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which may be translated, "The book and the author of it performed for us the service of Gallehault."
Echegaray himself, in the critical prose prologue which he prefixed to his play, comments upon the fact that the chief character and main motive force of the entire drama can never appear upon the stage, except in hints and indirections; because the great Gallehault of his story is not any particular person, but rather all slanderous society at large.
This idea is suggested in its title. In the old French romance of Launcelot of the Lake, it was Gallehault who first prevailed on Queen Guinevere to give a kiss to Launcelot: he was thus the means of making actual their potential guilty love. His name thereafter, like that of Pandarus of Troy, became a symbol to designate a go-between, inciting to illicit love.
The insidious purpose of the great Gallehault has been accomplished; and Ernesto takes Teodora for his own. It is amazing how many people seem to think that the subsidiary fact that a certain play is written in verse makes it of necessity dramatic literature.
Similarly the great Gallehault, which is the word of all the world, whispers unthinkable and tragic possibilities to the poetic and self-searching mind of Ernesto. He resolves to seek release in Argentina. But before he can sail away, he overhears, in a fashionable cafe, a remark which casts a slur on Teodora, and strikes the speaker of the insult in the face.
Now Echegaray, desiring to retell in modern terms the old familiar story of a man and a woman who, at first innocent in their relationship, are allured by unappreciable degrees to the sudden realisation of a great passion for each other, asked himself what force it was, in modern life, which would perform for them most tragically the sinful service of Gallehault.
Then it struck him that the great Gallehault of modern life El Gran Galeoto was the impalpable power of gossip, the suggestive force of whispered opinion, the prurient allurement of evil tongues.
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