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Updated: June 28, 2025
Mélisande had been wounded, "a tiny little wound that would not kill a pigeon;" yet her life is despaired of; and on her death-bed she has been delivered of a child "a puny little girl such as a beggar might be ashamed to own a little waxen thing that came before its time, that can be kept alive only by being wrapped in wool." The room is very silent.
For there will probably be no more plays like Pelleas et Melisande, or even like Aglavaine et Selysette. Real men and women, real problems and disturbance of life it is these that absorb him now.
The succeeding scene shows them on a terrace at the exit of the vaults. Golaud warns Pelléas. "About Mélisande: I overheard what passed and what was said last night. I realize that it was but child's play; but it must not be repeated.... She is very delicate, and it is necessary to be more than usually careful, as she is perhaps with child, and the least emotion might cause serious results.
"You are free to act as you please," he says. "It is of no consequence to me. I am too old to care; and, besides, I am not a spy. I shall await my chance; and then.... Oh! then!... I shall simply act as custom demands." "What is the matter? Is he drunk?" asks Arkël. "No, no!" cries Mélisande, weeping. "He hates me and I am so wretched! so wretched!"
Come along, Mark, come along, come along. I am not happy. I am not happy," he cried in an absurd falsetto. Then roaring with laughter at his own imitation of Mélisande, he went rolling out of the theatre and sniffed contentedly the air of the Strand. "I told Lady Pechell we shouldn't arrive till tea-time, so we'd better go and ride on the top of a bus as far as the city."
Mélisande begs to be released, Pelléas kisses the enveloping tresses.... "Do you hear my kisses? They mount along your hair." Doves come from the tower Mélisande's doves and fly about them. They are frightened, and are flying away. "They will be lost in the dark!" laments Mélisande. Golaud enters by the winding stair, and surprises them.
Yet, unrhetorical as the music is, it is never pallid; and in such truly climacteric moments as that of Golaud's agonized outbreak in the scene with Mélisande, in the fourth act, and the ecstatic culmination of the final love-scene, the music supports the dramatic and emotional crisis with superb competency and vigor.
To tell the truth, that is the France I prefer. But Heaven preserve me from ignoring the other! It is the balance between these two Frances that makes French genius. In our contemporary music, Pelléas et Mélisande is at one end of the pole of our art and Carmen is at the other. The one is all on the surface, all life, with no shadows, and no underneath.
Well, she would make allowances for a condemned man. And again she remembered the omen of which he had told her. She looked at him, and then up into the sky. "This same moon," she said to herself, "sees the battlements of Tankerton. Does she see two black owls there? Does she hear them hooting?" They were in Salt Cellar now. "Melisande!" she called up to her window.
His letters always began, "Dearest Héloïse," or "Mélisande," or "Baucis," or "Isolde"; and, rather than acknowledge her ignorance of these classic allusions, she looked them up and sent her answers to "Dear Abélard," or "Pelléas," or "Philemon," or "Tristan," as the case demanded.
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