The theatre of Jean Mairet: The metamorphosis of sensuality [Reprint 2018 ed.] 9783111343822, 9789027931016

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C.H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

Series Practica, 97

THE THEATRE OF JEAN MAIRET The Metamorphosis of Sensuality

by

BURF KAY Carleton

University

1975

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1975 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers. Illustrations on cover and page II are taken from the first edition of Silvanire (1631).

ISBN 90 279 3101 1

Printed in the Netherlands

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express sincere thanks to the Canada Council for two fellowships which made possible the research for this study, and to Carleton University for financial assistance in its publication. I would very much like to thank Donald Pattison for correcting all the mistakes in the proofs that I didn't see. Most of all, I would like to thank Professor Judd Hubert for the insight and encouragement which he gave to it so generously. B.K.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

V

Introduction

1

1. The Dawn of Sensuality

6

2. A Dream of Love and Death

13

3. A Pool of Monsters

20

4. The Game of Love

25

5. A Marvelous Disorder

33

6. A Time of Passion and Judgment

38

7. Death is a Fiery Sunset

46

8. La fausse route

52

9. The Pirate Prince

58

10. A Look Back in Anger

62

11. Athenais and The Balance Scale

68

Commentary on Athenais by Judd Hubert

77

12. The Happy Ending

78

Conclusion

83

Bibliography

90

Index of Proper Names

93

INTRODUCTION

What does Jean Mairet have to say to us? Jean Mairet, as Lancaster has pointed out in his monument to French classical theatre, A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century,1 deserves a significant place in the history of French theatre. Because his plays were successful and influential, he helped to prepare the way for Corneille and the development of later seventeenthcentury French theatre, which French scholars have long considered a pinnacle in the history of French civilization. Even more so than Théophile and Racan, Mairet introduced into his characters a certain amount of moral or psychological complexity. As a technician, he moved beyond not only the giant of baroque drama, Alexandre Hardy, but also beyond his two contemporaries. Despite similarities between Théophile's Pyrame et Thisbé2 and Mairet's Chryséide et Arimand,3 which have been well documented by Marsan 4 and Lancaster,5 Mairet was able to make his first play move with more energy than Théophile (this, despite the fact that Théophile was supposed to have learned his trade as a hack playwright for a travelling theatrical company). Mairet had another quality, this one often associated with ambitious courtiers : he was able to spot trends in fashion and taste. Mairet came to Paris from Besançon a little before 1625 (no one has been able to discover exactly when), and, like any young man from the provinces who wants to succeed in the capital, probably took 1

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929), Part I. Ed. J. Hankiss (Strasbourg: Heitz et Cie., 1933). Produced around 1621, Pyrame et Thisbé was first published in 1623 as part of the "Seconde partie des Oeuvres de Théophile". 3 Ed. Lancaster (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1925). First produced in 1625, Chryséide et Arimand was published without Mairet's permission by Jacques Besongne, Rouen, 1630. 4 In his critical edition of Sylvie (Paris : Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1905). 5 A History of French Dramatic Literature..., Part I, 236-241. 2

2

INTRODUCTION

careful note, among the hundreds of personalities he must have seen or met, of the most interesting people around, as well as a wealthy patron who could help him advance his career. This ability to spot trends, to foresee directions in public taste, is no little accomplishment, as Apollinaire and Diaghilev have shown us in more recent times, and until his fatal confrontation with Corneille over Le Cid, Mairet seems to have possessed such a gift. He saw the ideal patron in Henri de Montmorency, and the most interesting group of poets and writers, - among them Théophile and Saint-Amant - working under his patronage. Mairet probably saw Pyrame et Thisbé (he was later accused of stealing from it for his Sophonisbe) and most probably saw that this was where Parisian theatre was moving: away from the overloaded plots and hyperbolic language of baroque theatre, toward a new, more refined theatrical expression. Mairet probably learned some of his poetic language through contact with disciples of Malherbe, because his syntax is clearer, his language more elegant than Hardy's. He began his career with six different types of plays, one after another: a tragi-comedy, a pastoral tragi-comedy, a pastoral, a comedy, a heroic tragi-comedy, until in 1634 he hit the peak with Sophonisbe, which most scholars consider the first classic French tragedy. In ten years Mairet had established himself as the major dramatist in Paris. Mairet seems to have survived the loss of his most important patron, for after the execution in 1632 of the Duc de Montmorency, he managed to obtain a pension from Cardinal Richelieu. He produced two more tragedies, Marc-Antoine and Le Grand et dernier Solyman, both in 1635. But by 1637 he faced a formidable challenge in Pierre Corneille's Le Cid, which, whatever critics said against it, took the city by storm, and set a new landmark in French theatre. Mairet could see that this was the next challenger to beat, and took up his pen against Corneille. This proved to be a costly mistake, for if Mairet had been as good at spotting trends in 1637 as he had been in 1625, he might have learned something valuable from his rival: Corneille, vain and ill-tempered as he no doubt was, possessed a shrewd dramatic instinct and an extremely sound mind. Mairet looked at the shell, and forgot the meat inside: he saw that Corneille had succeeded with a tragi-comedy {Le Cid was called a tragedy only later) and decided to go back to that genre. His last four plays included three tragi-comedies and a pastoral. Unfortunately they met with little success, and after Sidonie in 1640 he decided to leave the theatre for a career in diplomacy. Since both Lancaster and before him, Gaston Bizos,6 have written 6

Étude sur la vie et les oeuvres de Jean de Mairet (Paris: Thorin, 1877).

INTRODUCTION

3

extensively of the part Mairet played in the development of seventeenthcentury French theatre, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a different approach, - to see if there were some dominant theme or themes in his plays that could be explored, or even recurring images. Three of his plays contain a dominant image: a solar metaphor in Marc-Antoine, an image of a road in Solyman, and a balance scale in Athénaïs. But there seemed to be no metaphor or theme which would link all twelve plays into a coherent structure. It was Professor Judd Hubert who suggested the notion of values as a connecting thread for a study of Mairet's theatre. In a letter commenting on Athénaïs (which appears on page 77 of this study), he suggested, rather than examining the dramatic structure of the plays, looking at them in terms of their ethical and esthetic dynamics. What kind of a world does Mairet create? What are the criteria of success and failure within this world? In the case of Athénaïs, does the notion of a balance scale imply a reconciliation of opposing values? The idea of values leads us back to the generation of the 1620's, when Mairet first came to Paris. The young writers he met through Montmorency all more or less shared ideals which we now call "Libertin". In reading Antoine Adam's Théophile de Viau et la libre pensée française en 1620, one is struck by the similarity between the ideals of the Libertins, and much of the radical sensibility of young people today: a mistrust of institutions and authority, a desire for freedom of expression, a love of sensual pleasures, and a belief in the natural goodness of mankind. Adam sums it up as follows : Retour à l'état de nature, à l'âge d'or de l'humanité primitive, quand la passion de l'or, quand l'orgueil et l'ambition étaient inconnus, quand seul l'amour, ou comme disaient ces libertins, quand la sainte amitié était le lien social par excellence. A ce monde dont ils rêvaient, ils opposaient la société de leur temps, ses barrières innombrables, ses castes, l'exploitation du faible par le fort. Ils bafouaient l'esprit militaire aussi bien que l'orgueil de la naissance, ils osaient s'en prendre même, sinon directement à l'institution royale, du moins à la mystique monarchique.7

This ideal naturally posed a serious challenge to the forces of authority, which found their most coherent expression in the personality and statesmanship of Cardinal Richelieu. As Adam has pointed out, the turning point came in 1625 with the arrest and trial of Théophile, and although Richelieu did not apparently exert any direct personal influence on the 7

(Paris: Droz, 1935), 433.

4

INTRODUCTION

trial, his overall policy was directed toward crushing any expression of individual authority. Théophile became the scapegoat of a whole generation : after his arrest, Libertins were forced to keep their opinions much more to themselves. Charles Sorel, who had given a unique literary expression to Libertin ideals in his popular novel L'Histoire comique de Francion, first published in 1623, reprinted the same novel two years later with most of the Libertin passages cut out. He even turned his back on the Libertins enough to make fun of their ideas in his satirical novel, Le Berger extravagant, published in 1627, whose hero Lysis is, in some ways, a simple-minded Libertin. For a young man (he was born around 1600), Sorel aged very quickly, and devoted the rest of his long life to defending literary and political orthodoxy. 8 Those who did not become subservient to the state simply went underground. As Pintard has pointed out in Le Libertinage érudit,9 a more intellectual vein of libertinism continued through the first half of the seventeenth century in men like La Motte le Vayer, Naudé, Diodati and Gassendi. They were interested not so much in promoting sensual pleasure as in questioning intellectual and spiritual authority. Gassendi had taught his students at the Collège Royal to mistrust any ready-made system of thought, particularly one which tried to impose a rigid order on human experience, and in this he found himself in direct opposition to Descartes' rationalism, based on the unique supremacy of reason. His search for à philosophy which would take into account more variables of human experience led him to adopt a version of Epicureanism which we may call Christian Epicureanism, an attempt to reconcile the two dominant forces in French sensibility - Christianity and classical antiquity. It is this problem which Mairet seems to be dramatizing in symbolic form in Athénaïs. It would be presumptuous to insist that this desire for reconciliation represented a dominant trend of thought or action in seventeenthcentury France: Mairet's play was not a success, and Gassendi's influence was hampered partly because his major works were written in Latin. I mention it partly because it helps us to understand the moral and intellectual climate of Mairet's theatre, and partly because I find it a much more attractive ideal than the Cartesian cogito. (As a matter of fact, the preponderant importance attached to the Discours de la Méthode dates from the late nineteenth century, when French scholars were rather desperately searching for a figure in their past who might hold his own 8

Cf. "A Writer Turns Against Literature: Charles Sorel's Le Berger Revue de /' Université d'Ottawa, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Avril-Juin, 1973). 9 (Paris: Boivin, 1943).

extravagant",

INTRODUCTION

5

against the much more significant contributions to human thought of German and English philosophers.) However, if we seek in Mairet's plays for a consistent body of Libertin opinion, we will be disappointed. Pyrame et Thisbe is in this respect much more of a polemic than anything of Mairet's: one has but to reread Theophile's tragedy to see the number of Libertin opinions it contained the hatred of money and its corrupting power, the evils of tyranny, the virtue of friendship and of course the beauties of sensual love. It is perhaps this sensual quality that links Mairet to the Libertins, rather than independence in thought or action (Mairet, it must be remembered, was essentially a courtier who needed money and influence to succeed). From the evidence of his plays, the Libertins' promotion of sensual pleasure as an important human value touched a responsive chord within Mairet himself. He seemed to possess an intuitive awareness of the sensual nature of man, and the conflicts which arise from it. Sensual pleasure finds itself at odds not only with forces outside oneself, but also within, and Mairet was to examine, in different plays, different aspects of this conflict. His attitude does not necessarily develop logically or consistently - in fact one is keenly aware with him that his plays, taken as a whole, resist being organized into a coherent intellectual or dramatic structure. Perhaps this, too, shows an affinity with the earlier Libertins a resistance to ready-made systems and even to intellectual discipline.

1 THE DAWN OF SENSUALITY

Mairet's theatre opens in 1625 with Chryséide et Arimand, a tragi-comedy adapted from an episode of d'Urfé's L'Astrée.1 The main setting and central characters of L'Astrée are of course those of a pastoral, but many of its episodic adventures take us away from the pastoral setting of Forez and into a world of adventure, intrigue, war and violence. Indeed, one is very conscious in d'Urfé's novel of a peaceful little haven surrounded by and only partially isolated from a much larger world of violent and often predatory aristocrats. In these episodes love nearly always comes into conflict with political ambition, greed or just plain lust, and it is one of the well-known conventions of the novel that love nearly always triumphs. That is to say, true love, quite divorced from self-interest or gain. The plot of Chryséide et Arimand is fairly simple in outline. Hero and heroine have known each other and been in love for some time as the play opens. Their parents had almost agreed to their marriage, when Chryséide and several other maidens were captured by a warrior king, Gondebaut, who was completely smitten by her charms. Arimand is now also a prisoner of the same king. A faithful friend helps them both to escape, one after another. After an ecstatic meeting they separate, and Chryséide is accidentally recaptured by the king. Gondebaut is not entirely heartless : he decides to hold a religious sacrifice to see whether the gods approve of his love for Chryséide. If he cannot convince her with that, he will try violence. But at a crucial moment Chryséide seizes the sacrificial knife and swears to kill herself unless the king abandons his plan. Arimand and his faithful friend arrive on the scene, and, confronted one after another with the devotion of the friend, the bravery of the hero in coming to plead for his love, and the heroic gesture of the heroine, King Gondebaut breaks down and frees them all. It can be seen that the main struggle of the play is between two forces, 1

Honoré d'Urfé, L'Astrée, nouv. éd. Hugues Vaganay (Lyon: Masson, 1925), Troisième partie, 428-468.

THE DAWN OF SENSUALITY

7

the moral force of love and the temporal force of political power. King Gondebaut is very conscious of the power he wields : Moy qui puis d'un clin d'oeil perdre tout un païs Et ranger sous mes loix mes voisins esbaïs; 2

as well as the limits to this power: Bien que tout me complaise, et sur terre, et sur mer, Je trouve en mon destin je ne sçay quoy d'amer; Vainqueur je suis vaincu... (II, 2, 583-85)

The limit being of course his unrequited love for Chryséide. The one object in his kingdom which he cannot control, she is the one thing he absolutely must have. The king thinks of himself as a reasonable man; he does not wish to force her : La contrainte en amour n'est jamais de saison, Je veux que la douceur l'ameine à la raison. (II, 2, 683-84)

He feels that she cannot help but be impressed by his grandeur as a king and his great wealth. How could she resist luxury and status? The king's confident provides an answer, once the king has left the stage : Le Roy croit fermement que l'éclat de sa pompe Doit charmer cette fille, et c'est ce qui le trompe; Car depuis qu'un esprit vivement obstiné, A l'amour d'un premier a son cœur destiné, Depuis que cette ardeur a passé dans son ame, On ne sçauroit jamais en divertir la flame, Il brusle opiniastre, et les plus doux appas D'un Empire ou d'un Ciel ne le changeroient pas. (II, 2, 713-20)

In this passage we see that in addition to love and temporal power, there is a third sphere of influence, another power which must be reckoned with, and that is heavenly power. Both earthly forces invoke the gods, particularly in moments of extreme anguish. When Gondebaut discovers that Chryséide has escaped, his rage knows no bounds : Je m'en veux prendre aux Dieux, c'est là que mes coleres, Comme sujets plus hauts, seront d'autant plus claires, Je ne suis pas moins qu'eux, Monarque souverain, Tous mes commandemens s'écrivent en airain; 2

Mairet, Chryséide et Arimand, éd. Lancaster (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1925), II, 2, 579-80. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

8

THE DAWN OF SENSUALITY

J'ay puissance comme eux sur le destin des hommes, Ils sont Dieux seulement dans l'erreur où nous sommes; Le vulgaire les craint, lors qu'un peu de vapeur, De tonnerres, d'éclairs, et des vents luy fait peur; Toy, le plus grand de tous qui faits trembler la terre, Mais que je ne crains point non plus que ton tonnerre; Mes amoureux desseins par toy sont traversez, Et par moy tes autels sont aussi renversez: Je veux que désormais du lever de l'Aurore Jusques à l'Occident, tout le monde m'adore... (IV, 1, 1003-16) Jupiter is seen by the king very like an appointed minister of the crown who, if he fails to fulfill his functions, can easily be replaced. Gondebaut gives every intention of taking over this particular portfolio and administering it himself. Thus the gods, as well as the girl he loves, are to the king simply extensions of his earthly power. 3 As might be imagined, the gods fare a bit better in the hands of the lovers. When Chryséide is captured for the second time, Arimand despairingly accuses the gods of deserting him, but he never thinks of overthrowing them. Love, unlike political power, is not in competition with the gods; it is a moral force which needs their support. Arimand's worst anguish arises when his friend suggests that they should maybe forget Chryséide. Forget her! To a faithful lover, forgetfulness is the worst possible sin, equivalent to blasphemy, and such a suggestion calls forth Arimand's one really violent outburst in the play : Ainsi donques barbare, ainsi tu me trahis; Perfide, est-ce donc là, ce conseil de Megere Que ton lâche courage à mon amour suggéré? Vous Dieux qui punissez les crimes des humains, Si vous avez des yeux, si vous avez des mains, Ne me punissez pas de moins que de la foudre, Si jamais à ce poinct vous me voyez résoudre : Apres m'avoir donné de si fidélles marques, Je croys qu'elle pourroit refuser des Monarques ; Ne m'en parles jamais, si tu ne veux sentir Les plus aigres remords d'un cuisant repentir. (V, 1, 1378-90)

In a hierarchy of values established by the lover the gods would be su3

Adam found this tirade of Gondebaut's "d'une telle violence qu'on y soupçonnerait volontiers de l'athéisme" (Théophile de Viau, 421). It is, however, the first and last outburst of this kind in Mairet's theatre.

THE DAWN OF SENSUALITY

9

preme; love would take its place somewhat lower than the gods, but infinitely higher than kingly power. Words such as "punissez", "fidelles", "remords" and "repentir" underline the religious significance of the lovers' faithfulness. They see moral values as having an objective reality, while the king sees them as meaningless symbols to be manipulated for his own satisfaction. Though the two sides have opposed feelings toward the gods, they are both in agreement that action must take place here and now. One's destiny is one's own to shape. Thus the king would like to have the consent of the gods, but is prepared to take matters into his own hands. Arimand is a faithful lover, but not a passive one; against all better judgment he goes to face a king known for his violent temper, to ask for Chryséide's freedom. Chryséide takes matters into her own hands when she threatens to kill herself rather than submit to Gondebaut. While these elements are present in d'Urfé's novel, it must be recognized that, from the dozens of episodes available for dramatization, Mairet chose this one, in which man, by his own actions, is able significantly to change his destiny. Authentic moral action is able to take precedence over temporal power. One might suppose from the above analysis that Mairet's world is solely one of noble (or ignoble) actions and moral choices. Such an inference would ignore the fact that one of the elements in his world is a strong vein of sensuality running through it. While heroic actions are accomplished in the name of love, and while this love is reinforced by merit and generosity, the initial impulse, a physical attraction between two charming young people, is never lost, and never something to be suppressed or denied in favor of a higher value. There is no contradiction between pure love and sensual love; love to Mairet is both pure and sensual, in his early plays at least.4 We take it for granted in pastorals that the couples are young and handsome: Mairet considers it worthwhile, when introducing his hero, to describe his adolescent beauty : On ne verra jamais un corps si bien formé, Nature ne le fit que pour le voir aimé; 4

In his unpublished doctoral dissertation "The Intellectual Art of the Early Corneille" (Harvard University, 1955), Lawrence Harvey compares Corneille and Mairet in their treatment of reason and the senses: "In placing ultimate trust in reason, Corneille certainly does not exclude the senses, but the focus shifts to the necessity of control by reason. When reason has won its battle and the time comes for enjoyment, the play ends" (p. 319); ... "Mairet does not treat the senses systematically as the source of error as Corneille does" (p. 332);... "The conquest of the senses, the sacrifice of desire to a higher ideal does not occur as a problem in Sylvie" (p. 294).

10

THE DAWN OF SENSUALITY

L'audace et la douceur partageoient son visage Et pas un d'entre nous n'égalloit son corsage: A peine toutesfois l'or d'un premier coton De petit poil naissant luy doroit le menton. (I, 1, 127-32)

We tend to forget sometimes that the lovers in pastorals are rarely over twenty, and usually between fifteen and eighteen; Mairet reminds us of this. The sensual attraction of the two lovers is made all the stronger in that the author keeps them apart during most of the play. They are united briefly in the fourth act, then separated again until the last scene of the final act. Increased by this tension of separation, their fears and desires take on a very sensual, even erotic, character, particularly those of Chryséide, at a time when she does not know whether Arimand is alive or dead: Et toy cher Arimand, dont les jeunes années Trop tost pour mes plaisirs se virent terminées, Reviens, reviens à moy de ces funestes lieux, Que je m'acquitte au moins de mes derniers adieux; Reviens, apparoist moy, fantosme desirable Tout pasle et tout sanglant tu me seras aimable; Mille amoureux baisers nos lèvres coleront Et nos esprits contens ainsi se mesleront. (II, 1, 381-92)

One is struck by an intense ambiguity in the passage, between Chryséide's greatest fear — that Arimand might be dead — and her desire to "die" together with him. There is just a hint that his being dead ("fantosme desirable") would even make him more attractive. These semi-conscious fears and desires have all kinds of associations with darkness, sleep, and dreams : Cent fois durant la nuict il erre dans ma couche, Cent fois il m'est advis que son ombre me touche, (II, 1, 457-58)

and though such love-death fantasies are swept away as quickly as possible ("tout cela n'est qu'une illusion"), they nevertheless remain as a sort of substrata of sensuality, charming and frightening at the same time. Thus sensuality, with its underside of eroticism, forms one of the notable elements of Mairet's world, and one which we shall explore through further manifestations. The Oxford English Dictionary gives five definitions of sensuality.

THE DAWN OF SENSUALITY

11

They are: 1. "The part of the nature of man that is concerned with the senses, chiefly the animal instincts and appetites; the lower nature as distinguished from reason; also occasionally the faculty of sensation. 2. The lower or animal nature regarded as a source of evil; the lusts of the flesh. 3. The following of the lower nature in preference to the higher; absorption in the things of sense. 4. Excessive fondness for, or vicious indulgence in, the pleasures of the senses. 5. Lasciviousness, unchastity". As we can see, these definitions do much more than describe, they make fairly heavy judgments on man's different faculties : we have upper and lower faculties, and the animal part of our nature must be kept carefully under control, or it will dominate and perhaps devour us. Reason and the senses are not seen as working together harmoniously, — they are by nature antagonists. "Je pense, donc je suis", said Descartes, and although no one else has given it in such a lapidary expression, a great deal of western civilization has tacitly approved of the idea. If we remove the dictionary's moral judgments, we find that sensuality has to do with man's body and his feelings. It is not all of man, but it is a part. This may be slightly premature, but the notion of sensuality that forms the title of this work is best exemplified in Mairet's second play Sylvie: a warm sunny Mediterranean world, of young beautiful people making love, a happy world, almost without guilt. Very much as poets of the Renaissance had done, Mairet is trying to recreate a world free from the Christian idea of sin. Which brings us to the notion of eroticism. The dictionary is even less help here: "erotic spirit or character". And erotic is "of or pertaining to the passion of love; concerned with or treating of love; amatory". After taking away part of the dictionary's meanings of sensuality, we shall have to add to its definition of eroticism. Here we can take into account Georges Bataille's investigations in his famous work, UÉrotisme. It is almost impossible to give a short clear definition of his concept of eroticism. He calls it "une approbation de la vie, jusque dans la mort", 5 which is an incredibly dense summation: it takes the whole book to explain what that means. But one essential part of it has to do with taboo. Erotic pleasure seems to increase when we feel we are infringing a taboo. And the stronger the taboo, the stronger the pleasure, ... death, of course, being the ultimate pleasure. If you consider sexual pleasure an undesirable force in the world, you may accept Bataille's idea of eroticism. But even if we do not, it must be admitted that many people see it in this 5

(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1957), 17.

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THE DAWN OF SENSUALITY

way. If sensuality belongs in a warm Utopian adolescence of delicious foods and happy love-making, it has a darker side, like a knife threatening to cut across a beautiful body, that we may call eroticism. Reviens, reviens a moy, fantosme desirable Tout pasle et tout sanglant tu me seras aimable. (II, 1, 389-90) Remember that pasle in seventeenth-century poetic language nearly always referred to a deathly pallor: Chryseide sees her young lover bleeding and dying, and she immediately imagines herself making love with him, even if she uses the words "Et nos esprits contens ainsi se mesleront". It is not hard to imagine a good actress giving that line a perfectly refined, and at the same time distinctly sexual connotation. Which brings us to another aspect of eroticism: the fact that it exists mostly in the mind. Erotic art, erotic poetry conjure up beautiful love-objects for us, but they keep us at a distance from the real thing, and our pleasure is coloured by a very definite tension, — tension between desire and reality, or even between pleasure and taboos. Also, when you know that erotica can become the object of police action and lawsuits, you know that a certain amount of danger can often accompany the pursuit of pleasure. It is this quality of danger, the fear almost of blood, that Mairet has seen and shown us: this is what I mean by the erotic underside of sensuality. Actually he did not choose to explore the more sinister aspects of eroticism until several years later, in his tragedy Solyman, and then only in a particularly twisted form. But as he was to show us in another play, Virginie, erotic longings could take a sinister shape in the outside world.

2 A D R E A M O F LOVE A N D DEATH

One is perhaps more conscious in Sylvie (1626) than in other pastorals of a distinction between the two worlds of court and pastoral, because the hero, Thélame, is not a shepherd, but a young prince who has fallen in love with a shepherdess. As he explains to his sister: Sçache donc, chere sœur, que ce cœur insensible, Ce cœur qu'on a tenu si long temps invincible, Que tant de beaux objets dont se pare la Cour N'avoient peu rendre encor susceptible d'amour, D e libre qu'il estoit incessamment souspire, Esclave devenu de l'amoureux empire.1

Although he uses the traditional vocabulary of the lover enslaved by love, Thélame somehow feels freer in the chains of love than he ever had at court. Sylvie has all the grace and natural charm which he found lacking in court ladies : Les dons d'ame & de corps dont elle est bien pourveuë Charment à mesme temps & l'esprit & la veuë, Son visage où jamais ne s'applique le fard Ignore les attraits qu'on emprunte de l'art, On n'y voit point blanchir la ceruse & le plâtre Comme en ceux qu'aujourd'huy nostre Cour idolâtre.

(I, 4, 313-18) Fresh, innocent, natural — Sylvie embodies all the qualities which made the pastoral world such a desirable escape from the artificiality and pretensions, to say nothing of the responsibilities of court life. The plot, again a simple one, turns on two forces opposing this love : one, a rival shepherd who tricks Sylvie into thinking that Thélame is unfaithful, and the other more important, the king's opposition in the form of a magic spell cast upon the lovers. Both obstacles are overcome, 1

Mairet, Sylvie, éd. Jules Marsan (Paris: Droz, 1932), I, 4, 285-90. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

14

A DREAM OF LOVE AND DEATH

and the play ends very happily with no less than three marriages projected. The sensual quality of love plays an even larger part than in Chryséide et Arimand. Thélame's rejection of princely responsibilities serves to throw into sharp relief his choice of love as a sensual pleasure, whereas Arimand seemingly had no conflict between love and responsibility. Time and space in Sylvie, as in nearly all pastorals, are naturally propitious : flowers, trees, birds, animals, everything is waking up, stirring, budding, growing. It is morning, springtime, adolescence — the time of day, of the year, of life, all suggest love. Even the sunlight is trying to force its presence on the wood : Ce bois qui de mon heur fut la cause premiere Sera tantost forcé des traicts de la lumiere. (I, 2, 101-02)

However, although the daylight is getting brighter and brighter, the aura of sensuality enveloping the young people is still associated with an earlier hour, an innocence, almost a preconscious state. As d'Ambillou, a predecessor of Mairet, had put it, Un plaisir qui aux veines monte Avant que l'esprit l'ait conceu.2 Is this not the key to the fascination which the pastoral held for audiences for almost half a century? A longing to return to the complete spontaneity of sensual pleasure, before that fatal moment when one's intellect apprehends, names, classifies and judges the experience. If only one could separate feeling and knowing, or better still, live with both of them in harmony ... Of course, part of the charm of a pastoral is the very tension that exists between the two faculties : one is never really able to separate them. Thus when Sylvie says, "Pleust aux Dieux vissiez vous mon ame toute nuë / Pour juger de sa flame", and Thélame replies with the famous line that many found in bad taste, "Elle m'est trop connuë, / J'aimerois beaucoup mieux te voir le corps tout nu", his reply is too sudden, too conscious, and she is shocked. Thélame next approaches more gently, with the traditional invitation to his love to go with him and rest in a shaded grove: Ce bocage prochain nous invite à propos A la commodité du frais & du repos: Couchons-nous sur ces fleurs, l'herbe & la feuille verte 2

D'Ambillou, Sidère (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1609), Acte I, 14.

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S'offrent à nous servir de lict & de couverte. Icy le moindre object au plaisir nous convie. Icy les ennemis des douceurs de la vie Ne viennent point troubler le repos d'un Amant. (I, 5, 435-47)

Like Théophile in his ode, La Solitude, where the progression of the lover is farther and farther away from prying eyes and conscious minds, so Thélame, who has retreated away from the court, now wants to retreat farther away from consciousness into the realm of the senses : Souffre sans murmurer que ma bouche idolâtre Imprime ses baisers dessus ton sein d'albâtre. O transports ! ô plaisirs du crime separez, Où voulez vous ravir mes esprits esgarez, Mon Ame, mon Soleil, mon Ange tutelaire? Ha! ta douceur me tue à force de me plaire, Mes sens esvanouys d'aise me vont quitter, Si tu ne prens le soin de me ressusciter. (I, 5, 473-80)

The ambiguity between feeling and knowing creates much of the tension of this repartee, a tension which is only partly allayed by the half serious, half jesting tone. Sylvie picks up the "dying of pleasure" idea and turns it into a light-hearted reproach : Si tu mourois durant cet aimable transport, Sans doute je serois coulpable de ta mort, (I, 5, 483-84)

which, in a playful context, carries the ambiguity about as far as it can go. (Another tension exists of course between the words and the actions they describe: although Thélame and Sylvie are presumably dressed, and standing talking to each other, Thélame seems to be describing his pleasure in the very act of making love to her.) However, although Thélame had referred to "plaisirs du crime separez", both he and Sylvie are aware that their love-play is set within certain limits, and that the closer one gets to them one's pleasures increase to the same degree as one's fears. Sylvie expresses her fears by saying that someone might see them, and though Thélame tries to calm her by telling her that their secret is safe from the world, in fact almost everyone, including the king, knows about it. The little pastoral world, which seems to be such a complete escape from the conscious world, very often takes on the characteristics of a glass house where only those outside can see in. In this sense, it is also very like a stage, where seeing is a theatrical as well as an intellectual activity. Try as

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they will, the lovers cannot prevent consciousness from impinging itself on them, from the inside (they see themselves, on the most part very happily) or from the outside (they are seen by others and by the audience, but enviously, even in a predatory manner). A state free of consciousness may take the form of a dream, again a traditional feature of pastorals. Sylvie's mother has an extensive dream of some unknown danger which threatens her daughter and then passes away. Florestan, the brave knight who ultimately breaks the fatal spell on the lovers, dreams of the daughter of the king, whom he loves. The spell itself has many qualities of a dream. Misunderstanding or alienation can also be expressed in terms of a loss of consciousness; this happens in the incident created by Thélame's rival to make Sylvie jealous. When she acts very coldly toward Thélame, because she has been taken in by the deception, he says: Tu ne me respons mot, je croy naïfvement Que tu n'as plus de voix ny plus de mouvement. (Ill, 3, 1071-72)

This deception, or illusion, has alienated the lovers so that Thélame feels that Sylvie has lost contact with reality, and he cannot understand what she is talking about : Je meure sur le champ si mes sens interdis Comprennent rien du tout de ce que tu me dis. (III, 3, 1091-92)

In this case the danger is not serious, for the misunderstanding is soon cleared up. But it provides, in miniature, a foretaste of the climax of the play. Illusion, loss of consciousness, sensuality and theatre all combine to the highest possible degree in the liebestod spell of the last act. Thélame's father, the king of Sicily, furious at his son's disobedience in courting "une fille des champs", has had a magician put a spell on the two lovers, which consists of a kind of alternating death trance : Ce maudit sortilege est fait de telle sorte, Que ce Prince par fois croit sa Bergere morte, Et dans cette creance il souffre des tourments Qui ne sont bien conus que des parfaits amants: Et d'autres fois aussi la plaintive Sylvie Pense qu'entre ses bras il a perdu la vie, Elle pleure, elle crie, & forme des discours Qui toucheroient le cœur des Tygres & des Ours. (V, 1, 1797-1804)

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If the king had any notions of recalling his son to his responsibilities, he certainly chose a punishment that had the opposite effect, for the torments which the lovers go through only intensify their love for each other. A key to the royal motives may lie in an imprecation by Thélame when he learns that his father's guards have taken Sylvie away : he calls his father a "vieux rêveur impuissant". If the king, who may be assumed to have passed the age of love, is in fact motivated by jealously more than reasons of state, then this particular form of punishment fulfills all kinds of hidden desires without shocking the audience's sensibilities. It allows the lovers to express their love in terms much more daring than would otherwise be accepted. It allows the king to give full vent to voyeuristic tendencies: immobilized himself, he can watch the sufferings of two healthy, attractive young people who are themselves temporarily reduced to inaction. Finally the whole scene fits in perfectly with the very essence, one might say the very metaphor, of theatre, where an audience, also immobile, watches actors perform on a stage. In this case, the kingfillsa double rôle of producer and spectator, since he is watching a spectacle that he has created. That the complaints of the spellbound lovers have much of the quality of a theatrical performance is underlined by a page who says: Sire, les deux Amants dans leur mal rigoureux Vont bien tost commencer leurs regrets douloureux, Un grand vent a tué la sacré luminaire, Signe presagieux de leur plainte ordinaire. (V, 2, 1867-70)

The lights have been lowered, the performance is about to begin. Thélame awakes first, thinks that Sylvie is asleep, and then realizes that she is as cold as death. He wonders if a divine power could revive her. She is so beautiful ; might breathing on her bring her back? Au moins si mes souspirs errans de place en place Sur ce corps precieux qui n'est plus que de glace, Avec tout ce qu'ils ont de force & de chaleur, Y pouvoient ramener & l'ame & la couleur. (V, 2, 1901-04)

The audience would no doubt be fully aware that Mairet was taking a well-known poetic convention of the time — a poet's complaint to his "cold" mistress — and deepening its sensual-erotic significance. Thélame goes on to blame the gods, then, seeing a gash on her breast, accuses his father of being a bloodthirsty animal : Puisque tu te plais tant à voir des funerailles,

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Je te veux contenter, tygre viens toy saouler De mon sang espanché que tu verras couler. (V, 2, 1930-32)

He longs for death, but even death is cold and unheeding, like the mistress who will not listen to her lover's cries. His final and most desperate desire is to unite with her body in an all-encompassing erotic death-spasm : Que ne peut de mon corps la masse toute entiere Dans cette grande playe avoir son cimetiere, Ma chair avec la tienne ainsi se colleroit, Et mon sang amoureux au tien se mesleroit. (V, 2, 1957-60)

This seems to be very close to Bataille's theory of eroticism. Sylvie's lamentations (one is tempted to say dream) are more gentle, less violent than Thélame's. Just as he had identified her with the beauties of the natural surroundings, so now her first thoughts, when she is convinced that he is dead and not sleeping, move outward to nature, and how Thélame's death will affect his country: Que cette Isle en ta mort fait une grande perte, Qu'on la verra bien tost infertile & deserte. (V, 2, 2013-14)

Birds will sing only of his misfortune, trees will lose their leaves as though it were winter, their pleasant fountain will pour out ink or blood. Flowers touched by this liquid will dry up. Sylvie herself wants nothing more than to fade away, to be reunited with her lover in the fields beyond death : Là j'ose m'asseurer que les plus belles ames Plaignant nostre desastre admireront nos flames. (V, 2, 2037-38)

Only after death will the beauty and authenticity of their love be recognized; only then will it acquire a permanent value. As she slips into unconsciousness, it seems to Sylvie that death comes to her like a lover: ...acheve, ô mort de me tuer, Ton charitable dard trop doucement me blesse Thelame je me meurs d'amour & de foiblesse. (V, 2, 2043-46)

As one can see, in the central crisis of the play, the two main characters are put in an essentially passive position. They impress everyone with the beauty and pathos of their situation, but they are unable to act; even the king, who created the spell, is powerless (the magician never appears),

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only a very brave warrior can do it, and several have tried and failed. If the pastoral cadre of Sylvie suggests the Renaissance and behind it, classical antiquity, the undoing of the spell takes on the quality of a mediaeval romance, where Florestan's action reminds us somewhat of Gauvain in the castle of the five hundred maidens. The trial consists of his mounting a flight of steps, against horrible demons, "Chimériques esprits, lutins, fantômes noirs", as well as ugly crawling things ("larves" is the term he uses), in order to break a crystal set in a dome at the top of the stairs. Lightning, showers of sparks and darts assail him, as they did Gauvain. It would almost seem as though all the evil forces of the unconscious are being paralyzed by this action. The hero must confront and destroy phantoms too unnameable to be given a real shape. When Florestan breaks the crystal, it is like Ulysses putting out the eye of the cyclops, or a modern undersea hero putting out the eye of a giant squid. The invisible monster dies with a great cry : Ce grand bruit qui soudain dans l'air s'est eslevé, Ces lamentables cris, ces croullemens de voûte, (V, 2, 2105-06) and the nameless terrors are subdued. It takes a little while for the lovers to accept their return to reality, to realize that they are not dreaming or dead. A Voice tells them that Sylvie is now worthy to be a princess, that their marriage has the blessing of the gods. Oddly enough, just as everyone knew about Thélame's secret love, so the news of the breaking of the spell has been transmitted as if by magic, so that the rejected shepherd and the shepherdess who loves him arrive almost immediately on the scene. He agrees to exchange his unattainable ideal, Sylvie, for the girl who loves him, so that all obstacles to happiness are removed. The worlds of court and pastoral, the intellect and the senses, the conscious and unconscious, all have achieved a precarious reconciliation.

3 A POOL OF MONSTERS

Mairet's third play, Silvanire (1630) marks a further departure from the heroic-courtly world, in that all the characters are either shepherds or their parents and friends. There are no outsiders, no princes to fall in love with commoners, no conflict of pleasure and responsibility. The plot, taken from the fourth book of UAstrée, and from d'Urfé's play of the same name, 1 contains some slight similarities with Sylvie. This time two young people are in love, but the heroine, Silvanire, differs from Sylvie in that she has kept her feelings so completely hidden, that her shepherd Aglante is convinced that his love is hopeless. A rival, Tirinte, wishing to make Silvanire fall in love with him, seeks help from a friend, who gives him a magic mirror that will make whoever looks in it fall in love with him. He must take care that only Silvanire looks into it. She does, but the charm does not work the way he had hoped; she falls ill and gives every sign of dying. Afraid that she really is dying, Silvanire confesses her love, and when she awakens, still has love only for Aglante. The "spell" has been completely ineffectual, because true love was stronger. One might well ask what it was that made Silvanire keep silent so long, that only the threat of death made her reveal her love? She had been friends with Aglante ever since they were children, but with the coming of adolescence she decided to become cold and distant to him. As he puts it, Au temps que mon amour estoit encore nain Vous l'aidiez à marcher, vous luy donniez la main, Et dés qu'il fut géant vous luyfistes la guerre.2 The novel places her decision very much on a conscious level, saying that "elle se résolut, ne pouvant mieux faire, de feindre pour le moins avec 1

La Silvanire ou la morte-vive, Fable bocagère de Messire Honoré d'Urfé (Paris: Robert Fouet, 1627). 2 Mairet, La Silvanire ou la Morte-Vive (Paris: Targa, 1631), III, 2. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

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3

prudence d'estre libre en sa captivité". The heroine in both novel and play refuses to face the fact that Aglante is the most devoted, the most faithful of lovers. But where d'Urfé, both in his novel and play, has placed the heroine's decision firmly at the level of volonté,4 Mairet has seen much more deep-rooted fears. His analysis begins in the prologue, spoken by Amour honnête, where a clear distinction is made between honest love and passionate love : Je sçay qu'un faux Amour de terrestre origine, Dont jamais la vertu ne regie les désirs, Et qui brutalement comme oyseau de rapine Se paist de voluptez & de sales plaisirs.

There are two kinds of love; they may look alike, but one is really a bird of prey, a vulture, eating its way through its victims. This same idea is taken up by the chorus between the first and second acts. Love appears as a monster, a beast of prey destroying the countryside: Autre serpent du Nil, il mange qui l'adore, Se tapit dessous les fleurs, Et fait languir sa proye avant qu'il la devore. 5

But having said this, the chorus relents. Who are we to speak ill of a god, they say. Love is a benevolent god; love created order out of chaos; love makes the world beautiful, makes humble men noble : Il fait, prodige amoureux! U n Courtisan d'un barbare, U n liberal d'un avare, Et d'un lasche un genereux.

The prologue had made a distinction between the two kinds of love, but now in the chorus the distinction has become more of an ambiguity. Love has two faces; it is ambiguous, a force of evil and a force of good. And since they look so much alike, who can tell which is the appearance, which 3 4

D'Urfé, L'Astrée, Quatrième partie, 120.

When the Silvanire of d'Urfé's play comes to herself after the spell is broken, she reproaches Tirinte with : Et de ma volonté Tu n'en faisois nul compte? 5 Other than the fact that d'Urfé wrote his play in seventeenth-century free verse rhyming lines of six and twelve syllables - the principal difference in the two versions lies in their imagery. D'Urfé introduces many hunting and animal metaphors. Hylas says to Silvanire that she should give up hunting poor wild animals and frequent humans more. She insists that men are more dangerous than wild animals. Mairet eliminates nearly all these hunting images and replaces them with allusions to snakes, fish, and monsters, all reptilian images which are less defined and more terrifying.

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the reality? Is Aglante really the faithful shepherd he seems to be, or is he a monster in disguise? One may suppose that this is the agonizing fear that has kept Silvanire for four years from telling Aglante how much she loves him. But her fears are too strong to be kept entirely hidden. They come out, in symbolic form, in a dream, which is not found anywhere in d'Urfé, but which Mairet has seen fit to give us in extraordinary detail: ... il m'a semblé, Tirinte, Que nous estions tous deux au fonds d'un labyrinte Qui dedans ses erreurs & ses chemins perdus Avec nos jugemens a nos pas confondus : Ayant passé du jour la meilleure partie A chercher les moyens d'une heureuse sortie, Nous treuvons un sepulchre ombragé de Cyprès Au bord d'un bel estang qui dormoit tout auprès: A l'aspect de cette eau qu'on eust considérée Comme le seul plaisir d'une bouche alterée, Approche, m'as-tu dit, Silvanire, & vien voir Celle qui sur Tirinte a le plus de pouvoir. Là presque malgré moy jettant les yeux sur l'onde, J'apperçois des objets les plus affreux du monde, Quantité de serpens & d'enormes poissons (De ce perfide estang monstrueux nourrissons) Ont sauté hors des flots, & la gueule beante M'ont soufflé le venin d'une haleine puante: Soudain le cœur me bat, j'ay des frémissements Suivis de maux de teste & de vomissements : De l'esprit & du corps la souffrance inoiiye Me presse tant qu'en fin je tombe esvanouye; Et quelque temps après (mes sincopes passez) Je me treuve vivante au rang des trespassez: Tu m'avois descendue au tombeau, de la sorte Qu'on y descend le corps d'une personne morte. Voila ma vision. (II, 2) Dramatically speaking, the dream fulfills a traditional function of foreshadowing events to come. Thus the pool in the dream becomes the magic mirror in the play, and its poisonous influence causes the heroine to faint, after which she wakes up in a tomb, both in the dream and in the play. But in the light of what we have seen in the prologue and the first chorus, it would seem that the dream has a deeper significance. It is a quest of the most hazardous sort, for it is a voyage into one's inner self. It should be noted that before falling asleep, Silvanire, like lovers in so many pastorals, had retreated away from the hot sun into a "boscage sombre" in order to rest. In her dream she is retreating further, into a labyrinth,

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where she is lost, not alone, not with the man she loves, but with the suitor who in real life is pursuing her - Tirinte (whose name just happens to rhyme with labyrinthe). In addition to the dramatic reason for his presence in the dream, Tirinte represents an unwanted force - someone or something she is trying to avoid in life. Not only is she with someone she does not like, but it is very possible that she is in search of something that she does not want to find, something which Tirinte is forcing her to see. He leads her to look at herself in the pool, "presque malgré moy". There, one might say right up out of the unconscious, come the most horrible creatures imaginable - crawling things, snakes and evil-smelling fish leaping out of the water. Sex quite literally rears its ugly head, and it is terrifying. Silvanire has only one other choice - the tomb, the other object in her dream. Death is the only alternative to the monsters of passion. Again the dream is curiously significant, because she wakes up in the dream to find herself in a tomb. It is really a choice she has made. Although the subtitle "la Morte-Vive" refers to her deathlike trance near the end of the play, the dream shows that her extreme fear of passion has forced her to avoid all amorous contact, so that, in real life as in the dream, she has transformed herself into a state of suspension. Tirinte is not the real threat to her; he has acted only as a catalyst to bring out what she had been keeping hidden. The pool and the tomb are in herself. But it is not enough that death and passion figure prominently in Silvanire's innermost soul: they must be exteriorized, dramatized, and vanquished if there is to be a happy resolution. This is the function of the spell. Tirinte is seen as a "monster" of cruelty in making everyone think that Silvanire has died, and in playing a cruel trick on her, especially in the name of love. Silvanire quite rightly points out the difference between love and the passion which inspired Tirinte. So she has "faced" the monster, named it and conquered. She faces the other alternative, death, in the scene where she shows every indication of dying, and is literally driven to a third alternative - her love for Aglante. Marriage with him is the final reconciliation, as the chorus at the end of the fifth act tells us : O fortuné Lignon ! ô terre bien-heureuse En ta simplicité, Où l'Amour seroit mort si la mort amoureuse Ne l'eust ressuscité Soit célébré à jamais cette belle journée Où l'Amour & la Mort D'ennemis qu'ils estoient, en faveur d'Hymenée Se sont treuvez d'accord.

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We think of the pastoral world as a sunny, beautiful haven, isolated from care and worries that beset ordinary mortals. But within the heart of this wooded dell, Mairet sees unknown tensions lurking. Silvanire is his only play devoted wholly to a pastoral theme - and the only one where a monster is so evident.

4 THE GAME OF LOVE

Les Galanteries du duc d'Ossonne (1632) is Mairet's only venture into what would now be called sophisticated comedy. This term is often applied, especially in commercial theatre today, to plays in which the characters profess to be rather liberated from conventional emotional attachments throughout three-quarters of the action, only to fall seriously in love in the closing scenes. Mairet shows us just the opposite: at the beginning his characters seem to be conventional people with feelings, but as the action progresses we see that they are really sophisticated individuals who have abdicated any emotional involvement. The first example is the hero. At first sight the Duke seems to be a conventional gay bachelor who has finally fallen in love seriously for the first time. All at once the parties, dances, and tournaments which made up so much of his social life have become meaningless, for he has been struck, as if by lightning, by love. As he says to his confident, Almédor : Je confesse, Almédor, qu' à mon regret extresme, Je suis visiblement dissemblable à moy-mesme. Ces divertissemens où j'ay veu tant d'appas, Me touchent aussi peu que si je n'estois pas.1 Again in the same scene he refers to "ceste humeur chagrine / Qui contre ma coustume aujourd'hui me domine". One might suppose that love had wrought a transformation in the spirit of this ladies' man, that with its discovery he had found a whole new set of values. One would be wrong. What is stopping the Duke in his tracks is not so much the overpowering influence of true love, as the fact that the lady in question makes no reply to his letters. He is temporarily immobilized. His nature being a playful and active one, this immobility will not last long, for activity is a keynote in the play as in its hero. 1

Edouard Fournier, éd., Théâtre français du XVle et du XVIIe siècles (Paris : Garnier, 1874?), 1,1. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

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The heroine also gives a first impression which does not prove lasting. Emilie may not have replied to the Duke's entreaties because she has more than enough to occupy her at the moment. A beautiful young woman married to a jealous old man, she has been in love herself for some time, and while she and her young lover have been most careful to avoid gossip, her husband's suspicions have grown to the point where he arranged for his men to attack the lover, under the guise of a family vendetta. (The action takes place in Naples.) Camille, the young man, has been severely wounded and may die. Emilie's reaction is a flood tide of love, self-recrimination, and hatred of her husband. Her outburst contains many conventional hyperboles : Soupire donc, mon cœur, soupire en liberté, Pleurez, mes tristes yeux, et perdez la clarté, Puis que votre soleil luy-mesme l'a perdue, Sans espoir que jamais elle luy soit rendue. Clair soleil de mes jours par la mort endormy, Dans le rouge Ocean du sang qu'il a vomy; L'apuy de la vertu, l'honneur de l'Italie, Le phoenix des amans et l'espoir d'Emilie En la fin de Camille ont rencontré la leur.

(1,4) Her love is eternal even though criminal, her husband is a monster of jealousy, she is ready to kill herself if Camille should die : all in all a picture of a strong-willed, passionate young woman, who, even if she were deceiving the entire world, would remain true to her love. Succeeding events do not bear out this first impression. The street attack against Camille provides the initial impulse which sets the forces of the play in motion. The husband finds himself named as the instigator ("Un de mes braves, pris, a déclaré l'affaire") and runs to the Duke for help, before the Neapolitan police catch him. He could not have made a worse (or for the purposes of the play, a better) choice of protectors, because the Duke is itching for an opportunity to get him out of the city - he offers him refuge in a country estate - in order to redouble his attentions to beautiful Emilie. In her husband's absence, Emilie is to stay with his sister Flavie, an attractive young widow, who is supposed to keep a very strict watch over her, to the point where they sleep in the same bed. Late at night (most of the action takes place at night) the Duke arrives at Flavie's house to try his luck. He spies a young man climbing down a silken rope ladder from a bedroom, and presumes that someone else is paying court to Emilie.

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Que sert de se flatter? C'est un beau favory Qui mesnage en amant l'absence du mary. Je suis venu trop tard, la place est occupée; Voilà de mon amour l'esperance duppée. (II, 2)

No tears, no despair. The thought that someone else may have gained Emilie's love, far from striking despondency into his heart, arouses his curiosity. He must see who it is. The stranger returns and goes back into the house; the Duke follows, and discovers that it is Emilie dressed as a man. When she bumps into him ("ah bon Dieu! qui vous ameine icy?") he is so polite and ingenuous with her that she tells him everything: she is in love with Camille and is trying to visit him before he dies. Not a whit abashed, the Duke offers to help her, Plus content de vous plaire en confident secret Que de me satisfaire en amant indiscret. ÍII, 4)

Emilie asks him for one favour - would he take her place in bed and fool the old woman she sleeps with? What she does not tell him is that the "old woman" is Flavie, her sister-in-law; furthermore, what she does not know is that Flavie has overheard the whole conversation, and is herself secretly in love with the gallant Duke. What better opportunity to let him know her feelings than to pretend to dream of him as he is sleeping next to her? Of course when he awakens her, she pretends to be properly shocked at seeing a man in her bedroom, but she permits him to calm her down and tell her the whole story. When he leaves, the Duke is so taken by the widow's charms that he decides to court both ladies. Why not? It is an adventure, it is hazardous, and besides, Si j'ay ces deux trésors, je suis le plus heureux Et le mieux diverty de tous les amoureux. Fay donc, et ne crains pas que ton jeu se descouvre, Attendu que jamais l'une à l'autre ne s'ouvre. (III, 4)

He is not the only one infected with a spirit of play. Camille, recovering from his wounds, has also decided that he would like something more exciting than courting only Emilie (as though it had not brought him enough excitement already!), that lovers' constancy is really disguised laziness : Ce qui leur fait treuver le change hazardeux, C'est qu'ils n'ont pas l'esprit d'en entretenir deux; La constance est en eux une vertu forcée,

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Moins de gré bien souvent que de force exercée. J'estime, quant à moy, qu'en pareilles amours On est fidelle assez, quand on ayme tousjours. (IV, 2)

Could this be the faithful passionate lover Emilie had extolled to the heavens? It would seem that first impressions have again proved wrong. No one, says Camille, is going to write on his gravestone, "Le phoenix des amans est clos dans ce tombeau", - the exact phrase Emilie had used to describe him. He has no intentions of playing Petrarch to Emilie's Laura. Like the Duke, he is going to essay both ladies at once. The tempo quickens as complications increase and action becomes more intricate. Flavie receives a letter from Camille. Emilie tells her that she has received all kinds of letters from the Duke. Flavie's reaction is that, if he is playing them off one against the other, then it is everybody for himself: Si ma sœur a le duc, j'ay Camille en eschange, Ainsi d'un inconstant un inconstant me venge. (IV, H)

And she shows Emilie her letter from Camille. Emilie's first reaction is one of outrage: Ha le traistre ! ha l'ingrat ! le lasche, l'infidelle, De l'imperfection le plus parfaict modelle! (IV, 13)

But then, on reflection, she is not quite as furious as she thought she was. Is this possible? L'infidelle me trompe, et je voy son péché; Mon esprit toutesfois en est si peu touché, Que la seule douleur que mon ame ayt soufferte, Vient de son changement, et non pas de sa perte, Veu que rien ne me picque en sa desloyauté Que le visible afront qu'il fait à ma beauté. Suis-je encore Emilie, ou comme est-il possible Qu'à cette trahison je sois si peu sensible? (IV, 13)

Like all the characters in the play, Emilie is extremely lucid : she sees her lover's deception, she sees her first angry reaction to it, and recognizes the part that feminine vanity played in that reaction. But if she is losing one man, she is gaining another : Le duc m'a si long-temps ses soins continuez, Que les miens pour Camille en sont diminuez. QV, 13)

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29

It only remains to bring all four players together - again, at night, and in Flavie's bedroom, of course. Flavie invites Camille to a secret rendezvous at the same time as Emilie invites the Duke. Sudden discoveries are followed by spirited accusations, until everyone pardons everyone else. One last obstacle: Emilie's husband returns unexpectedly, but they get rid of him almost as quickly by telling him that his enemy, Camille, has discovered his return and is after him. He runs away, leaving the four young people to retire happily to the next room for a midnight supper. This lively and diverting comedy was Mairet's answer to the challenge posed by Corneille's Mélite, and though the two plays have certain similarities - urban setting, sophisticated dialogue, change as a dominant motif in the plot - the overall impression which emerges is quite different. In Corneille's play love is a moral and an intellectual force; that is, by experiencing love and the various transformations it brings, lovers gain certain insights and form a set of values. One is conscious in Mairet's play more of the rejection of a set of values than of the creation of one, for the main characters begin the play with an exalted ideal of love that soon crumbles. Moreover, this exalted romantic ideal has a distinctly literary quality in its expression, particularly in the passages spoken by Emilie, quoted above; so that the rejection of romantic love involves the rejection of a certain literary heritage. The confident, Almédor, shows how ridiculous romantic love appears when it comes into contact with a real situation, like cold, rainy weather. A lover who can keep his romantic illusions while waiting out in the rain must be mad: Treuver pour toute dame, une porte fermée; En baiser mille fois la serrure, et les clous, Si l'on pouvoit encor, les gonds et les verrous; Adorer à genoux ses planches verglacées, Avoir sur ce sujet plusieurs belles pensées : Que c'est un ciel d'amour, que ses clous bien fichez Sont de ce firmament les astres attachez; Astres durs et malins, dont le regard influé L'impuissance d'entrer qui le tient à la rué; Et milles autres beaux traicts heureusement conçeus Qui suivant sa figure il treuve là dessus.

(II, 1) The fusion of two incompatible ideas becomes all the more amusing because there is a certain resemblance between a locked house and a cold unheeding mistress - a resemblance which Mairet tips over into the absurd by taking the time-worn comparison of a mistress's eyes to stars in the firmament and fixing it in the form of nails in the front door !

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Having laughed ideal values out of existence, having categorized constancy and fidelity as "fantosmes vains", what sort of a world do the Duke and his companions create? Put in its simplest terms, it is a world of play, a world set apart from good and evil or love and hate. Having loosened themselves from romantic or moral conventions, the characters can devote their energies to fun, and their nocturnal activities resemble nothing so much as manoeuvres in an intricate and spirited game. Each little stratagem is a play which one's opponent counters as though he were returning a ball. Compliments are stratagems where one person vies with another. After an exchange of compliments between Emilie and the Duke, he says: Si la reconnoissance au bien-fait se mesure, Ce compliment tout seul me paye avec usure. (III, 3) Compliments demand compliments ; tricks are paid back with tricks. The idea of paying back is underlined throughout the play - words like récompense, reconnaissance, payer occur several times - and while it establishes, as it does in Corneille and Molière, the notion of human relations as a series of mutual exchanges, Mairet seems to be using it in this particular play to point out that mutual exchanges are part of a game. Any game means observing certain rules, and setting limits beyond which one cannot go. Outright cruelty is against the rules. No one person has all the power; a game of love must be between equals, as the Duke judiciously observes : Je n'approuvay jamais cette lasche manie De regner en amour avecque tyrannie. 01, 4) Players must be prepared to take risks, the esthetic of which is proclaimed by the Duke: La Fortune et l'Amour ayment les hazardeux Et les timides cœurs sont les mespris des deux.

on, 2)

and by Camille: Comme qu'il en arrive, il vaut mieux hazarder Que rien perdre en amour faute de demander. (IV, 2) Of course the fact that a risk is involved means that the game could get out of hand, and the Duke is aware of this : Il est vray que l'affaire ayant mauvaise issue, Emilie en cecy seroit la plus desceuë:

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31

Mais mon authorite la deffend en ce cas, Et c'est 4 mon advis ce qui ne sera pas.

QII, 2) The Duke has shed his "authority" for the purposes of the game (he is Viceroy of Naples), but if things got out of hand, he could stop being a player and become an umpire or referee. But it is not necessary, for everyone is able to take care of himself. The trick is, as Emilie says, to land on your feet ("Je ne sQaurois manquer de me treuver debout"), no matter what is thrown at you. He who loses must pay a forfeit. Near the end of the last act, when the two girls have paid back the men's deceptions with their own, they decide that the men must beg for pardon, and the Duke says, "Faut-il que le battu paye encore l'amende?" They go down on bended knee, and pardon is granted. The only person who really loses out is the nasty old husband, but he is so old and disagreeable that nobody cares. He is meant to lose, just as he was in the innumerable mediaeval farces and tales in which he figured. Besides, from the standpoint of a game, the husband is the person who won't play. They even call him "Rabat-joye" or spoilsport, and get rid of him as fast as possible. As Huizinga has observed, It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the playworld in which he has temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion — a pregnant word which means literally "in-play" (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community. 2

No one makes a conventional moral commitment at the end of the play. Emilie is still married to Rabat-joye, none of the others suggest marriage. Flavie is already a widow, the nearest that seventeenth-century literature came to an "emancipated" woman. When the game is "over" they have not increased their moral or spiritual stature by so much as a finger, but they have had a great deal of fun. What is, then, the significance of this game? It would seem that the game in this play serves a similar function to the spell in Sylvie and the dream in Silvanire: it is a means of channeling the erotic impulse, of putting it into a coherent and acceptable dramatic structure. In contrast to the pastoral world, where sensuality constantly erupted into language and metaphor, sensuality in Les Galanteries has almost disappeared from the language: it has literally been turned into a 2 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), 11.

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game, exciting, risky, but a game nevertheless. Flavie notices that, "... sur tout en amour / Les songes de la nuict sont les pensers du jour." Thoughts are no sooner said than acted upon, and actions turn into a game, the game of love. Situations which would shock the audience's sensibilities, such as the couple in bed together, are passed off as being all in fun. Finally, is not the theatre a game in the fullest sense of the word? In drama, human relationships are given a specific, formal order within a prescribed time and place. While encounters are governed by a set of rules, or conventions, there is a high degree of play (if we may use the word) between spontaneity and control, between chance and determinism. The Duke is quite aware of the theatrical nature of his gallantries: Comme une comedie a sauvé mon amour, Mon amour pourrait bien en causer une un jour: Car c'en est un subject galand, comique, et rare. Entre les plus parfaits dont la scene se pare. (III, 5) In fact all four lovers are extremely lucid as to the nature of their actions. They are all playing an immensely enjoyable game for their own and others' enjoyment. They are at the same time actors and spectators in a game they have devised for our - the audience's - entertainment.

5 A MARVELOUS DISORDER

... si du lambris, & de ce paysage, Vous vouliez destourner vos yeux sur mon visage, ... Le dehors vous seroit une visible preuve Du merveilleux desordre où le dedans se treuve.1

In 1633, one year before writing the play that was to mark him as the founder of French classical tragedy, Mairet produced a full-blown, wildly improbable tragi-comedy, Virginie. The action revolves around a young couple, Périandre and Virginie, thought to be brother and sister, whose arrival at the court of Byzantium precipitates a series of devious intrigues. The Queen is most impressed by Périandre's bravery in a war against Thrace, and this, added to his personal charm, stirs up the jealousy of a rival faction at court. Seeing that the Queen's cousin, a lady named Andromire, is infatuated with Périandre, the villains of the piece seize on this and manoeuvre it into a plot to kill the young couple, put the Queen's cousin on the throne and themselves in power. Virginie escapes by a curious coincidence - she faints as her killers lunge at her from opposite sides, and they accidentally stab each other to death, "de façon que la malice & le crime, y retournent tousjours à leurs Autheurs", as Mairet expressed it in his notice to the reader. Périandre escapes from the city, arrives back just in time to defend the Queen in single combat and restore peace between Byzantium and Thrace. The villains are undone; all that remains is to bring on an aged wise man in the closing minutes of the drama to explain the long-kept secret of Périandre's and Virginie's origins : they are not brother and sister after all, but prince and princess of the two warring royal families, separated because of an oracle, lost, found by someone else, brought up in a strange land, and only now, etc., etc. ... in short, nothing stands in the way of consummation of true love. It would be difficult to think of a greater contrast than that between the 1

Mairet, Virginie (Paris: Pierre Ricolet, 1635), II, 1. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

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lighthearted amorality of Les Galanteries du duc d'Ossone and the moral climate of Virginie. Like melodramas of more recent vintage, it may offend against taste, credibility, and dramatic unity, but it offers an extremely conventional, not to say simplified, concept of morality. Good is good, bad is bad, without so much as a suggestion of any mixture of the two. The spectator is never without the slightest doubt as to the ultimate triumph of virtue and defeat of vice. Mairet's portrayal of love in this play has also assumed a more polarized form than what we have seen previously. The split between spiritual and physical love, which we saw beginning in Silvanire, has now widened. Love between Périandre and Virginie is of the purest pure, not just because they believe themselves to be brother and sister (though they are not completely sure), but because they are untroubled by any sensual or erotic impulses. Sensuality and eroticism are now definitely connected with monsters. Passion is a violent, disturbing force which gives rise to countless evils ; in fact, it is the mainspring of all the evils in the play. After holding in her feelings until they can no longer be hidden, Andromire steels herself to confess to Périandre : Honneur, Crainte, & Pudeur, qui dans ma violence, Adjoutez à mes maux la rigueur du silence, Adieu, portez ailleurs vos conseils superflus, Ma fureur désormais ne vous escoute plus. Et quoy? mourray-je donc faute de luy parler? Non non il n'est plus temps de se taire & brûler : Je veux résolument que Periandre sçache Mon feu, qui s'acroit plus lors que plus je le cache. Cette respectueuse, & modeste froideur, Au lieu de me déplaire augmente mon ardeur. (1,2) All the elements are present: an overwhelming passion unable to contain itself, and an attractive but unresponsive young prince. If aggressiveness is a masculine characteristic, and coldness and modesty traditional feminine traits, we can see a reversal of normal sexual rôles in this confrontation, which may intensify the embarrassment both characters feel. Périandre's modesty, however, hides a certain amount of calculation. Unlike Hippolyte in Phèdre, he already knows that Andromire is in love with him. He also knows that she has another suitor, Amintas, the captain of the queen's army. But he says nothing of all this to her, which causes her to become more and more violent as she goes on.

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35

She begins the crucial interview by flattering the prince on his military achievements, and then moving to more personal matters. She speaks in rather clear terms of "Ma pasleur, ma tristesse, & mes yeux languissans", and then goes on: Je resve, je me plains, j'ayme la solitude, Et me sens travailler avec inquietude, D'un mal que jusqu'icy je n'avois point connu, Et tout cela, depuis que vous estes venu.

(II, 1) When stronger and stronger hints fail to elicit any response (with perfect duplicity, he says "je ne sçay pas de quoy vous me parlez"), she is forced to make herself crystal clear : Vous voulez donc avoir l'intelligence dure, Pour adjoûter la honte aux peines que j'endure, Exigeant de ma bouche une confession, Qui diffame mon sexe, & ma condition? N'importe, je feray cet effort sur moy-mesme, Hé bien, ouy, Periandre, il est vray, je vous ayme; Je meurs d'amour, enfin le mot en est lasché, Voilà ce feu si grand, & si long temps caché.

She implores him to look at her, speak to her, at least acknowledge her, even if he cannot return her love; but Périandre, hiding his real feelings under the guise of modesty and respect, rejects not only her love, but her very self. Seeing this, she reverts to her rôle as princess, and appeals to his ambition: Si la peur vous retient, jusqu'à tant qu'elle cesse, Ne me regardez-pas en tiltre de Princesse, Dépouillez-moy plustost de ce faste éclatant, Qui n'est que vanité, si l'esprit n'est contant. Ne considérez pas l'éclat qui m'environne, Ny mon sang, dont le droict me garde une Couronne : Mais si l'Amour vous touche, alors regardez-moy, Et comme vostre Amante, & comme sœur de Roy. Considerez-moy lors, comme cette Andromire, Qui peut vous faire seoir dans le Throsne d'Epire.

(II, 1) A subtly ambivalent approach: if you feel cowed by my rank, you have only to take off the veils of royalty to see me as I really am, a woman of flesh and blood. At the same time, do not forget that loving me can lead to a throne. This switching back and forth from public to private personality would seem to be not just a device on her part to find out what most

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appeals to the young prince: it betrays a deeply ambivalent attitude toward herself. Even if Périandre accepted her offer, she would never know his real motives : would she be an object of desire herself, or simply the means to another object, the throne? Thus, whether Périandre accepted or rejected her, their relationship would be a degraded one - very much like Phèdre and Hippolyte. And Andromire, unlike Phèdre, has never experienced love before : either through fear or repulsion, she has never allowed herself to express her deepest feelings. Andromire believes that Périandre remains silent because he is modest and inexperienced. What she does not realize is that he knows a great deal and is saying very little, while she knows very little and yet must say everything. We must admit that she really tries very hard to make him speak, whereas Phèdre seems to be so preoccupied with her own thoughts and desires that Hippolyte is almost reduced to the rôle of adjunct. It is a curious fact that, in the famous passage, "Mon mal vient de plus loin...", in which Phèdre for the first time reveals her dreaded secret, we see first person pronouns, je, mon, me, ma, mes, moi-même, recurring no less than 54 times within the space of 48 lines, while third-person pronouns referring to Hippolyte, the supposed adored object of her desire - occur exactly ten times. It would seem that Phèdre's obsessive thoughts are fixed rather disproportionately upon herself. Then, in her confrontation of Hippolyte, she really makes no effort whatsoever to learn anything of his thoughts. Does this betray a sense of shame, or rather an obsession within Phèdre's soul? However magnificent the lines are - and they are, because Racine was an infinitely superior craftsman - they create an image of a personality hermetically sealed off from any real contact with another person: Phèdre has made such an imaginary creation out of Hippolyte that there remains no room in her mind for any thoughts of a real person. Can anyone blame the young man for feeling repulsed by her? With Phèdre, he would literally have had no identity. Racine's most celebrated heroine has much more than incestuous or illegitimate desires to cause her guilt: in her deepest self, she is trying to annihilate another human being, and it is extremely difficult not to feel that she deserves the terrible retribution that she brings down on herself. Mairet at least saw his heroine in a more humane manner : her soul is sufficiently open to the world outside that she tries to make contact with the man she loves. She begs him to look at her, to react to her offer, to speak - at least she would know he existed. But Périandre remains silent, which provokes the same violent reaction as it does in Phèdre : she seizes the young man's sword and tries to kill herself with it. In what may seem

A MARVELOUS DISORDER

37

to us an incredible lapse in judgment, both Racine and Mairet's heroes leave the queen with their swords, and flee from her presence. And very much like Phèdre, Andromire, when left alone, instead of killing herself, turns very suddenly against the man she loves, and sees him as a monster: O ! Neptune, ennemy de ma prospérité, En quoy les miens ou moy t'avons-nous irrité, Pour jetter sur nos bords cette agreable peste, Et faire à nostre court un present si funeste? Au lieu de m'envoyer ce Monstre en cruauté, Sous le masque trompeur de la mesme beauté, Que n'as-tu plutost fait que je fusse la proye De l'Orque d'Andromede, ou des serpens de Troye? Ou que n'ay-je treuvé le Taureau qui parut, Quand pour son innocence Hipolite mourut : Ce monstre seulement m'eût la clarté ravie, Où cettuy-ci m'emporte et l'honneur et la vie.

When you really think about it, there is nothing actually monstrous in falling in love with a handsome young warrior, nor is it monstrous on his part to refuse her love. But the increasingly violent tone she takes, and her sudden switch from guilt to innocence - she sees herself now as Andromeda, or even Hippolyte himself - makes us suspect that Andromire was only waiting for his refusal, that behind her violent feelings lay a most deeply rooted hatred of herself. The author has no need to make her love incestuous : her monsters spring not from incest, or from a cavern in the ocean, but from the very depths of her being. And when such a monster comes into the world, it must be slain immediately. Andromire does not even need a family history of unnatural couplings to weigh on her conscience : she sees her own desires as sufficiently monstrous themselves that they must be destroyed. But she moves instinctively to protect herself: once the monster takes shape in words, she thrusts the words back onto her opponent: he is the monster, he must be destroyed. And this hatred becomes the impulse of most of the play's action, because the villains use it as a means of initiating a political conspiracy. Mairet now has a little more experience. If he did not see it earlier, he now knows that passion is not only confined to the world of dreams and personal relations; it has political consequences as well. But now another consideration comes up. Andromire saw herself as monstrous, and this led to a series of destructive acts. Is it also possible that a passion, totally shared between two people, might also lead to destruction? Mairet explored this situation in his next, and most famous work, Sophonisbe.

6 A TIME OF PASSION AND JUDGMENT

A beautiful young wife, an older husband who suspects her of loving a young man, a fight between husband and rival... in Les Galanteries du duc d'Ossonne, this situation led to a lively game. But take the same situation, deepen the tones, intensify the issues involved to an ultimate of life and death, make the game deadly serious, and you have the material of tragedy. Mairet found a perfect setting for a tragedy of passion in the ill-fated love of Sophonisbe and Massinisse. Her father, Hasdrubal of Carthage, had promised her to the handsome young Numidian, but for political reasons, married her to old King Syphax. Sophonisbe used her influence and charms to make Syphax break his alliance with Rome. As the play opens, Massinisse, as a Roman ally, attacks and defeats Syphax. He then advances on the city, meets and falls in love with his enemy's young widow, and marries Sophonisbe, but their love runs contrary to the interests of Rome, and Massinisse, who refuses to turn Sophonisbe over to the Roman consul, sends her poison to take, after which he kills himself. In a wider context, we might say that Sophonisbe poses the problem of physical passion in western European society, which, in a deeply ambivalent attitude, is at the same time fascinated and repelled by the phenomenon. Passion is both eminently desirable and yet criminal, so that an author, in order to exploit this ambivalence in the mind of his audience to the fullest, must dramatize both the birth and culmination of passion as well as a judgment condemning it. Sometimes the same character experiences passion and condemns it: in Racine, Phèdre is both participant and spectator in the drama of her love for Hippolyte. Though she feels driven by forces outside her control, she nevertheless suffers as much guilt as if she alone were responsible for her passion. Mairet had explored an unrequited, "unnatural" passion and its destruction from within, in Virginie. With Sophonisbe he turns to a love that is fully shared, only to be destroyed from without. One is again reminded of the two lines from Sidère,

A TIME OF PASSION AND JUDGMENT

39

U n plaisir qui aux veines monte, A v a n t que l'esprit l'ait conceu,

which, enlarged to tragic dimensions, describe quite well the situation in Sophonisbe. But he now sees consciousness and sensuality as two opposing forces. Where in earlier plays they had existed as parts of one personality, they have now grown sufficiently apart that they can be transferred symbolically to two separate people. The two lovers share their passion to the full before the arrival of Scipio, who judges and condemns their passion. And since they have elected to put their whole lives, their very existence, as it were, into passion, they have no other choice but to die. (In the original, the drama was much less symbolic. As Livy1 tells it, only Sophonisbe died; both Syphax and Massinisse lived on afterward, and the latter's hasty marriage to Sophonisbe was treated as folly, something which could easily be rectified.) In bringing the story to the stage, Mairet had the advantage of working with characters whose national identity had already taken a symbolic form, generally recognized and accepted by a seventeenth-century audience. Africans, and particularly Numidians, had a reputation of being hot-blooded, sensual men and women. One of Sophonisbe's confidents says of Massinisse : Il est jeune, & d'une nation, Qui par toute l'Afrique est la plus renommée, Pour aymer aussi-tost, & vouloir estre aymée. 2

Both Sophonisbe and Massinisse are African, young, handsome, passionate. Scipio, on the other hand, is Roman, and it is a curious fact that although Livy specifically mentions his youth, good looks, and magnetic personality,3 Mairet has changed him into the embodiment of Roman discipline and order, cold, intractable, the perfect enemy of passion. Thus the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage also lend themselves to symbolic interpretation, in the triumph of intellect over the senses. The character of Syphax fits into both the dramatic and the symbolic situation. An African, he had always kept an alliance with Rome, until his marriage with Sophonisbe, and he dated his misfortunes from the day of his marriage. As a king, he had failed to reconcile his wife's political interests with those of Rome, and was not strong enough to withstand 1

Livy, Histories, trans. Frank G. Moore, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1949), XXX, Ch. 11-17. 2 Mairet, Sophonisbe (Paris: Droz, 1945), II, 3, 590-92. All references in this chapter are to this edition. 3 Livy, Histories, XXVIII, Ch. 35, p. 143.

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the Roman military attacks. As a man, his marriage to the young Sophonisbe had been a disaster, because of the discrepancy in their ages. He appears in the first act exactly what Massinisse calls him, "ce barbare & lasche Usurpateur" in the sense that he had prevented the young couple from marrying years before. A measure of Syphax's failure - he has not been able to be true to either reason or passion - may be gained by the virulence with which he spits out his hatred of Sophonisbe : O Ciel, pouvois-tu mieux me tesmoigner ta hayne, Qu'en mettant dans mon lict ceste impudique Heleine, Ou plustot cette peste, & ce fatal tison, De qui desja la flame embraze ma maison? Quel Roy sans cette horreur de la foy conjugale, Auroit une fortune à ma fortune esgale? Soit maudit à jamais le lieu, l'heure & le jour, Que son aspect charmeur me donna de l'amour. (I, 1, 131-38)

Syphax is not just jealous at being betrayed by his wife, who, as he knows, is in love with Massinisse. She has destroyed him from within just as the Roman armies are destroying his country around him. Only Sophonisbe could bring about this physical and moral disintegration ("bien plus que mon corps mon esprit a vieilly"), to leave him a charred, empty ruin, with nothing but hatred for her beauty, and Syphax in his impotent rage can think of nothing more horrible to wish on his rival than to go through the same experience : Pour te faire un present digne d'un ennemy, Et te souhaiter pis que le fer ny la flamme, Je te souhaite encor Sophonisbe pour fâme. (I, 2, 230-32)

Thus the first condemnation of passion comes not from the intellect, but from the emotions, from a person who has tried and failed to come to terms with passion. When Sophonisbe first feels her love growing for Massinisse, she is married, and he is her enemy, so that by conventional standards her feelings are "feux illegitimes". She is aware of being controlled by a force greater than her resistance : ...un secret Destin, que je ne puis forcer, Contre ma volonté m'oblige à l'offencer : Moy-mesme mille fois je me suis estonnée Et de ma passion, & de ma destinée. 3, 305-08)

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41

As the battle between Syphax and Massinisse is about to begin, she prays to wisdom and reason to give her back her "clartez coustumieres" but already a larger, stronger part of her being is praying for the opposite : ...mes passions aujourd'huy me reduisent A vouloir le salut de ceux qui me détruisent. ...je reclame en vain cette foible raison, Puisque c'est un secours qui n'est plus de saison. (II, 1, 351-54) It is already too late : she knows that time is working for Massinisse and against Syphax. Time is on the side of passion, which has taken on the character of a destiny, irreversible. One cannot go back, one cannot reverse the movement of passion. It is extraordinary how Mairet has in this play instinctively understood the unity of time, not merely as a technical innovation (which it was, for contemporaries), but as a dramatic, as well as a psychological and symbolic necessity. Everything in the play hinges on the tremendous force created by the compression of time - one has the feeling that human lives are being lived out in the space of a few hours, that every decision, every act carries an enormous importance, far beyond its normal significance. Unity of place is no less significant than that of time. Once King Syphax is dead, the palace is of course Sophonisbe's, and we see the action from her viewpoint and from the area of the palace. We wait with her as Massinisse comes closer and closer to the city; we know when he is outside the gates; we know when he is in the courtyard outside. Mairet exploits the traditional identification of the woman and the building surrounding her (as he had done in Les Galanteries du duc d'Ossonne for comic effect), so that Massinisse's steady approach to the city and the palace has both a military and an amorous dimension. In this case, of course, far from resisting his attacks, Sophonisbe yearns to be conquered. What is the use of defending the walls of the city, she says, when your Queen has given you away from within : Que vous sert de deffendre avecque tant de peine, Les portes & les tours qui couvrent vostre Reine, Si desja l'insensée ayme tant son vainqueur, Que d'en porter l'image au milieu de son cœur? Que vous sert de deffendre une place rendue En voulant conserver sa liberté perdue? Plustost, braves sujets, armez-vous contre moy, Qui suis le plus mortel des ennemis du Roy; Et qui fais de mon cœur le temple et la retraite, De celuy qui poursuit vostre entiere deffaite. (II, 1, 379-88)

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A coherence is established between inner and outer space. Syphax felt himself disintegrating from within as his empire was crumbling around him. Now Sophonisbe transforms her inner self so that it takes on dimensions in physical space : in the drama of passion the scene of action is to be the human heart. She uses the word "temple" aptly, for there is a feeling, if not of sacredness, at least of a very special quality to the area surrounding her, a quality that Massinisse senses as soon as he enters the palace : Soldats attendez-moy, n'entrez pas plus avant, La majesté du lieu ne veut point de suivant. (III, 4, 745-46)

The long-awaited interview begins; Massinisse courteous, tactful, considerate of the Queen's feelings, promises to do all that he can to allay her sorrow. Sophonisbe returns courtesy with subtle praise. Many warriors conquer by force, she says, Mais fort peu sçavent l'art de vaincre les esprits, Et de bien meriter le Sceptre qu'ils ont pris. (III, 4, 785-86)

They compliment each other, and their compliments take on the attributes of caresses. Little by little, Massinisse changes from esteem and consideration, to wonder, admiration, sympathy - until he is unabashedly in love with his captive queen : Il est vrai, j'affranchis une Reine captive, Mais de la liberté moy-mesme je me prive : Ces vainqueurs des vainqueurs, vos yeux, maistres des Rois. (III, 4, 867-98)

Just as she had been in his absolute power, so he finds himself her servant. The traditional courtly love reversal of the "vainqueur vaincu" at least underlines a desire, however unreal, to balance their positions, so that their relationship has a reciprocal character. Love reciprocated grows by a mutual exchange : J'ayme plus de moitié quand je me sens aymé, Et ma flame s'accroist pour un cœur enflamé. Un plaisir legitime en veut un de retour, Et l'amour seulement est le prix de l'amour. Comme par une vague une vague s'irrite, Un soûpir amoureux par un autre s'excite. 4 (IV, 1, 1001-08) 4

Jacques Guicharnaud comments on the play as follows : "In itself, the love of Sophonisbe and Massinisse is altogether sensual and sexual - a conception of love without

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43

Putting all other thoughts out of his mind, Massinisse arranges for a wedding ceremony to be held that night, and the fourth act takes place next morning. The happiness of the young couple is at its height, when, almost literally, a knock comes at the door. Massinisse's superior, Scipio, the Roman consul, has arrived and is waiting for him in the next room, and with him the terrible destiny of Rome, discipline, and responsibilities. Scipio's arrival is so quiet, so sudden, so different from Massinisse's climactic entry into the palace, that one has the eerie impression that he was there all the time, like a foreboding presence. Slower than the time of passion by only a few hours, the time of judgment was hidden behind it, pursuing it inexorably. Massinisse had hoped to invest his passion with some of the permanence of a social institution - to give it a certain duration - but he literally has no time : like ancient gods who favour us only in order to punish more severely, time turns against him and toward Scipio. Of course Scipio's "reasons" are all too cogent: Sophonisbe, a sworn enemy of Rome, had turned Syphax against his greatest ally, and could easily do the same to Massinisse, so that a marriage between them was politically out of the question. But at a deeper level, passion, by its very existence, poses a threat to the forces of reason. No compromise is possible between Carthage and Rome, no reconciliation between passion and reason can be effected. The gulf between the two is unbridgeable. Scipio can not conceive of anyone's doing what Massinisse has done: Ce qu'a faict Massinisse est si desraisonnable, Qu'à peine mon esprit le treuve imaginable. (IV, 2, 1151-52)

The two men cannot communicate with each other; how could they? They do not speak the same language. Massinisse's arguments, except for one claiming a right to Sophonisbe as a payment for past services, are all based on an emotional appeal, just the kind which would have no effect on a mind like Scipio's. And as he sees he is making no impression on Scipio, Massinisse does just the wrong thing: he becomes more and more emotional until he reaches a state of incoherence (Mairet even includes stage directions : "Icy il se pourmene sans rien dire"). Words, the tools of intellect, completely fail him.

complexes, similar to that of the Renaissance, and not yet degraded or stifled by the Jansenist atmosphere, or even idealized by the superstructure of Corneille" ("Beware of Happiness: Mairet's Sophonisbe", in The Classical Line (= Yale French Studies, No. 38) (May, 1967), 211.

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The lovers are left with no alternative: Massinisse sends Sophonisbe a poisoned cup; she dies on their marriage bed. 5 Massinisse asks to see her, and a curtain is drawn to reveal her body. Are you satisfied now, he says bitterly to the Romans, now that you have the obedience you demanded : ...regardez maintenant, O vous Consul Romain, & vous son Lieutenant, Si je vous ay rendu l'aveugle obeyssance, Que vostre authorité veut de mon impuissance. Ay-je esté, qu'il vous semble, ou rebelle, ou trop lent A l'exécution de ce coup violent? (V, 7, 1738-43)

Look at her body. Be sure that she is really dead, and not feigning. Now you have what you want; my debts to your senate are paid with interest: Si la reconnoissance aux bien-faits se mesure, Cette seule action le paye avec usure. (V, 7, 1756-57)

which is almost word for word what the Duke had said to Emilie in Les Galanteries du duc d'Ossonne. The give and take of a parlor game have turned into the terrible retribution of life and death. Massinisse staked everything on his love for Sophonisbe; without her, nothing has any meaning for him, his country,,the world - they can have it all. Even words have lost their meaning (and here we may possibly see the first sign of despair in Mairet's feelings about his own work) : ...consumer le temps en des plaintes frivoles, Et flater sa douleur avecque des paroles, C'est à ces lasches cœurs que l'espoir de guérir Persuade plustost, que l'ardeur de mourir. Meurs miserable Prince, & d'une main hardie, Ferme l'acte sanglant de cette tragedie. (V, 8 1820-25)

One might say, as Denis de Rougemont did of Tristan and Iseut, that the lovers, in seeking the absolute of passion, were in fact seeking the absolute of death. Both Sophonisbe and Massinisse "knew" without admitting it to themselves, that their passion would be condemned, so that staking everything on this passion - considering it an absolute whose only alternative is death - was a way of removing responsibility for their acts 5

"...in fact, the bed is the metaphorical décor of the play from beginning to end: Syphax and Sophonisbe's unhappy bed, Sophonisbe's and Massinisse's bed of joy, and finally Sophonisbe's grave, on which drops the stabbed body of Massinisse as the curtain falls" (Guicharnaud, "Beware of Happiness...", 216).

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and putting it on to Scipio. We might therefore accuse them of the existential sin of bad faith. But to do so would be to ignore our own bad faith, in blaming the two lovers for an attitude that is part of our conception of man. The duality between intellect and the senses is so deeply ingrained in us, that any work of art directed to a general audience must take it into account. Mairet has given audiences, in Sophonisbe, a tragedy which satisfied these opposing exigencies. His audience could respond wholeheartedly to the beauty and eloquence of the lovers' emotions; it could feel the weight of their tragedy, while at the same time experiencing a secret satisfaction in knowing that their downfall was inevitable. It still seems somewhat ironic that the triumph of reason - supposedly man's highest faculty - over passion, should be perceived and accepted as material for a tragedy.

7 DEATH IS A FIERY SUNSET

After the remarkable success of Sophonisbe, it is not difficult to see why Mairet turned to the story of Antony and Cleopatra. One had but to open the pages of Plutarch to find all the elements of a great drama, and Mairet was neither the first nor the last to succumb to the charms of the "Serpent of old Nyle": 1 Jodelle, Gamier, Shakespeare, Benserade, Dryden, among others. In rereading Shakespeare's play, one cannot help being struck by his debt to Plutarch. The whole description of Cleopatra's barge is already in Plutarch; it has only to swell and blossom in Shakespeare's hands. The feeling that a world has been thrown away for passion is underlined in every page of Plutarch; it took Shakespeare to phrase it, we have kist away Kingdomes, and Provinces.

cm, io) and to make the legend even more compelling: Eternity was in our Lippes, and Eyes, Blisse in our browes bent: none our parts so poore, But was a race of Heaven.

(I, 3) All through the play, Shakespeare tells us that with the fall of Antony and Cleopatra, a world, a planet, a sun has fallen : Alacke our Terrene Moone is now Eclipst And it portends alone the fall of Antony.

(HI, 13) The Starre is falne.

(IV, 14) 1

Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London: Nonesuch, 1953), I, 5. All references to Shakespeare's tragedy are to this edition.

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Oh Sunne Burne the great Sphere thou mov'st in, darkling stand The varrying shore of the world. (IV, 15) His face was as the Heav'ns, and therein stucke A Sunne and Moone, which kept their course, & lighted The little O, the earth. (V,2) Finish good Lady, the bright day is done, And we are for the darke. (V,2) My Resolution's plac'd, and I have nothing Of Woman in me: Now from head to foote I am Marble constant: now the fleeting Moone No Planet is of mine. (V,2)

People like Antony and Cleopatra are larger than life; they are like stars guiding the destinies of lowlier mortals, even while they are guided by a higher destiny. This comparison with heavenly bodies, so natural to Plutarch and to Shakespeare, may also be found in Mairet; for such a comparison forms a metaphorical structure to Mairet's tragedy, as it did to Shakespeare's. The three main characters, Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavius, are often compared to planets revolving in the heavens, while the image of Julius Caesar is like a greater star, by which the others are judged as lesser. Antony sees a terrible discrepancy between Caesar and his successor: O Cesar! qui du Ciel vois la terre ou nous sommes, Faut-il qu'un nom si beau, si grand, si cher aux hommes, Enfle les vanitez d'un ingrat successeur?2

Mairet's Octavius is much less human than Shakespeare's; cold, cunning, and crafty, he is a pale image of his foster father, though Cleopatra flatters him by referring to "grand Cesar, dont vous estes l'image" (V, 4). He is not a great soldier or leader of men : what he has learned of warfare, he learned from Antony, as the latter is told by his best friend : Or qu'Octave vous cede en l'art de commander C'est un poinct que lui-mesme est contraint d'accorder, 2

Mairet, Marc-Antoine (Paris: Sommaville, 1637), II, 1. All references to Mairet's tragedy are to this edition.

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Puisque ses plus beaux faits des vostres empruntez Doivent tout leur esclat à vos propres clartez. (1,2)

It is interesting to note that the learning of military skills is here transposed into an image of light, as of one star taking its light from another. By a combination of cleverness, calculation, and just plain good luck, Octavius finds his fortunes rising - Mairet uses the terms "croissante grandeur" and "croissante gloire" - while Antony is plagued by bad luck: his star is falling, as Octavius' is rising. Another celestial image of the relationship of the two men is suggested by Plutarch: Antoine ... avait auprès de lui un de ces devins d'Egypte qui ... lui disait que sa fortune, toute grande, toute éclatante qu'elle était, s'éclipsait devant celle de César, et lui conseillait de s'éloigner de ce jeune homme le plus qu'il lui serait possible. "Votre génie, lui disait-il, redoute le sien; fier et élevé quand il est seul, il perd devant celui de César toute sa grandeur, il devient faible et timide." 3

Shakespeare did not miss this. His soothsayer tells Antony : Therefore (oh Antony) stay not by his side : Thy Daemon that thy spirit which keepes thee, is Noble, Couragious, high unmatchable Where Cœsar's is not. But neere him, thy Angell Becomes a feare, as being o're-powr'd : therefore Make space enough betweene you. .. .Thy Luster thickens When he shines by. (II, 3)

Mairet too saw this analogy and used it: his high priest warns Cleopatra against Antony's staying close to Octavius : que Roy sur tout autre il trembloit en esclave, Et perdoit sa vertu contre celuy d'Octave. (III, 2)

Not only has Octavius taken light from Antony, like one star from another, but their orbits must not come too close together; if they do, Antony will be eclipsed (Plutarch's French translator uses this very word) by Octavius. Whereas Antony feels that he is falling while Octavius is rising, he also feels that his destiny is inevitably linked with that of Cleopatra. Although 3

Ricard, trans., Plutarque: Les Vies des hommes illustres (Paris : Gamier, 1862), tome quatrième, 291.

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friends who do not like her tell him that she has "terni vostre nom d'une honte criminelle" as much because of her cowardly flight at Actium as the excesses of pleasure - in spite of these warnings, Antony feels whatever glory he has is due to her : Puisque c'est vostre image en mon ame imprimée, Qui fait les beaux désirs dont elle est animée: C'est d'elle que je tiens cette noble chaleur.

(1,4) The love that inspires a warrior to bravery is here expressed in terms of the reflected light and heat from one planet to another. Mairet's play is of course much more concentrated in place and time than Shakespeare's: following the trend which he helped to establish with his Sophonisbe, he limits the time to one or two days before the fall of Alexandria into Octavius' hands, and the place to within the city walls. Though there is not nearly the wealth of imagery to be found in Shakespeare, Mairet nevertheless manages, within the limits of a growing classical taste, to suggest some of the brilliance of the court of Cleopatra, the fatal attraction she held for Antony, and the appalling magnitude of their fall. He does it with a recurring use of planet and light images. Cleopatra recalls their first few months together as a kind of âge d'or, a golden ideal as opposed to the messy reality of the present: Iras, vous souvient-il de la magnificence, De l'estat glorieux, de pompe & de puissance; En fin de la splendeur dont nous brillions tous deux Quand mes premiers regards allumèrent ses feux? (I, 3)

She recalls her sumptuous retinue, "Dont l'esclat orgueilleux n'eut jamais de pareil". There is a magical golden hue to nearly all her excesses; in fact, one might say that Mairet's play is bathed in the golden colours of a brilliant fiery sunset. One of Cleopatra's excesses, not mentioned in Plutarch, was having her ships painted gold inside and out, and her flight from the battle of Actium may be imagined as a sun disappearing over a horizon, carrying Antony's good fortune away from him. Another image of sun and good fortune deserting them came from Plutarch: Cleopatra gave a suit of golden armour to a soldier (Mairet makes him a Gaul, rather ironically) who had shown particular bravery. The next day he deserted to Octavius. Even death comes in splendor to Cleopatra: she dies on a golden bed, dressed in her robes of the sun-god Isis. Many people had been shocked at her presumption in continually wearing these robes at public functions - in addition to which she had named her and

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Antony's son and daughter after the sun and moon - and these onlookers predicted grave consequences. If Antony and Cleopatra met destruction because of hubris in likening themselves to gods, it is nevertheless a fact that they are made to appear more than mortal, and their fall that of a meteor going down in flames. With them goes an era of greatness, and with the reign of Octavius will come an era of careful planning and petty respectability - a bourgeois era. The whole movement of the tragedy is a fall - a fall f r o m fortune, a moral falling away, a sun falling, day turning into night. Cleopatra's fears turn into cosmic images : Que de nuages noirs, de craintes, & d'ennuis, Ont fait de mes beaux jours de tenebreuses nuicts. (I, 3) The action of falling also has definite erotic connotations, as can be seen in certain expressions like "tomber amoureux" or "tomber dans ses bras". Mairet, like Shakespeare, like many French poets of the sixteenth century, sees the link between sensuality, loss of consciousness, and death. (In a sense, Antony's falling in love with Cleopatra is a forecast of his final fall, for with her he can express only his sensual, erotic self, while his conscious mind is prevented from dealing with external events. H e has allowed himself to become part of a man, so that he is naturally at a disadvantage against Octavius, who is all conscious self - one might even say all super-ego - who has never been in touch with his unconscious, and whose victory over Antony and Cleopatra will be slightly marred by the fact that they will never follow his chariot in a Roman triumph. The unconscious will escape him always.) Antony knows that he should give Cleopatra u p : Je ne puis recevoir un conseil plus utile, Mais l'execution en est bien difficile, Mon cœur dans ses regards a trop pris de poison Pour ailleurs qu'en la mort trouver sa guerison, J'ay dormy trop longtemps dans le sein des delices, La peste des vertus, & la source des vices : Enfin je ne voy plus de milieu désormais Entre cesser de vivre, & ne la voir jamais. (IV, 1) Although Antony dies by his own sword, his death reminds us of Cleopatra's, by the use of the poison image, so that he seems to partake of her identity as he dies. This metamorphosis is a double one, for while Antony

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seems to slip down into death in ever decreasing circles, Cleopatra's last thoughts move outward and upward, from the buildings around her to her country, and finally to Antony himself, who is transformed into a sort of beginning and end of humanity : A d i e u Temples, Autels, & v o u s Prestres, tenus D ' y recevoir des dieux qui v o u s sont inconnus; A d i e u cher Patrie, esclave, & desolée, A d i e u Palais superbe, adieu grand Mausolée, N o i r tesmoin de la fin du premier des humains, Et du dernier aussi des Empereurs Romains.

(V, 6) Antony becomes a sort of sun-god, overshadowing official gods like Isis ("dieux qui vous sont inconnus"), and these public buildings around her will see him rise and fall every day, while merely human leaders like Octavius will busy themselves with the affairs of empire. Even the latter is forced to recognize the quality of her death: ...elle a fait une mort D i g n e de la splendeur des R o i s dont elle sort. (V,9)

Octavius is after all, like us, a mere mortal, a sort of spectator on stage who can only marvel, and not participate actively in the solar drama. It is most ironic that Octavius, in eclipsing Antony and gaining a decisive victory over the two lovers - one that will establish him as ruler of the world - still seems to shrink in stature beside them; he loses his planetary aspects at the same time that theirs become all-encompassing.4

4

Lancaster tells us that "Roman tradition has left us accounts of few women that have become famous on account of their passion, but there are at least three, all of them Africans and all doomed to die by their own hands after a conflict with Europeans. Of these Sophonisbe had recently been treated by Mairet, and Dido, already made a heroine by Hardy, was soon to be placed on the stage by Scudiry" (A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932], Part II, 40-41). Mairet manages to mention both Dido (III, 4) and Sophonisbe (V, 6) in this play, so that the similarity which Lancaster noticed had not escaped him, either.

8

LA FAUSSE ROUTE

Le Grand et dernier Solyman ou la mort de Mustapha, which Mairet rather defiantly states is "dans toutes les reigles de la Tragedie", 1 seems on first reading to be so burdened with coincidence, unexplained betrayals, and anticlimaxes, that it is tempting to dismiss it as another disorderly seventeenth-century tragi-comedy verging on melodrama. Solyman is rather disorderly : the last act is an apotheosis of brutality, bathos, last-minute revelations, remorse, death and destruction. An old hag comes to reveal that the young hero doomed to execution is in reality the heir to the throne. In a melodrama she would arrive one minute before the execution, just in time to save the hero; in Solyman she arrives one minute too late - the axe has fallen. The play contains a series of reversals: nothing that anyone does turns out the way he intended. Confidences are betrayed, motives are twisted, letters are used against the person whom they were intended to help, the voices of reason and common sense are consistently overpowered by those of intrigue, violence, hatred and calumny. Characters are sketched in, no one really comes to grips with a problem within himself. In a way, it is a return to the old tragédie du sang of twenty-five years earlier, and as such, found slight favour with audiences of 1637. Everything leads to destruction in Solyman, and it is not surprising that the central image of the play is the route to follow, which turns out to be a fausse route. Based on the life of an actual sixteenth-century tyrant, and adapted from an Italian play by Bonarelli,2 Solyman tells of the court intrigues which resulted in the death of the king's faithful brave son, Mustapha. Solyman, growing old and suspicious of his son's increasing glory, is easily persuaded by the queen and wicked son-in-law that Mustapha is plotting against him. He orders him back to the palace, discovers that the 1 (Paris: Courbé, 1639), following the list of characters. All references in this chapter are to this edition. 2 Prospero Bonarelli, II Solimano (Firenze : Cecconcelli, 1620).

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prince is in love with an enemy princess, and has them both executed. Their deaths prove doubly meaningless when the old king discovers his son's innocence and the queen discovers that Mustapha is really her son. There remains nothing to do but give vent to violence and destroy everyone, which Mustapha's army sets out to do. We first see the image of the road in the first scene between father and son. A campaign against Persia is being planned, and Solyman gives Mustapha his orders : Si vostre ame guerriere, & bouillante d'audace Abborre le repos comme il faut qu'elle fasse, Que dez le point du jour on connoisse demain L'effet du Sceptre d'or que vous avez en main Faites marcher vos gens tout droit au sein de Perse, Et moy qui veut tenir une route diverse Aussitost après vous je conduiray les miens Par où plus grand peril meine aux flots Caspiens. (I, 3)

What could be more straightforward? Plans for a battle naturally include marching toward the most advantageous site, and by the shortest path. But with this particular battle, it is a question of who is going to follow the most dangerous route (and presumably acquire the most glory). Mustapha's immediate reaction is that his father should not expose himself to danger : ...permettez moy de prendre vostre route Ou le plus grand peril se trouvera sans doute,

so that if he (Mustapha) should perish, the empire would not suffer such a loss. This struggle between the two generations, where each man tries to outdo the other in generosity, is in effect a power struggle, expressed in terms of a path to be followed. Solyman is more aware of the real nature of the struggle than Mustapha, for he answers his son : Vostre cœur me plaist, & j'en fais cas Mais l'ordre neantmoins ne se changera pas Je veux me reservant ce perileux voyage Que le plus grand ouvrier ayt le plus grand ouvrage.

Mustapha accepts his father's decision without question, and Solyman happily gives him some parting advice, which begins : Va mon sang, va mon fils, apprens qu'un conquérant Doit cheminer partout comme un feu dévorant.

It is clear that to Solyman and to Mustapha, the road to follow leads toward victory and conquest. It seems to be a triumphal march. But the

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fear of the coming generation is a real one, and one which can be played upon by ambitious and unscrupulous people, such as the young Rustan, Mustapha's half brother and the villain of the piece. Here, the struggle between generations is expressed in terms of a path: Estant bien malaysé qu'aux peres de son âge Le credit des enfans ne donne de l'ombrage Et que d'un successeur, qui marche sur leurs pas La trop grande splendeur ne les offusque pas. (I, 1)

Rustan uses the same image when planting the seeds of suspicion in the old king's mind. Speaking of Mustapha, he says : Sur tout j'ay remarqué qu'il vouloit obtenir De prendre le chemin que vous voulez tenir, Non qu'il y fut poussé par un désir de gloire Comme possible alors il vous là fait accroire : Mais pour joindre plustost le perfide Estranger Afin d'aller tous deux d'un cours prompt & leger, Envelopper la Thrace, & surprendre Bisance Dont la plus grande force est en vostre presence. (1,2)

The easy, harmonious communication between father and son, which we saw at the beginning of the play, is soon cut off by a web of suspicion and lies, all designed to lead the king down the devious path of alienation from his son, from the world of reality, and from himself. One of the false signs on this twisted path is a forged letter, by means of which, says Rustan, Il apprendra ... que le Prince a promis D'entrer en alliance avec ses ennemis, Et que pour cet hymen la fureur qui le guide Doit allumer la torche avec un parricide, Si bien qu'en cette mer battu de tant de vents En son cœur agité flots sur flots eslevans Avec l'aveugle amour qu'il porte à la Sultane Sa raison à la fin perdra la Tramontane, La fortune & l'amour ont l'ouvrage advancé Mais il faut achever ce qu'ils ont commencé.

(II, 5) Alienation is expressed in terms of deviating from a path: la Tramontane is the name of a wind that comes across the mountains - hence the name and the expression perdre la Tramontane means to lose one's direction.

The slow but steady movement along this path toward madness is emphasized by the frequency with which the verb avancer occurs in the play,

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in a literal or figurative sense. In the passage quoted above, the "ouvrage advancé" refers to the advancement of the plot against Mustapha. Again, speaking of the prince, the queen's plan is to "lui faire advancer la mort qu'on luy desire". Other times the verb is used in a more figurative meaning. Solyman says "Achevez, poursuivez la parole avancée". When the one courtier who believes that Mustapha is innocent says "je suis plege envers tous de sa fidélité", Solyman replies "Vous advancez beaucoup, Acmat". Mustapha says "J'avance ses soupçons par mon retardement." Not that Mairet uses the verb in an unusual meaning; it is simply the frequency of its occurrence which suggests a preoccupation in the mind of the poet. While the road away from the palace was seen as a path of victory and conquest, the way back is a devious one, a "voyage funeste", a twisted trail which ends in a labyrinth of suspicion, treachery and sadism. One might well ask why, when he knows of the plot against him, does Mustapha consent to return to his father's palace? It is a choice made "en pleine connaissance de cause" certainly. Mustapha is of course convinced of his innocence as well as his loyalty to his father, and he realizes that his duty is to obey his father's command. Anything less than absolute fidelity would make him the traitor he is accused of being. In order for him to be true to the ideals he believes in, he must follow a course which may very well lead to his death. His friend Bajazet warns him in no uncertain terms : Ah Seigneur gardez bien d'entrer dans le Palais Si vous avez dessein de n'en sortir jamais, Là si vous l'ignorez la mort vous est certaine Par le traistre Rustan, & la mechante Reyne.

(ni, 1)

Moreover, once inside the palace, Mustapha sees that the atmosphere has become fetid with an almost physical sickness and decay: Dans ce Palais funeste, ou l'effroy m'environne, Chacun craint mon abord, me fuit, ou m'abandonne, Comme un lieu désolé par la peste, & le feu Ou que celui du Ciel a frapé depuis peu. (IV, 1) Does he think that, like some sort of lightning illumination, his very presence in the palace will turn black into white, distortion into clarity, lies into truth? This kind of visual force, almost a transfiguration, occurs sometimes in Corneille; Pauline finally sees the truth of her husband's alienation, that what she took for an illusion is in fact reality of a higher

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order ("Je vois, je sais, je crois, je suis désabusée"); 3 Nicomède calms the turbulent mob outside the palace merely by showing himself to them ("Un moment de ma vue...")»4 the idea being that truth and virtue have only to make themselves clear in order to dissipate the dark forces of hatred and evil, that one's strength is as the strength of ten if one's heart is pure. But Mustapha is unfortunately no Theseus come to kill the monster in this labyrinth; because the palace is a labyrinth, and the monster in it is the monster of suspicion and jealousy, as Acmat observes to Solyman : Ah Seigneur, le soupçon, ce monstre sans pitié Loge bien tost la hayne, ou logeoit l'amitié, C'est pourquoy cependant qu'il vous en reste encore Devorez-le vous mesme avant qu'il vous devore. (II, 6)

Everything in the play works toward a particularly vicious distortion of generally upheld values: not only does evil triumph, in that Solyman subjects Mustapha and his fiancée Despine to an extremely sadistic form of mental (and threatened physical) torture and to final death, but evil goes scot free afterward, by the simple process of repentance. All in all, it is an extremely nihilistic drama, in which all positive, beneficial values are overthrown by negative and destructive ones. Two attitudes to this are seen within the play. Mustapha, when he is convinced of his father's treachery, makes a move to fight his way out, and hears this final grisly threat: Si le moindre des miens reçoit une attainte Le corps de vostre Amante exposé tout un jour Servira de spectacle aux Pages de ma Cour. (V,4)

There is nothing left to do but to bear this inhuman treatment with stoical resignation, which is what Despine suggests : Quittez donc cette hache, en qui vostre innocence N e rencontre aussi bien qu'une foible defence Non non, à mon advis, il est plus à propos Tant pour nostre vertu que pour nostre repos D'aprivoiser la Mort en payant de constance Que de l'effaroucher en faisant resistance Mettez les armes bas, un semblable malheur A besoin de constance, & non pas de valeur. (IV, 4) 3 4

Polyeucte, V, 5, 1722. Nicomède, V, 9, 1779.

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The two virtuous but helpless young lovers are reduced to a state of frozen immobility. Bajazet, on the other hand, is whipped into a state very near frenzy: he becomes a whirlwind of destruction: Compagnons suivez moy! perdons, saccageons tout Desertons ce Palais de l'un à l'autre bout, Que tous les serviteurs, & les proches des Traistres Portent l'iniquité des parents & des Maistres, Que l'ardeur de tuer par le meurtre croissant Confonde le coupable avecques l'innocent. Et que cette vangeance, en cruautez célébré Soit à nostre Héros une pompe funebre, Mesme afin qu'un si juste & si prompt châtiment Passe jusqu'aux sujets privez de sentiment, Que le perfide sein de cette Terre infâme Soit lavé par le sang & purgé par la flâme. CV.9) These are the closing lines of the play. This is where the path has led - to a labyrinth of jealousy and alienation, the immobility of resignation, and a senseless whirlwind of violence. It is either a profoundly disordered view of the world - or a vision of a profoundly disordered world, and obviously one which Mairet himself was unwilling to accept. From now on, his theatre will deal in various ways with attempts at breaking an impossible situation. From now on he will attempt a reconciliation between love and political realities in his plots, and on another level, between reality and the work of literary creation.

9 THE PIRATE PRINCE

Not many young men who try to kiss the object of their love get a reaction quite as violent as the hero of L'Illustre Corsaire, produced toward the end of 1637. Invited to his beloved's own room at midnight, Lepante tried to kiss her, when suddenly, as he tells it, Les yeux auparavant si calmes & si clairs Me lancent des regards qui semblent des éclairs, Et sa bouche offensée aux injures ouverte, Me foudroyé en ces mots qui causèrent ma perte: Indiscret, me dit-elle, après cet accident Ne me montre jamais ton visage impudent, Meurs, & souille la Mer de tes flames impures.1 It proved a horrifying experience for both of them. Lepante leaped from her bedroom through a window and fell into the sea below, where a ship's crew picked him up half dead, took him aboard, only to lose him to pirates the next day at sea. He spent the following ten years in the company of these outlaws, gradually increasing his influence over them until he became head of a large flotilla of pirate ships. The horrified princess, Isménie, suffered in a different way. She nearly went out of her mind, thinking that she had caused his death. Palace authorities announced that she had died of plague, but actually she was taken away from Marseilles to a country estate far from the ocean, where it took her a full nine years to recover. When the play opens, ten years have passed since that fatal night. Lepante is now thirty. At twenty he had a fresh, almost feminine beauty ("il avoit la façon / D'une jeune beauté sous l'habit d'un garçon") ; ten years have matured him, he is now more heroic, more virile looking, but still the same prince who loves Isménie. And the doctor who helped her through her sickness is sure that she still loves him, even though she 1 Mairet, L'Illustre Corsaire (Paris: Courbé, 1640), II, 5. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

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thinks he is dead. How best to approach her? The doctor has an idea: why not dress up as fools, you and your friend Ténare, and entertain her? Par cette invention, mon art & mon credit Vous feront seurement aprocher Ismenie.

(1,2) They will stage a performance - Ténare playing the comic and Lepante the tragic rôle - of two lovers who have lost their wits because of love. The performance must be amusing: ...de sa gayeté [Isménie's] dépend sa guerison. Tant qu'elle sera triste, elle sera mal saine

(I, 5) and at the same time keep a delicate balance between artifice and sincerity (are they really in love or just playing?), so that if it does not succeed, they can always say that it was only a game. As he had done in earlier plays, Mairet is using the idea of performance, of theatre, to expose a truth and protect himself at the same time. We also see, particularly in Ténare's light-hearted playing of le gay, that this performance has distinctly literary associations. He enchants the ladies "de ses récits pleins de naïfveté, / D'amours & de combats qui n'ont jamais esté" (11,2). They ask him where he finds his "beaux mots", and he replies : Amour me les suggéré, & les neuf doctes Sœurs Qui laissent rarement une bouche muette.

(II, 3) Célie, one of Isménie's serving maids, who has quite fallen in love with this happy rogue, laughs and says, "Je croy qu'en son bon sens il fut mauvais Poëte." Lepante's performance of le triste is no less successful. Since he spent the last ten years on the seas, he presents his character in terms of marine mythology. He has been living in Neptune's kingdom, fulfilling the duties of "Intendant General du palais de Neptune". He also tells Isménie that he has fallen in love with her because she reminds him of the beautiful Iphis, who, he says, thinks he is dead. Everything he tells her is a disguised version of what had actually happened, to the point that she begins to wonder if she is awake or dreaming : Non, non, j'ay fait un songe, ou je suis enchantee... Ce qui s'est dit & veu, n'est qu'ombre & que mensonge, Ou tous les assistants n'ont fait qu'un mesme songe.

(II, 6) She is disturbed, then delighted when she realizes that Lepante is still

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alive. Now at last she can forgive him his imprudence of ten years before, and at last ease her conscience. Two further obstacles to their marriage present themselves in the form of a boring pretentious rival, King Lypas of Liguria, and a promise which Isménie's brother had made to a pirate captain a few years before, that he could marry her in exchange for her brother's life. Lepante wins out easily over his rival, first in a battle of wits and then in action, when Lypas tries to kidnap Isménie and Célie, and Lepante and Ténare rush out and rescue them. The promise to the pirate captain is easily disposed of as we discover that the captain is Lepante himself. The play ends in a flurry of joyful energy. Lepante leaves Isménie's brother to reign in Marseilles, and he and Isménie, Célie, Ténare and the good doctor all set out for the high seas and new adventures. The ladies are so ecstatic and grateful they feel like worshipping him. Isménie mentions that people raised temples to commemorate Hercules' great deeds : Lepante certainly deserves a temple in Marseilles. After writing three tragedies in a row, Mairet in this play turned again to tragi-comedy, as most critics have noted, stung by Corneille's success with Le Cid. Although we do not know the exact date of the first performance of U Illustre Corsaire, it is possible that Mairet had seen or knew of Le Cid when he wrote it, as there are certain traits common to both plays. Both take place far from Paris, in cities on or near the sea, so that there is a certain amount of local colour in both. Lepante and Rodrigue are young heroes who are in fact much more powerful than the kings under whom they serve. It is made clear in Mairet's play that Lepante has enough ships in reserve to attack Marseilles and depose any ruler - but he never has to use them. Finally, this is really Mairet's first non-tragedy since Chryséide et Arimand in which the hero is not only in love with the heroine, but is also responsible for most of the action of the play. Lepante is a man who is significantly able to control his own destiny. But when we look more closely at that destiny, we see the gulf that separates Mairet from Corneille. Rodrigue's destiny is, from the moment of his triumph, inextricably linked with that of his country. Although he will never rule Spain, he will always be the principal support of his monarch. And his love for Chimène, which at first seemed unalterably opposed to his family responsibility, at the end becomes reconciled with his responsibility to the state. Mairet simply does not see things that way. In fact, the comparison of Lepante with Hercules is a significant one, as the Greek hero, in all his adventures, never allied himself permanently with one

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authority. He was the great travelling hero, a righter of wrongs who, once he had slain a monster or avenged a wrong, moved on to another land. And since many of his adventures were also amorous escapades, it fits in with his character to have love in L'lllustre Corsaire the chief pivot of the action. The plot revolves around a series of obstacles to the love between Lepante and Ismenie, in the course of which the hero regains the heroine by a combination of ready wit, physical actions, and a theatrical performance. This use of theatre as metaphor may remind us of Les Galanteries du due d'Ossonne, in which the hero wins the love of his lady (and we are entertained) by a clever performance. But if we examine the opening situation of L'lllustre Corsaire, we see echoes in it not only of another play, Sylvie, but also of Mairet's own situation as dramatic author. In Corsaire, the plot turns, not on the awakening of young love, but on the recapturing of a love that had awakened ten years previously. And the hero uses theatre to recapture this love. It seems peculiarly significant that Mairet should use this plot device in a play written almost exactly ten years after his first theatrical triumph in Sylvie. This is why L'lllustre Corsaire seems to me to contain a symbolic presentation of Mairet's own situation: he is trying to recapture the wonderful relationship that existed ten years previously between himself and Parisian theatre audiences, when Sylvie was the most talked-about play in the city. And the fact that in Corsaire both hero and heroine think that the other is dead reminds us of the famous love-death spell in Sylvie, in which Thelame and Sylvie are each placed under the illusion that the other is dead. Obviously the situations in the two plays are not identical, but the similarity exists.

10 A LOOK BACK IN ANGER

If responsibilities of statehood played but a small part in the hero's actions in L'Illustre Corsaire, they are even further out of the picture in Roland furieux, which Mairet wrote almost at the same time, and which was performed in early 1638. He has taken the central subject, Roland's madness, and the events immediately surrounding it, from the elaborate pattern of Ariosto's poem, and made it the substance of his tragi-comedy. One could accuse him of a rather rambling plot line, but compared to its original, it is almost a jewel of concision. Of the dozens of characters in the poem, he has used only Roland, Angélique, Médor, Isabelle, Zerbin and Rodomont, with Astolphe making an appearance at the end. Roland's madness arises of course from thwarted love. At the beginning of the play he tells us that he realizes he should be back in Paris helping Charlemagne fight the Saracens, but instead he is pursuing Angélique. Reason tells him he should go back to his duty, but, as he says, Laisse-moy raison sans pouvoir Qui me parles de mon devoir, Ta remonstrance m'importune, Moy j'ay l'amour dans les entrailles Qui me devore nuict & jour. 1

To distract himself from thinking of his hopeless love, he remarks on the pastoral surroundings - "Vrayment cette prairie est un charmant theatre" - but suddenly he sees the names of Angélique and Médor carved on a tree-trunk. Could there be another Angélique? Could the name Médor really be a disguise for Roland? Unfortunately not, for the next object which catches his eye is a little poem, "Stances de Medor", part of which reads: 1

Mairet, Roland furieux (Paris : Courbé, 1640), 1,1. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

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...moy pauvre Medor dans les bras d'Angelique, Temperant doucement du feu de ses beaux yeux L'humide fraischeur de ton ombre, Ay gousté des plaisirs sans nombre Que l'on ne gouste point à la table des Dieux.

(I. 1) Horror-stricken, Roland inquires of an old couple nearby, who tell him that Angélique and Médor were married in their house and have gone on to Marseilles. The young couple are of course inside the house, and in the following scene we meet them as young newly-weds. Angélique, the fantastically beautiful princess from Cathay who stirs up all the knightly hearts in Orlando furioso has chosen for her husband not one of the many Christian heroes who were desperately in love with her, but a simple Moorish soldier, not known for his bravery, but possessed of extraordinary physical beauty, and their love takes on the quality of a mutually shared banquet of pleasure. As Médor says to Angélique, Dans l'aise où je me perds contemplant vos appas La nuict vient que mon œil ne s'en apperçoit pas : Dans ce ravissement les plus longues journées Semblent à mes transports de courtes matinées, Et je me plaints du temps qui donne à mes amours, Et des désirs si longs, & des soleils si courts. (1,4)

For her part, she is afraid only that he will be surfeited of pleasure: .. .je crains que l'excès du plaisir N'esmousse en vostre cœur la pointe du désir, Et qu'un certain dégoust qui suit la jouissance...

but they assure each other that they will never grow tired, not until heaven and earth change positions. When he asks her how he, a simple soldier, can be worthy of her, she replies : Aymez-moy seulement autant que je vous ayme, Ainsi vostre brasier estant pareil au mien Sera ma recompense & mon souverain bien.

He will reign some day in her kingdom, which, like Baudelaire's Dutch landscape, is seen as a beautiful earthly paradise : Là regne un air si bon, si calme, si benin Et dans sa pureté si contraire au venin...

Pleasures take on a pure, beautiful character in Cathay, completely divorced from any cares or ugliness. Angélique is most anxious to take

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Médor home with her, and set him on the throne, where diadem and royal robes well enhance his natural beauty. She wants to "mettre nostre amour dans un trosne esclatant", which is certainly a way of giving beauty and pleasure a permanent, tangible, and visible glory. Médor is impressed with her description, but he feels that, even if we cannot enjoy the ideal of Cathay, we can taste immediate pleasures here and now: Mais attendant le temps que la faveur des Dieux Nous permette de vivre en ces aymables lieux, Jouissons des plaisirs que ceux-cy nous fournissent.

Médor feels that he can do almost anything; "Assisté d'un regard de vos yeux amoureux", he could become a hero himself. (Could Racine have been thinking of this when he wrote Pyrrhus' line, "Animé d'un regard, je puis tout entreprendre"?) He goes to fetch a knife to carve their names in other trees, and just before going, kisses her on the mouth: O bouche qui baisez avec tant de pudeur! Bouche où la violette exhale son odeur, Bouche qui faites honte à l'incarnat des roses, Qu'on pense en vous baisant à d'agreables choses ; Encore un, & je meurs. (II, 1)

As Médor leaves, Isabelle comes on the scene. She is in love with Zerbin, the Scottish knight who saved Médor's life when he was wounded in the fight with the Christians. After greeting each other, and exclaiming over each other's beauty, the two heroines compare their attitudes to love, and Mairet devotes quite a long passage to Angélique's defence of sensual pleasure. It is perhaps the most outspoken such defence in all of Mairet's theatre: Sçachez donc, tres-aymable & discrette estrangere, Que sous ces vestemens de Nymphe & de Bergere Je cueille en ce desert des plaisirs innocens, Qui ne sont bien connus que des cœurs jouïssans; Qu'estant fille de Roy, j'ay choisi pour Amant Un simple avanturier des troupes d'Agramant; Mais l'amour ... se rit de l'inégalité Des biens de la fortune, & de la qualité. Ce qui me plaist m'égale, & l'objet du plaisir Attire seulement mon amoureux désir: Enfin suivant l'esprit du Dieu qui me commande, J'ayme pour estre heureuse, & non pour estre grande Je sçay bien que mon nom, quand vous l'aurez appris, Vous fera condamner le dessein que j'ay pris;

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Et que tout l'Univers apprenant mon histoire Dira que mon amour a fait tort à ma gloire. (II, 2) When one reads a line such as "J'ayme pour estre heureuse, & non pour estre grande", one cannot help thinking that Mairet was aiming his words not only at those who considered love in terms of influence or social status, but also those for whom love was experienced from a lofty moral viewpoint, and that he was claiming sensual pleasure as a value in its own right. It is possible that he was including Corneille in this indirect attack, but there are too many uncertain factors to warrant more than a supposition on this. What is perhaps more important is the fact that Mairet puts his defence of pleasure in the mouth of a pagan princess, Angélique, who is speaking to a Christian heroine, Isabelle. It would seem that Ariosto's celebrated poem has furnished Mairet with a means of making a point and disguising it at the same time - that the ideal of sensual pleasure cannot be realized in a Christian society. He did not have to change anything in the Italian original, only focus on certain aspects of it and disregard others. In contrast to the ideal relationship between Angélique and Médor, we see three other attitudes toward love in the play. One is the gross bestiality of Rodomont, that "Colosse audacieux fanfaron mal apris", whose attitude toward women varies from undisguised lust to undisguised hatred. He complains with venom of the fickleness of women: Ce sexe où la nature a mis si peu de foy, Sexe à qui la beauté sert d'agreable masque A deguiser sa fraude & son humeur fantasque; Sexe de qui l'esprit est un sable mouvant Qui va toujours au gré de la mer & du vent, (III, 3) but the moment he sees the virtuous Isabelle, his hatred turns to lust, and he must have her. Isabelle tricks him into killing her, by telling him he is only testing a magic charm of invulnerability; and she suffers what is in essence a Christian martyr's death, in the tradition of Saint Eulalie, who died to preserve her virginity. In the short sketch of an innkeeper and his wife, Mairet has given us a picture of an older couple's reaction to young love. Watching the young couple kiss, the innkeeper's wife says : Je ne m'estonne pas s'ils cueillent des plaisirs Dont l'âge d'un mary me deffend les désirs. (IV, 3)

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Médor's answer to this is even more specific: Et bien Bertrand & vous baisez-vous de la sorte? Non, vostre âge & le sien n'ont rien qui se rapporte, D'où vient que ses baisers à demy morfondus Sont donnez froidement, & froidement rendus.

But the wife has accepted her situation : Mon plaisir me suffit, si je le sçay borner Aux forces de celuy qui me le peut donner.

The older couple take obvious pleasure in having Angélique and Médor in their house, and the husband had mentioned before that not only was Angélique married in his house but the marriage was consummated in his own bed: Son hymen s'accomplit Dans ma propre maison & dans mon propre lict. a , 2)

One can well imagine the shock of Parisian audiences of 1638 at hearing impotence and vicarious enjoyment discussed so plainly, but this aspect of human experience returns more than once in Mairet, in different forms. Finally, and perhaps in greatest contrast to the young lovers, is the hero, Roland. His love for Angélique has never dared express itself beyond the bounds of modesty : he speaks of her as "Cette fleur que jamais je n'ay voulu toucher", and it is the realization that Médor is enjoying with her all the delights which have been forbidden to him (or which he has forbidden to himself) that sets off his fits of violence. It must be noted that even in his madness he does not use any violence against Angélique; it is directed entirely against the trees and flowers, against the setting around him. Seeing their names engraved on the trees, he cries out: Oui, l'outrage est trop grand, & je dois pour le moins Au deffaut des autheurs, en perdre les tesmoins. (Ill, 1)

Whereupon he tears off his clothes, and runs naked throughout the forest, uprooting trees, trampling flowers, killing anything that gets in his way. We have already seen violence as a reaction to an impossible situation in Solyman, written only two or three years before, but Roland's violence is less all-consuming than Bajazet's cries to burn and destroy everything, and at the same time has a peculiarly theatrical nature. One of the curious points about Mairet's play is that he situates it in the old setting of UAstrée, the area of Forez. All these violent deeds and killings take place in a traditional pastoral setting, and Roland, in uprooting

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trees and trampling flowers, is in fact destroying the pastoral setting, which has been a witness to his failure to reconcile Christian morality with pagan sensuality. By stretching the point a little further, one can see Roland as somewhat of a counterpart to Mairet himself, who achieved his first successes with pastorals and who now finds the pastoral an embodiment of an unattainable ideal where heroic action is reduced to violent gesture without meaning. Roland is the only character in the play who comments on the setting, both at the beginning and at the end, when, having recovered his senses, he mounts the hippogryph and, before flying away, turns back to the stage and says : Adieu terre odieuse, adieu theatre infâme Sur lequel je rougis d'avoir representé Un personnage indigne, & si digne de blâme, Comme tu fus témoin de ma captivité, ... Sois-le de mon repos & de ma liberté. (V, 3)

Having left the "theatre", he will find liberty in devotion to duty, which was just what Mairet was to do two years later.

11 ATHEN AÏS AND THE BALANCE SCALE

The subject matter of Athenais comes from the Byzantine empire. Caussin1 relates how Theodose, a rather weak, ineffectual emperor, is persuaded by his sister Pulcherie to marry a beautiful young commoner, Athenais, who has recently suffered the loss of her philosopher father. Pulcherie, who really holds the strings of power in her hand, is quite sure that a beautiful well-educated empress, not of the royal blood, but noble, will pose no political threat. The action of the play consists in overcoming the obstacles to this marriage: first, the young heroine's natural reticence and timidity, which takes up the first three acts, then (Act IV) the fact that Athenais is a pagan, while Theodose is Christian, and finally (Act V) a suspected amourette between Athenais and Paulin, one of the emperor's ministers. All these obstacles are of course overcome and the play ends triumphantly. It is not hard to imagine the critics of 1638 (the date Lancaster gives as the probable first performance) pouncing on this tragi-comedy with the cry, "No unity of action!" However, the notion that a plot was supposed to develop organically from the opening situation, introducing no new material or outside events after the third act, was still a new idea in 1638. Tragi-comedies, though slightly fewer in number, were still quite popular, and as Lancaster has shown,2 their concept of unity of action was much broader than what later came to be accepted. It is true that, from a historical point of view, Mairet was going against the trend by continuing to write tragi-comedies, and while his Athenais transgresses unity of action as classical critics saw it, his play, while it could never be called a masterpiece of dramaturgy, is nevertheless not without a metaphorical unity. 1

R. P. Nicolas Caussin, La Cour sainte ou Vinstitution des grands (Paris: Sebastien Chappelet, 1624), 701-35. 2 Lancaster, The French Tragi-Comedy, its Origin and Development from 1552 to 1628 (Baltimore: Furst, 1907).

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In placing Athénaïs firmly near the bottom of the Mairet parabola, Bizos is of the opinion that "il n'y aurait qu'à indiquer rapidement le sujet et le plan de cette pièce, n'était la très curieuse influence qu'elle nous semble avoir eue en bien et en mal sur l'esprit du grand Corneille".3 If only Mairet had made the conversion of Athénaïs the subject of his play, "au lieu d'en faire un épisode mal lié à l'action principale". 4 If only Mairet had been Corneille, what great plays he might have written! However, the comparison with Corneille is not without interest, if not for the reason Bizos puts forward. For one of the images that lie behind the surface of many of Corneille's plays is that of the balance scale, which tips this way and that as weights are added on either side, but which seeks the juste milieu. Two well-known examples may show this. In Le Cid, the Infanta, although she does not influence the outcome of the struggle in Rodrigue and Chimène, forms an integral part of the structure of the play. Not only does she establish a sort of ethical framework which prepares us for Chimène's inner conflict, but her love for Rodrigue, unrequited as it is, is balanced by Don Sanche's unrequited love for Chimène. In Horace Corneille creates two characters who are both exaggerations of a norm. Camille is all personal feelings, unmindful of any social or political responsibility, while her brother sees nothing but this responsibility, to the detriment of any personal feeling, so much so, in fact, that he kills his sister. Brother and sister are conceived by the dramatist as being almost two halves of one complete human being. They are like weights at either end of a long fulcrum. In Athénaïs the two leading ladies have somewhat the same symbolic relationship. Pulchérie is more than active in government matters ; she is the power behind the throne of her brother Théodose. Athénaïs leans toward scholarship and the beauties of nature; she would prefer to spend her whole life studying. As she explains : ...sans que Pulchérie en puisse estre offensée, S o n Palais m e plaist m o i n s que ne fait le Lycée. Je chercherais plustost, s'il estoit à m o n chois, L'estude des Sçavans que la chambre des Rois. Je bornerois mes vœux, m a gloire & m o n envie D a n s la tranquillité d'une si chere vie. 5 3

Gaton Bizos, Étude sur la vie et les œuvres de Jean de Mairet, thèse présentée à la Faculté des lettres de Paris (Paris: Thorin, 1877), 352. 4 Bizos, 353. 5 Mairet, Athénaïs (Paris: Bréquigny, 1642), II, 1. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

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Certainly both ladies were exceptions to what was considered the normal role of women, but here as in Horace, their exaggerations may be seen as two sides of a balance scale. It is this balance scale which forms the central image of the whole play, and which gives it a unity that, on a superficial examination, it does not seem to possess. When we meet Athénaïs for the first time, she has come to the palace to plead a case against a stingy brother. Their late father had left them a rather unequal inheritance : Je donne tous les biens qui sont en mon pouvoir A mon fils, dont l'humeur, l'esprit & la conduite Font juger du besoin qu'il en pourrait avoir. Quant à ma chere fille, il suffit qu'elle herite De toute mon estude & de tout mon sçavoir, Et qu'une vérité dans les Astres escrite, Luy promette & me fasse voir, Que la fortune & le mérité S'accorderont un jour afin de la pourvoir.

(I, 3) This will serves somewhat the same function as the oracle in a pastoral : it seems to hand down a decision which is either unreasonable or unfair, but which succeeding events show to be quite justified. And it also contains, as one might expect, a reference to the main image of the play. Although Athénaïs has been left penniless now, some day her wealth "will be in harmony" with her worth - the scales will be more evenly balanced. Although Athénaïs pleads most eloquently for even a tiny portion of her brother's inheritance, and he refuses to help her, in spite of the fact that she is almost in dire poverty. Pulchérie, after listening to both sides, decides that the will shall stand, that the brother may keep his inheritance. She has other plans for the beautiful Athénaïs. She had arranged for Théodose to watch the proceedings from a window, and as she had planned, he became quite entranced with the young girl's eloquence, simplicity, and beauty. Pulchérie invites Athénaïs to stay at the palace, where she soon learns of the emperor's feelings for her. This is just the sort of incredible stroke of good luck that was hinted at in the will, but Athénaïs sees it as a threat. As Paulin explains to Théodose: Sa rigueur vient de crainte, elle est en défiance, Non de sa propre force, ou de vos passions, Mais de la pureté de vos intentions. Sa naissance à la vostre est si fort inégale Qu'elle croit vostre amour à son honneur fatale,

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Et que vous voir souvent, ce seroit allumer Le bûcher qui dans peu le pourrait consumer. (II, 2)

Whatever her motives, she does in fact "light the fire" in him to such a degree that he is soon willing to marry her. She has won the grand prize : "En luy refusant tout, [elle] l'oblige à toute chose..." The word injuste crops up occasionally, to remind us that the balance scale is also the scale of justice, at least ethical justice. Athénaïs' fears are referred to as "injuste crainte", "injustes soupçons". Théodose swears that in wanting to see her, he was not thinking of "injustes plaisirs" (though whether he was or not is open to question ; it is possible that, like Athénaïs, he too is frightened by sexual desire). Pulchérie is sure that her brother's conduct will conform "Aux Loix de l'équité qu'il a tousjours suivie". As Athénaïs still refuses to see the emperor, the mounting tension is expressed by Paulin in the phrase "tenir plus longtemps vostre esprit en balance". When Théodose says that he will surely die if he cannot marry Athénaïs, Paulin's lady-inwaiting replies : Ces deux extremitez sont beaucoup éloignées, Un miracle d'Amour les peut joindre pourtant. (Ill, 1)

Théodose says almost the same thing: "L'Amour nous rend égaux, & l'Hymen nous peut joindre." In all pastorals and tragi-comedies, love is the great equalizer, although very often it turns out that the social gap that separates hero and heroine is really a fiction, an illusion, and that they are both of noble birth. In Athénaïs it is not just love, but marriage, a much more solid institution, which will balance the two unequal partners. As Théodose says, ... pensez que la foy conjugale Doit rendre désormais nostre fortune égale Et que vous m'eslevez au faiste du bon-heur Comme je vous esleve au sommet de l'honneur. (III, 5)

To which Athénaïs replies : Donc en ce grand Hymen les plus humbles vallées Aux plus superbes monts se verront égalées Par la seule vertu du plus grand des mortels.

One might be tempted to see in this vertu an almost Cornelian act of will in which the hero surpasses and transcends himself. Théodose, however, is a far cry from Auguste. It is Pulchérie who holds the strings of power in this empire. Love is only one balance scale in this play : there is also

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the balance of power. This is exactly why Pulchérie wants her brother to marry Athénaïs : she will not pose any political threat : Puisqu'une belle-sœur est un mal nécessaire Que le bien de l'Estat est contraint de me faire : Mon interest se trouve à n'en point recevoir De qui l'authorité balance mon pouvoir. (III, 2) Athénaïs will have all the dignity and splendor of an empress, while Pulchérie will continue to govern the country. As with the repetition, previously noted, of the word injuste, so this repetition of the word balance and the verb balancer indicates a certain obsession, be it conscious or not, on the part of Mairet, and forms what might be called a metaphorical structure behind the plot and characters. The perfect equilibrium is upset twice after Athénaïs' consent in Act III. In Act IV we find that while Théodose is a Christian emperor, Athénaïs is a pagan: Quelle avanture non préveuë S'oppose injustement à mes justes plaisirs, (IV, 1) complains Théodose. His pleasures now being equitable and just, since they are to be legalized by marriage, the latest obstacle presents itself "injustement". Interestingly enough, paganism is never described in spiritual or moral terms, but as an affront to reason and efficacy: ... de grossières fables, Qui choquent la raison, l'honneur & le devoir Des Dieux sans connoissance ainsi que sans pouvoir. (IV, 1) It upsets the balance. Théodose, as an enlightened Christian emperor, does not want to force Athénaïs to convert; his solution is rather to confront her with the most learned men in the kingdom, who will convince her by reason that Christianity is the only sensible and elfective religion. This great debate between the old and the new creeds is carried on off stage, with attendants coming on at intervals to give latest despatches of how things are faring. Athénaïs holds up her end brilliantly, so we are told, but in the end reason triumphs, she sees the light, and equilibrium is restored. But not for long. In the fifth act the balance is upset once again with the emperor's suspicion that she is being false to him with Paulin, the same minister whose eloquence had won the debate for Christianity. Théodose dismisses her quite rudely with a curt

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Va, retourne au néant, d'où je t'avois tirée, Impudente, indiscrette, & peu chaste beauté. Cf. 2)

Athénaïs, completely unaware of why her fiancé is angry, reflects rather bitterly about the instability of life at court, and the changing humours of monarchs : Ha ! Prince qui sans cause, & peut-estre sans peine Avez si tost passé de l'amour à la haine, Qu'il est aisé de voir à vos feux inconstans Que si vous aimez fort vous n'aimez pas longtemps: Et ne déguisez plus vostre humeur inégalé En m'appellant peu chaste, ingratte & déloyale Puis qu'il est asseuré que je ne suis rien moins, Par la terre & le ciel que j'en prends à témoins, Va retourne au néant d'où je l'avois tirée: Mais plutost à la paix que tu m'as procurée, Inconstant, qui me rends avec la liberté, Le repos de l'esprit que tu m'avois osté. (V, 3)

Not only is Théodose unstable, like a balance scale that is constantly wavering, but the life of the court around him is seen as a precarious equilibrium of movement and agitation, which the slightest jolt may upset. Somewhat like Madame de Clèves, Athénaïs would like to escape: Fuyons-là cette Cour, & cette vaine pompe De qui le faux éclat nous attire & nous trompe; Il vaut mieux pour jouir d'une paix assurée, Retourner au néant, d'où vous m'avez tirée. (V,8)

In the end, however, she does not escape; Théodose finds out that he was wrong to suspect her; he begs her forgiveness, and she relents. From a psychological point of view, she had strong reasons not to trust him. Here she was at court, with no friends, no money, no power, entirely dependent on the feelings of an extremely weak, unstable man, with no guarantee that next week or next month he might not suspect her of some new treachery. The events described in this play actually covered a period of twenty-three years. Athénaïs was married in 421, broke with her husband in 444 and went into exile in Jerusalem, never to return. The ending of the play is thus a conscious distortion of historical and psychological reality for an esthetic purpose: the marriage and harmony of Théodose and Athénaïs seen as an equilibrium, a balance, which successive obstacles threaten temporarily, but cannot ultimately upset.

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There is an anonymous dedicatory sonnet to the play, written by someone who signs himself A.D.L.A.D.N., which is so imbued with this idea of a balance scale that one wonders whether Mairet did not write it himself. Le Tombeau d'Athénaïs Cy gist (ou vit l'honneur qui nâquit avec elle) La docte Athénaïs, sœur ou fille des Dieux, Qui vescut & vivroit adorable à nos yeux Si la vertu rendoit une femme immortelle. Sa fortune icy bas fut si grande & si belle, Que mesme elle en rendit son Autheur envieux, Et perdant à la mort un bien si precieux, La douleur qu'elle en eut fut juste & naturelle. Mais depuis qu'un Ouvrage & si grand & si beau A l'égal de son Trône illustra son Tombeau, L'Ouvrage & son Autheur sont si dignes d'envie, Qu'en l'estat glorieux qu'ils ont réduit son Sort, S'il estoit à son choix de r'entrer dans la vie, Elle auroit plus de peine à sortir de la mort. The thought is not too complicated: Athénaïs, while she lived, gained such renown by her intelligence and virtue that she made even her creator envious of her. Although she lost this worldly glory in death, she has gained so much more glory by being immortalized in Mairet's play that, if she had her choice, it would be difficult to decide between her earthly fortune and her subsequent literary glory. One might say that there are three main balance scales in the sonnet: earthly glory is set against literary (i.e. eternal) glory, the author of life is compared to the author of the play, and the throne is replaced by the tomb, or monument. The idea of a balance scale is underlined in no less than seven instances, balancing two terms one against another: "Cy gist ou vit", "sœur ou fille", "vescut & vivroit", "si grande & si belle", "juste & naturelle", "& si grand & si beau", and "L'Ouvrage & son Autheur". Opposites are constantly being weighed against each other, and the projected choice at the end of the sonnet reinforces this idea. And once again we find the key word "égal" in the sonnet. Athénaïs, who has been raised by a philosopher, is a student herself, and when she comes to court for the first time, makes a most persuasive defence of the contemplative life. If she but had the means, she says,

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Avec la quietude & la paix de l'esprit, Je bornerais mes vœux, ma gloire & mon envie Dans la tranquilité d'une si chere vie. Tantost considérant & de l'ame & des yeux Les diverses beautez de la terre & des Cieux. Je verrais en tous deux, comme en une peinture, Le merveilleux pouvoir du Dieu de la Nature. Tantost je me plairais à monstrer les raisons De l'ordre qui varie & change les saisons: Tantost celles des vens, des frimas, des tempestes, Et des corps enflamez qui grondent sur nos testes. Apres, pour délasser mon esprit curieux D'une estude si vague & si laborieux, Je le promenerois dans ces belles allées, Ces paisibles costaux, ces secrettes vallées, Et ces bois de laurier éternellement verds Où coule à flots d'argent la fontaine des Vers.

(II, 1) The train of thought in this passage is quite revealing. Although at the beginning it is the contemplative life she is talking about, the subject soon changes, almost before our very eyes. With cares of the world set aside, she would begin by studying not abstract ideas, but the beauties of nature, and not only nature in its rough state, but nature given shape and design, "comme en une peinture", by its artist-creator. It is something like nature seen by a French landscape artist. But even painting is a little too vague and laborious for a poet: nature becomes a garden, but it must be a specifically literary garden, where the trees are of course "lauriers" and the fountains are fountains of poetry. Thus the study of nature and the world is given a point by being fashioned into poetry. This is by no means a new idea with Mairet; Ronsard had said it before, and throughout the seventeenth century there is a constant concern given to resisting the chaos of everyday life and to imposing an order on it, an essentially literary and artistic order. Indeed, part of the charm of the passage quoted above is the almost unconscious ease with which Mairet moves from one concept to the other, ending up in a beautiful dream landscape that is partly his, partly the century's, and which was to culminate in the ultimate dream landscape of Versailles. What is keeping Athénaïs from this ideal existence is the bane of so many poets' lives - extreme poverty : Ce mortel ennemy dont je suis menacée, Rend ma Lyre muëtte, & ma veine glacée Car enfin vous sçavez, ô Nymphes que je sers! Qu'on porterait en vain dans vos sacrez desers

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Un esprit accablé d'aucune inquietude, Qui par les soins du corps interrompe l'estude, Veu qu'il est des beaux Vers comme des Alcions Qui veulent un long calme à leurs productions. (II, 1)

Mairet has practically abandoned the idea of the heroine as a philosopher's daughter; for the moment she has turned magically into a poet, and with her dependent relation to Théodose, a poet of the seventeenth century dependent on the whim of a wealthy prince. If Athénaïs is in some respects a creator, she is also the thing created : ... un merveilleux spectacle, Le chef-d'œuvre du Ciel & son plus beau miracle, D'une asseurance grave, & d'un regard modeste, Telle enfin qu'on peindroit une Beauté Celeste. (1,2)

In another passage Tegnis, the lady-in-waiting, compliments her in this manner: Vous avez des beautez, des graces, des appas, Et des talents d'esprit que les autres n'ont pas: Sur la foy des sçavants on croiroit que les Muses Auroient toutes en vous leurs sciences infuses.

(II, 1) To which Athénaïs replies somewhat wryly, "Aurez-vous bientost fait ce merveilleux tableau?" Although this play of reflections in mirrors does not form the substance of the play as a whole - Mairet the poet writes a play, a work of art, in which his heroine is both a poet and a work of art - it is noteworthy that such a mechanism, and one so baroque, is part of his inheritance.

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Judd Hubert: Commentary on Athénaïs

Paris, le 12 nov. (1964) Cher Ami, J'ai bien reçu et lu le chapitre sur Y Athénaïs, et j'en ai profité pour lire cette curieuse tragi-comédie à la B.N. Elle est, en effet, fort intéressante, tout en étant assez ratée du point de vue dramatique. En tout cas, vous avez fort bien relevé tout ce qui est important dans la pièce. Reste à voir comment on pourrait rattacher le chapitre ou plutôt l'article sur Athénaïs à une cohérence quelconque, valable pour toutes les pièces. Et ce rattachement semblerait d'autant plus difficile que Mairet, à la différence de Corneille, pourrait manquer de cohérence, métaphorique ou autre. Vous pourriez essayer, comme schème constructeur, la notion de valeur, morale et esthétique. Le dénouement d'Athénaïs, comme vous l'avez si bien suggéré, établit une espèce d'équilibre où tous les personnages trouvent leur compte. Il suffirait de transformer chacun de ces personnages en symbole et la pièce elle-même en allégorie, pour aboutir à la "vision" de Mairet - vision qui se retrouve peut-être, du moins en partie, dans d'autres pièces. La notion d'équilibre qui rejoint, comme vous l'avez écrit, celle de justice n'arrive à dominer qu'après une série de confrontations dont chacune prend, jusqu'à un certain point, l'allure d'un procès : même la conversion de l'héroïne ne peut se faire qu'après un procès où elle est à la fois juge et parti. Mais que diable peut symboliser cette femme savante, d'autant plus qu'elle n'est pas même chrétienne? Ne serait-ce pas justement les beautés de l'antiquité païenne dont tous les poètes se montrent si friands et qu'il faut, tant bien que mal, accorder avec les vérités chrétiennes? Nous aurions alors, au dénouement, un équilibre aussi stable que celui qui est implicite dans l'expression "humanisme dévot". Mairet souhaiterait que les arts (surtout la poésie !) fussent subventionnés par le prince (mariage d'Athénaïs et de Théodose) pour la plus grande gloire de l'état et de la religion... Cordialement, J. D. Hubert

12 THE HAPPY ENDING

Mairet had touched on various aspects of conflict within ruling families n Virginie, Solyman, and Vlllustre Corsaire; in Solyman, Athenais, and Rolandfurieux he had shown the jealousy of one person when confronted with the happiness of two others. In his last play, Sidonie (1640), he dramatizes a combination of political and sexual jealousy in his study of two princes, Pharnace and Cinaxare. In one aspect it is the struggle, as Doubrovsky would put it, between monarch and hero, mutually dependent on and mistrustful of each other. Pharnace is the heir to the throne of Armenia, but his throne depends almost wholly on the military power of Cinaxare, who is not of the royal family, but rather an outsider, being prince of Lydia. Pharnace possesses authority without power, while Cinaxare has power without authority. But Pharnace is doubly jealous of Cinaxare, for the prince of Lydia is engaged to marry a beautiful noble young girl, Sidonie. Although this marriage will in no way bring Cinaxare even close to ruling the country, Pharnace, by a combination of envy, vanity, and irrational obstinacy, has decided that he, not Cinaxare, must marry Sidonie. When she tells him that she wants only his friendship, J

N'attendez done de moy qu'une parfaite estime Puisque j'ay pour un autre une amour legitime, 1

he insists that he intends to force her to marry him. Without showing himself in any way worthy of her, or trying to win her love, he puts their relationship in degrading terms: by marrying him she will gain the glory of a crown, and if she does not want to marry him, he can think of innumerable unpleasant things to do to her. Her opinion or her feelings do not enter into it at all: Que mon dessein vous plaise, ou qu'il vous importune, C'est assez qu'il importe a ma bonne fortune.

(1,2) 1

Mairet, Sidonie (Paris: Sommaville, 1643), I, 2. All references in this chapter are to this edition.

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He actually does nothing except create a climate of mistrust between the lovers, by suggesting that Sidonie had seen him fairly frequently the previous year when Cinaxare was away fighting, and that perhaps she might be more attracted by the possibility of becoming queen than by a marriage to Cinaxare. The latter, the typical valiant warrior at a loss in dealing with intrigues at court, begins to wonder if perhaps Sidonie does not in fact prefer the Queen's son to himself. Moreover, destiny seems to be on the side of Pharnace, in the form of an obscure oracle which apparently predicts great prosperity for the country if he marries Sidonie. (If any example were needed of the irrational nature of autocratic power, this oracle would provide it - the corruption of religion into a tool that can be used by rulers for their own ends.) The lovers' quarrel is resolved by the second scene of the third act ; after that only the oracle and Pharnace's obstinacy are against them. In this unequal struggle, Cinaxare behaves at all times like a perfect gentleman. Goaded by Pharnace's insults in one instance he nevertheless refuses to cross swords with him, because he would win too easily. After the oracle has apparently given Sidonie to Pharnace, Cinaxare asks him if he will not show royal magnanimity and give her up. The passage contains an echo of Massinisse pleading with Scipio : Sidonie est à vous, & je vous l'abandonne, Le sort me la ravit : mais l'Amour me la donne ... Sidonie est à vous: mais je vous la demande. Assuré qu'un grand Prince à qui l'honneur commande Ne refusera pas de me rendre aujourd'huy, Le prix de tant de sang que j'ay versé pour luy. (IV, 2) This appeal flatters Pharnace's vanity ("On me prend par mon foible alors que l'on me prie"), but, all things considered, he refuses to give up Sidonie. Cinaxare is very tempted to take violent action: Abbatons cet ingrat dont nous fusmes l'appuy, Et pour le perdre mieux, perdons-nous avec luy, (IV, 3) but the thought that his attack would hurt the innocent as well as the guilty makes him stop : O Devoir ! ô Respect ... Vous desrobez Pharnace à mon ressentiment Et tournez ma fureur contre moy seulement. He even abandons self-violence when Sidonie asks him to live for her.

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As she is called away to marry the man she now hates, her last words to Cinaxare give him courage : Pharnace est mon Tyran, vous estes mon Espoux, L'Estat me livre à luy, l'Amour me donne à vous: Je veux jusqu'à la mort, & puis joindre sans crime Le Désir au Devoir, & l'Amour à l'Estime: Adieu, souvenez-vous de m'aymer & de vivre. (IV, 4)

What Cinaxare does not know is that her reconciliation of personal feelings with a fate imposed upon her is going to be at the expense of her life. She plans to acknowledge her responsibilities toward the state by marrying Pharnace, and then kill herself, very much as Andromaque planned to do after her marriage to Pyrrhus : Espousons ce Tyran que nostre ame deteste: Mais n'approchons jamais de sa couche funeste: Mais par un genereux & legitime effort, Passons des mains du Prestre à celles de la Mort.

Pushed to the limit of their endurance, both Sidonie and Cinaxare have prepared to face the loss of their most cherished possession and their highest value with tragic resignation, very much as Mustapha and Despine had faced the sadistic attack of his father in Solyman. But in Sidonie the expected tragic dénouement never arrives. Extraordinary last-minute revelations produce the fact that Sidonie is an orphan, of royal blood, and Pharnace's sister, in that order, so that tragic resignation is quite out of context; in fact all the attitudes and poses developed-throughout the play tumble down like a house of cards. There is a happy ending, but it has very little to do with effective actions of the principals. Destiny, which seemed to reinforce a master-slave relationship by joining Pharnace and Sidonie, proves itself in the end the guardian of reciprocal love between Cinaxare and Sidonie. Virtue has found its reward only by the application of a theatrical cliché. Does this constitute a sign of artistic bankruptcy in Mairet, or does it betray an awareness of a profound gulf between fiction and reality, and the bad faith necessary on the writer's part to reconcile them? Sidonie is Mairet's last attempt to recapture the celebrity he had known at the peak of his career. And yet it is most difficult to see in this last play a conscious, even if veiled, portrayal of how the artist sees himself in relationship to society that we have already observed in L'Illustre Corsaire, Roland furieux or Athénaïs. There are hints, but they are extremely

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meager. In this first scene of the play, Céphise, the Infanta, is congratulating Sidonie on her happy, good fortune : her marriage to Cinaxare will bring her "La Gloire, le Plaisir, & le Bien tout ensemble". We have seen in previous plays how the marriage which forms the crux of the plot seems to symbolize for Mairet a productive harmonious relationship between the artist and his public. And we know that his concept of a harmonious relationship includes the giving and enjoying of pleasure (Isabelle reaffirmed this in Roland furieux). We may now ask ourselves a more difficult question: if Sidonie represents a desirable goal in the structure of the play, why are there no indications, as there were in the three previous plays, of any artistic achievement? Cinaxare is a noble soldier, Pharnace the heir to the throne, and Sidonie apparently the prime minister's daughter. While we might conceivably link Cinaxare to the playwright's own situation - like his fictional creation, Mairet had to leave his homeland in order to seek his fortune in Paris, the nearest large centre of power - none of the actions of the three main characters seems to indicate, even symbolically, any artistic activity. Does this again suggest that Mairet is giving up the struggle to seek fulfilment through literary creation? There is another problem to this play. Mairet's grasp of political realities seems very weak indeed. It may strike the reader as odd that a political alliance should be sealed by the marriage of an allied prince to the daughter of the ruling power's prime minister. It is possible, but not, to my mind, probable: in the seventeenth century most such marriages were contracted between members of two royal families. And yet Sidonie is described as a "trésor" and "un bien de valeur infinie". We are told that she is a most honorable person, but not that she is a beautiful desirable woman. A treasure of infinite value. Even in the context of theatre of the 1630's, and certainly in comparison to Mairet's other plays, this is an extremely vague term. What exactly constitutes this infinite value? And while Cinaxare's relationship, and his value, to the kingdom of Armenia, are made quite clear, the heroine remains a priceless, but vague entity. Finally, the answer comes : Sidonie is really the daughter of the late king of Armenia; she is a member of the royal family, therefore the marriage does represent customary seventeenth-century political reality. But a major portion of the plot hinged on this secret: hero and heroine were prepared to face death until a hidden truth saved them. Mairet had used the revelation of royal birth as a final solution in Virginie, but he did not hang a large part of the plot on it : Périandre defeated his enemies and won his love largely because of his own courageous actions.

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This is why Sidonie seems to be an admission of defeat. Cinaxare and Sidonie may be a beautiful and sympathetic couple, but their happy destiny ultimately depends on a situation over which they have no control: an accident of birth. In a very real sense, Mairet seems to have found that actions do not seem to have any effect on external reality, or at least, actions in the context of an imaginary world, the world of theatre. And he was incapable of creating theatrical action of a different sort - he was unable to successfully dramatize intellectual or ethical conflicts, as was Corneille. The public may have been right: it was time to get out. If, as I have maintained, Maiiet's last plays constitute a series of statements of the function and achievements of the artist in society, Sidonie then seems to be, rather ironically, a demonstration of the artist's inability to function any further. For Mairet, it was time to leave the world of fiction, and go out into the real world.

CONCLUSION

In looking over Mairet's twelve plays as a whole, it becomes apparent that the highest ideal in human relations for him is a love shared by two young and beautiful people, a love based first on physical beauty and second on moral integrity. The fact that occasionally love coincides with self-interest (Sylvie, Médor, and Athénaïs, for example, stand to gain a great deal from their marriages) underlines the general truth that personal beauty and virtue take precedence over material advantages. Mairet also held in high esteem a disinterested friendship between two men - examples of close friendship may be seen in Chryséide et Arimand, Marc-Antoine, Solyman and U Illustre Corsaire - but if there is any conflict between friendship and love, it is understood that love comes first. We have also seen that for Mairet, particularly in his early plays, love has a distinctly sensual quality, and that the greatest enjoyment of sensuality takes place in a sort of innocent, almost pre-conscious state of mind. This is no doubt why Mairet was attracted to the pastoral genre; pastorals as a social and literary convention are able to contain a high degree of artifice or illusion, and at the same time allow many happy fantasies to be acted out and approved by everyone; they take place in a delightful shaded grove far removed from the world of ambition and responsibility, in a world where the principals can devote themselves entirely to pleasures of the senses. But as we have seen in Silvanire, in a world quite divorced from outside pressures there may lurk deep-rooted fears. Not all the obstacles to sensual fulfilment come from without; they also lie within the heart of the person in love. Where Sylvie enjoyed Thélame's caresses and blamed herself for being too indulgent toward him, Silvanire seems terrified of any sign of sensuality within herself, so much so that her fears take the form of monsters leaping out of a pool. With Virginie, one might say that sensuality comes out into the open, but deformed by guilt from its original beauty. References to the legend of Phèdre and Hippolyte show how Andromire considers her love evil,

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again like a monster. It is also significant that this thwarted love sets in motion all the forces of evil in the play, so that sexual and political jealousy become intermingled. In Sophonisbe and Marc-Antoine Mairet portrays sensual relationships grown into passion on a grand scale, played before an entire world, and we see that when passion is raised to the proportions of an all-consuming ideal, the forces of consciousness assume shape and strength to defeat it. Solyman represents an extreme of another kind: perhaps the most horrifying example in all of Mairet's theatre of sexual jealousy and fantasies of power carried to their ultimate degree of sadism. Mairet found an appropriate metaphor for the theme of this tragedy in the fausse route or twisted path. Oddly enough, his eighteenth-century biographer, Rochet de Frasne, while he appreciated the excellence of Sophonisbe, found that he personally preferred Solyman for the "intensity" of emotions it aroused. Without meaning to, he picked the most sadistic of Mairet's plays as his favorite. Critics have almost without exception treated Mairet's last four plays as beneath contempt, for reasons which are all too clear: after 1637 and the disastrous confrontation with Corneille over Le Cid, Mairet was not only unable to regain the position of pre-eminence he had enjoyed between 1626 and 1635, but he also seemed to have lost the capacity for theatrical innovation which characterized his first six plays. As I mentioned before, Mairet made a most unfortunate decision when he attacked Corneille: in misjudging a vastly superior intelligence, he put himself simply out of his depth. Nevertheless, these last four plays are interesting for a variety of reasons. A writer who experiences failure is often forced to re-examine himself and his work, and it is noteworthy that in Mairet's case, this re-examination forms part of the substance of his later plays. We have already seen how in both Sylvie and Les Galanteries du due d'Ossonne, he had used theatrical performance as a metaphor. InL'Illustre Corsaire, Rolandfurieux, and Athenais, we can see not only the same metaphor being explored in different ways, but also, particularly in Roland, a modified, but quite definite statement on the relationship between sensuality and pleasure on the one hand, and ethical and political realities on the other, and their expression in a theatrical production. Lepante, the handsome pirate prince in Ulllustre Corsaire, uses theatre to win back a love he had lost ten years before, just as Mairet hoped to win back the public's esteem he had enjoyed with Sylvie, which, as critics have pointed out, was the most popular play in Paris before Le Cid.

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In Roland furieux Mairet returns to the pastoral world he had left with Sylvanire, to give us, as we have seen, his most outspoken defence of sensual pleasure. For Angélique, love has no intellectual or moral dimensions; it is based clearly on physical beauty, and significantly enough, can be fully realized only outside Christian civilization. The lovers escape to pagan Cathay, while Roland, the Christian hero, is left to tear apart and destroy the pastoral setting that bore witness to a happiness he would never know. Roland brings up several considerations. If we have seen sensuality as a significant theme in Mairet's theatre, we have also seen how Mairet seems to have attempted to put into his work an awareness of the relationship between man's sensual nature, or his basic erotic impulses, and artistic endeavour. While I would never claim that this relationship is central to all artistic achievements, it is nevertheless a fact that man cannot endlessly prolong a state of sexual ecstasy. This is one reason why we see machinery in sexual terms today : man's physical energy may give out, but he creates a machine which will continue functioning after he has stopped. Works of art may have this function too : an artist creates something beautiful or truthful which will be admired after he himself has withered away. Villon created a perfect metaphor of the poet's achievement in his Testament : a poor starving outcast in his world, he chose the last will and testament as a central metaphor of his poem, and through all the gifts and legacies mentioned in it, which give us a vivid picture of the world Villon lived in, we see a very large gift : he has left us his poem, an incredibly living and beautiful legacy. Mairet seems to be dealing with a similar problem: the relationship between man's sensual nature and his desire to perpetuate it through art. Like Villon and many other poets, Mairet in 1637 has experienced failure and disappointment. Although not an old man in twentieth-century terms, he is older than he was when he first gained success, and this comes up in his work in a variety of ways. One had the feeling in the earlier plays that lovers were expressing their feelings directly, spontaneously, instinctively, particularly if we compare Mairet to Corneille's early theatre. In Roland, while he is still dealing with the same impulses as before, his vision has changed, and so has his language : words expressing the intermingling of conscious and unconscious, of living and dying, of fainting and reawakening, which we saw in the early plays - all this vocabulary his vanished to become more conventional, more abstract. Sensuality, associated with pagan civilization, finds itself forced by the dominant Christian ethos to defend and define itself. In this play Mairet seems to be defending as

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valuable and beautiful both sensuality and his own artistic production, and his language has become clearer and yet at the same time less sensual. Another aspect of Roland that we saw in the actions of the hero is the note of despair which creeps in. If Roland is unable to win Angélique's love and is driven to destroy the pastoral setting, only to turn his back on it and return to political duty, we may very well know that Mairet is following Ariosto's plot line; it nevertheless seems more than a coincidence that he should choose this subject two years before he retired from the stage himself to become a diplomat. Mairet seems to see that on one level, his plays are not winning the approval of the theatre public, and on another, that sensual love as an ideal is at odds with the world of 1637, the year Descartes published his monument to intellect, the Discours de la méthode. But Mairet had not quite finished: he comes back to the same question in Athénaïs, in a slightly different form. Since this is a historical drama which takes place at court, we should not be surprised to find the language more refined, more intellectual than the language of a pastoral, and yet Mairet seems to be examining in allegorical terms the poet's relation to his principal patron, the head of the state. Athénaïs is certainly no Angélique : she is more reserved and cautious, which is perfectly in keeping with her upbringing as a literate and welleducated daughter of a philosopher. But she is a poet and a pagan, and her conversion to Christianity and subsequent marriage to Théodose may be seen, as Professor Hubert has pointed out (on page 77) as an attempt to reconcile in allegorical terms the values of classical antiquity with those of the Christian tradition. And the fact that Mairet has had to distort historical and psychological reality in order to achieve this reconciliation seems to indicate an awareness of the gap between reality and art. It would seem significant, then, that Mairet wrote three plays in a row which contain references to the situation of a writer and poet, hoping for success and happiness, and plagued by the spectre of failure. However self-indulgent these metaphors may be - and in his fantasy portrayal of himself in L'Illustre Corsaire as a handsome virile witty pirate prince, we can all too easily accuse Mairet of a wide streak of self-indulgence nevertheless, it is a fairly rare phenomenon in French seventeenthcentury literature to see works containing metaphors or allegories of the writer's own situation. There are notable exceptions: the anonymous Fantasies amoureuses of 1601 is a novel in the form of one long letter written by a poet who is desperately in love; literary activity in the form of letters, sonnets, and even a temple with the commandments of love

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forms a significant part of L'Astrée. Most of us are familiar with Corneille's metaphor of theatrical and poetic creation in U Illusion comique. Metaphors of rehearsal and performance form part of the main structure of Rotrou's Le Véritable Saint-Genest, and we probably know more than a few Molière characters who are preparing roles to act or putting together a clever mise en scène. Jean Rousset has recently pointed out 1 how La Fontaine's Psyché contains as one of its themes the activity of the writer, as well as the relationship between love and the writer's art: both must be learned and earned through a long initiation of work and self-analysis. However, these examples are somewhat rare in the seventeenth century, and while it would be presumptuous to pretend that Mairet's accomplishment was as great as any of the authors mentioned, the analogies are there, and I think deserve our attention. This is why Mairet's last play, Sidonie, although it ends with a happy reconciliation of the conflicts within it, appears in the last analysis to present a failure on more than one level. On an immediate practical level, the play failed to gain any popular success, and Mairet decided to quit the field. On another level it demonstrates the falseness of certain current theatrical conventions, and by extension, of theatre itself. Mairet's choice of a theatrical cliché, the secret identity, to solve the heroine's dilemma, may suggest to us that situations based on manipulation of absolute power find an equitable solution more often in theatre than they do in real life. And as already mentioned earlier, the lack of any references to poetic or theatrical creation seems to indicate that Mairet finds himself no longer able to use theatre to project his vision of the world. At least we may be thankful that he put down his pen when he had nothing more to say, unlike Charles Sorel, who produced volume after volume of petty diatribes against almost every great writer he knew. We know very little of Mairet's later life; and yet he lived for a full forty-six years after writing his last play. We know that he married, and served as a diplomat between Burgundy and France. Interestingly enough, his best known achievement in diplomacy was the negotiation of a peace treaty between France and Burgundy, which shows that Mairet was still interested in effecting a reconciliation of values. Had he lived in Paris, he could have seen Corneille replaced in turn in the public favour by Racine. He might even have seen Phèdre, for he lived nine years after the first performance of Racine's last secular tragedy. But Mairet fell out of favour with Cardinal Mazarin, and was exiled from the capital for many years. 1

In L'Intérieur et l'extérieur (Paris : Corti, 1968), 115-124.

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We possess no documents on his literary opinions after 1640, except for one short comment on his own writing, which he made in 1647 to a friend who sent him a Latin poem, hoping for some poetry in return. Mairet replied : Je n'ignore pas que je devrais vous envoyer quelqu'un de mes ouvrages ; mais, outre qu'il me serait impossible de vous rien donner de nouveau, puisqu'il y a longtemps que j'ai fait divorce complètement et par une déclaration solennelle avec les dames du Parnasse, ma langue ne peut relever la bassesse des pensées que par les termes d'un langage mol, stérile, sujet à la tyrannie de l'usage, et lequel n'a presque point d'autres règles que la mode et le goût d'une cour qui fait et change de temps en temps, au gré de son caprice, le prix des choses et des paroles. 2

I know of very few writers in seventeenth-century France who have spoken so openly of their own failure. How many well-known authors of that time would admit that their language had become soft and sterile? or that it was no longer strong enough to resist the tyranny of changing fashions? that values, both concrete or literary, were being endlessly manipulated by the changing tastes at court : Mairet found himself simply unable to cope with it in words. He does not reveal everything about himself. We may wonder, for example, what was this "bassesse des pensées"? Was Mairet harboring some dark guilty desires? What could they have possibly been? We may begin to wonder whether Mairet saw himself as the happy lovers in his plays, or whether he felt he was the evil force trying to destroy them. The impotent jealous father in Sylvie produces a spell which has many aspects of a theatrical performance. Tirinte, the jealous disappointed suitor in Sylvanire stages a little magic show which he thinks will win the heroine's love, and he is horrified to discover that his trick very nearly turns into a spectacle of horror when Sylvanire appears to have died because of it. Syphax, the withered old king who had forced Sophonisbe to marry him, conjures up a nightmarish revenge on his young rival, who he wishes may some day go through the torture he's going through at this moment. While this is not really a theatrical performance he is creating, it is still an extremely vivid portrayal of narcissistic self-hatred, and as such, deserves to be called a literary creation. The climax of the king's sadistic desires in Solyman consists of threatening to expose the body of the girl his son loves as a spectacle for the young pages of the court. Roland destroys and then leaves forever the "theatre infame" 3

The quotation was found in Augusti Nicolaï, Europa lugens sive de universâ Europte dade sub. annum 1747, Carmen Elegiacum; Vesontione, apud G. Benoit, bibliopolam; quoted in Bizos, Étude sur la vie et les œuvres de Jean Mairet, 371.

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where he has played so unworthy a role. These are five characters who felt driven to destroy the happiness of another couple, or, in Roland's case, the theatre in which this happiness had existed, and all of their actions in different ways resemble literary or theatrical creations. I have already suggested that in some of his plays Mairet seems to see the marriage of hero and heroine as a metaphor for the harmonious relationship between the poet and his patron. But the five examples mentioned above show us that he could also see the poet as a jealous spurned rival. This ambiguity perhaps indecisiveness is a better word - of vision suggests that there existed conflicts in Mairet's mind which he was never able to resolve. It may be that, for all his delight in sensual pleasure and his claim that it be recognized as a desirable human value, he may never have lost an underlying feeling of guilt about it. Why else would he speak of having low, common, vulgar thoughts? We may also wonder whether he had always considered his thoughts in this way, or whether they became vulgar as he grew older. Does literature transmit and display our innermost selves, or does it refine, control and embellish them? This concept of literature as refining and controlling raw experience is, as we know, a dominant one in seventeenth-century France. This is why I find Mairet worth examining: in nearly all his plays he seems to be trying to present as much of his inner self and his fantasies as he can, within theatrical conventions of his time, and trying to present them in a form which his audience will find acceptable and attractive. Literature may certainly have other dimensions besides this, but this seems to me what Mairet has done, and I think it is worth doing. And when he could no longer express his vision in language, he had the good sense to realize it and stop writing.

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Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston : Beacon Press, 1955). Kay, Burf, "A Writer Turns Against Literature : Charles Sorel's Le Berger extravagant ", Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Avril-Juin, 1973). Lachèvre, Frédéric, Le Procès du poète Théophile de Viau (Paris: Champion, 1909). Lancaster, Henry Carrington, The French Tragi-Comedy, its Origin and Development from 1552 to 1628 (Baltimore: Fürst, 1907). , A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929-1942). Mairet, Jean, Silvanire (Paris : Targa, 1631). • , Virginie (Paris : Rocolet, 1635). ——, Marc-Antoine (Paris: Sommaville, 1637). • , Solyman (Paris: Courbé, 1639). , L'Illustre Corsaire (Paris: Courbé, 1640). , Roland furieux (Paris: Courbé, 1640). , Athénaîs (Paris: Bréquigny, 1642). -, Sidonie (Paris: Sommaville, 1643). , Les Galanteries du duc d'Ossonne, in Le Théâtre français au XVIe et au XVIIe siècles (Paris: Garnier [1874]). , Silvanire (Bamberg: Buchner, 1890). , Chryséide et Arimand (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1925). , Sylvie (Paris: Droz, 1932). ——, Sophonisbe (Paris: Droz, 1945). , Les Galanteries du duc d'Ossonne, vice-roy de Naples; comédie, texte établi, annoté et présenté par Giovanni Dotoli (Paris: Nizet, 1972). Marsan, Jules, La Pastorale dramatique en France (Paris: Hachette, 1905). Moore, Frank G., trans., Livy: Histories (London: Heinemann, 1949), XXX. Nelson, Lowry, Jr., Baroque Lyric Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Pearce, Donald, "Horace and Cleopatra: Thoughts on the Entanglements of Art and History", The Yale Review, Vol. LI, no. 2 (December 1961). Pieroni, Carole Anne, "Mairet, la Virginie and the French Classical Drama", Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, Fordham University, New York, 1965. Pintard, René, Le Libertinage érudit (Paris: Boivin, 1943). Poulet, Georges, Etudes sur le temps humain (Paris: Pion, 1950). Revue des sciences humaines, Le Baroque, Numéro spécial (juillet-décembre 1949). Ricard, trans., Plutarque: Les Vies des hommes illustres (Paris: Garnier, 1862). Rochet de Frasne, Discours sur Mairet lu le 28 janvier 1754 devant l'Académie de Besançon (Bibliothèque de Besançon, recueil manuscrit des travaux de l'Académie de Besançon, 1.1). Rougemont, Denis de, L'Amour et l'occident (Paris: Union générale d'éditions [Série 10/18], 1963). Rousset, Jean, La Littérature de l'âge baroque en France (Paris: Corti, 1954). , Anthologie de la poésie baroque française (Paris: Colin, 1961). , L'Intérieur et l'extérieur (Paris: Corti, 1968). Sakharoff, Micheline, Le Héros, sa liberté et son efficacité, de Garnier à Rotrou (Paris: Nizet, 1967). Schérer, Jacques, La Dramaturgie classique en France (Paris: Nizet, 1959). Shakespeare, William, Complete Works (London: Nonesuch, 1953). Snyder, Emile, "The Poetry and Sensitivity of Théophile de Viau", Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1962. Solard, Alain, "Étude sur la métaphore chez certains poètes baroques, 1585-1650", Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1963.

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INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

Adam, Antoine 3, 8n. D'Ambillou 14 Apollinaire 2 Ariosto 62, 65, 86 Bataille, Georges 11,18 Baudelaire 63 Benserade 46 Bizos, Gaston 2, 69, 88n. Bonarelli 52 Caussin 68 Corneille 1, 2, 29, 30, 43n„ 55, 60, 69, 71, 77, 82, 84, 87 Descartes 4, 11, 86 Diaghilev 2 Diodati 4 Doubrovsky, Serge 78 Dryden 46 Garnier 46 Gassendi 4 Guicharnaud, Jacques 42n., 44n. Huizinga, Johan 31 Hardy, 1, 2, 51n. Harvey, Lawrence 9n. Hubert, Judd 3, 77, 86 Jodelle 46 La Fontaine 87 La Motte le Vayer 4

Lancaster, Henry Carrington 1, 2, 51n., 68 Livy 39 Malherbe 2 Marsan, Jules 1 Mazarin 87 Molière 30,87 Montmorency 2 Naudé 4 Petrarch 28 Pintard, René 4 Plutarch 46,47,48,49 Racan 1 Racine 36, 37, 38, 64, 87 Richelieu 2, 3 Rochet de Frasne 84 Ronsard 75 Rotrou 87 Rougemont, Denis de 44 Rousset, Jean 87 Saint-Amant 2 Scudéry 5 ln. Shakespeare 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 Sorel 4, 87 Théophile 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 15 D'Urfé 6,9,20,21,22 Villon 85