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Updated: June 6, 2025
"Down on your knees! On your knees before me! Ah! your long hair is of some use at last!" He throws her from side to side, holding her by her hair. "Right, left! Left, right! Absalom! Absalom! Forward! now back! To the ground! to the ground! Ha! ha! you see, I laugh already like an imbecile!" Arkël, running up, seeks to restrain him. Golaud affects a sudden and disdainful calmness.
"Is it you, grandfather?" questions Mélisande; "is it true that winter is already coming? it is cold, and there are no more leaves." "Are you cold? Shall I close the windows?" asks Golaud. "No, no, not till the sun has sunk into the sea it sets slowly." Arkël asks her if she wishes to see her child. "What child?" she inquires. Arkël tells her that she is a mother.
"It seems to me that we keep too still in her room," says Arkël; "it is not a good sign; look how she sleeps how slowly. It is as if her soul were forever chilled." Golaud laments that he has killed her without cause. "They had kissed like little children and I I did it in spite of myself!" Mélisande wakes. She wishes to have the window open, that she may see the sunset.
The Mélisande theme, in a new form, opens the moving scene between Mélisande and Arkël in which he tells her of his compassionate observation of her since first she came to the castle.
It is her soul, now, that weeps. Why does she stretch her arms out so? what does she wish?" "Toward her child, without doubt," answers the physician. "It is the struggle of motherhood against...." "At this moment? At once?" cries Golaud, in a renewed outburst of anguish.... "Oh, oh! I must speak to her! Mélisande! Mélisande! leave me alone with her!" "Trouble her not," gravely interposes Arkël.
She has never felt better, she says, in answer to Arkël's questioning. She asks if she is alone in the room. Her husband is present, answers Arkël. "If you are afraid, he will go away. He is very unhappy." "Golaud is here?" she says; "why does he not come to me?" Golaud staggers to the bed. He begs the others to withdraw for a moment, as he must speak with her alone.
The hesitant and melancholy personages who invest its scenes Mélisande, timid, naïve, child-like, wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelléas, dream-filled, ardent, yet honorable in his passion; old Arkël, wise, gentle, and resigned; the tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; the grave and simple diction, at times direct and homely in phrasing and imagery, at times rapturous, subtle, and evasive; the haunting mise-en-scène: the dim forest, the fountain in the park, the luminous and fragrant nightfall, the occasional glimpses, sombre and threatening, of the sea, the silent and gloomy castle, all these unite to form a dramatic and poetic and pictorial ensemble which completely fascinates and enchains the mind.
Certain portions have been left out as the scenes, at the beginning of Act I and Act V, in which the servingwomen of the castle appear; the fourth scene of Act II, in which Pelléas is persuaded by Arkël to postpone his journey to the bedside of his dying friend Marcellus; the opening scene of Act III, between Pelléas, Mélisande, and Yniold.
"I will not have you touch me, do you understand?" he cries. "I came to get my sword." "It is here, on the prie-Dieu," says Mélisande, and she brings it to him. "Why do you tremble so?" he says to her. "I am not going to kill you. You hope to see something in my eyes without my seeing anything in yours? Do you suppose I may know something?" He turns to Arkël.
The original Paris cast was as follows: Pelléas, M. Jean Périer; Mélisande, Miss Mary Garden; Arkël, M. Vieuille; Golaud, M. Dufrane; Geneviève, Mlle. Gerville-Réache; Le petit Yniold, M. Blondin; Un Médicin, M. Viguié. M. André Messager was the conductor. The work was admirably mounted under the supervision of the Director of the Opéra-Comique, M. Albert Carré.
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