powerful tragedy in a few indifferent lines dropped by a mediocre historian, or by an inferior narrator of insignificant events. His surroundings furnished him with precise representations, made real to his mind by the vague abstractions of history. In the forms and conditions of the present he saw and felt all the past.⁷³

His constant contact with the world of his times favoured the action of his mind upon the minds of his auditors. He exhibited to them their passions, their thoughts, their feelings, their different ways of looking upon social duty, upon politics, and upon the part played, or to be played, by the aristocracy in the general movement. The people of Paris loved the play because it exhibited openly, in different, but always favourable lights, everything in which they had any interest. In it they saw their own life, their aims, their needs, their longing to be great and admirable in all things.⁷⁴ They saw depicted all that they had dreamed of being, all that they had wished to be; and something more vital than love of literature animated their transports and lighted the fond glances fixed on the magic mirror reflecting the ideals they so ardently caressed. The people listened to Corneille's plays and trembled as they now tremble at the sound of La Marseillaise. It has been said that they did not understand Racine; if they did not, their lack of comprehension was natural. Racine was of another generation, and he was not in sympathy with his forerunner. Mme. de Sévigné was accused of false judgment in her criticism of Bejazet,⁷⁵ but she also was of another school. She had little sympathy for Racine's heroes. She understood Corneille's heroes, and could not listen to his verses without the tremor of the heart which we all feel when something recalls the generous fancies of our youth. The general impression was that Corneille was inspired by the image of Mlle. de Montpensier when he wrote Pulcherie (1672), an heroic comedy in which an empress stifles the cries of her heart that she may listen to the voice of glory.

The throne lifts the soul above all tenderness

It is not impossible that Corneille had some such thought in his mind. Certainly Mademoiselle was a model close at hand. One day when her bold poltroon of a father told her, in the course of a sharp reproof, that she was compromising her house for the pleasure of "playing the heroine," she answered haughtily and truthfully:

"I do not know what it is to be anything but a heroine! I am of birth so high that no matter what I might do, I never could be anything but great and noble. And they may call it what they like, I call it following my inclination and taking my own road. I was born to take no other!"

Given such inclinations, and living in the Louvre, where Corneille's plays were constantly enacted by Queen Anne's order, Mademoiselle was accustomed to regard certain actions as the reverse of common and ignoble, and to consider certain other actions "illustrious."

The justice of super-exalted sentiments was proclaimed by nobility, and they who were disposed to closely imitate the examples set by the literary leader of the day ran the risk of losing all sense of proportions and of substance. Mademoiselle did lose that sense, nor was she the only one to do so among all the children of quality who were permitted to abuse their right to see the play. Through the imprudent fashion of taking young children to the theatre, the honest Corneille, who taught the heroism of duty, the poetry of sacrifice, the value of strong will and self-control, was not absolutely innocent of the errors in judgment and in moral sense by which the wars of the Fronde were made possible. When he attempted to lift the soul of France above its being, he vitiated a principle in the unformed national brain.