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"At the moment of my writing to you the bells are tolling for the twenty-second person to-day; perhaps to-morrow it will be for me; but my conscience has marked out my duty. God's will be done!" Two days later he was dead. Corneille had dedicated Polyeucte to the regent Anne of Austria.
No forgiveness was possible between them; they would still hate one another even in the family tomb, where some day they would sleep side by side. All the same, that evening Baroness Duvillard excused herself from attending the performance of "Polyeucte" at the Comedie Francaise. She felt very tired and wished to go to bed early, said she. As a matter of fact she wept on her pillow all night long.
He referred to a stubborn caprice of Silviane d'Aulnay, who, although she had hitherto only reaped a success of beauty on the stage, obstinately sought to enter the Comedie Francaise and make her /debut/ there in the part of "Pauline" in Corneille's "Polyeucte," which part she had been studying desperately for several months past.
No forgiveness was possible between them; they would still hate one another even in the family tomb, where some day they would sleep side by side. All the same, that evening Baroness Duvillard excused herself from attending the performance of "Polyeucte" at the Comedie Francaise. She felt very tired and wished to go to bed early, said she. As a matter of fact she wept on her pillow all night long.
"It was applauded to the extent demanded by propriety and the reputation already achieved by the author," says Fontenelle; "but some days afterwards, M. de Voiture went to call upon M. Corneille, and took a very delicate way of telling him that Polyeucte had not been so successful as he supposed, that the Christianism had been extremely displeasing."
The horrors of the Place de la Revolution made her shudder, but only in the same way as the tragedies of M. Racine or of Sophocles which she had studied caused her to shudder, and she had exactly the same sympathy for poor Queen Marie Antoinette as she had for Mary Stuart, and shed as many tears for King Louis as she did for Polyeucte.
In Polyeucte, however, the means employed to bring about the catastrophe, namely, the dull and low artifice of Felix, by which the endeavours of Severus to save his rival are made rather to contribute to his destruction, are inexpressibly contemptible.
The article in question was one written in advance, from the society point of view, on the success which Silviane would achieve in "Polyeucte," that evening, at the Comedie. The journalist, in the hope of pleasing her, had even shown her his "copy"; and she, quite delighted, now relied upon finding the article in print in the most sober and solemn organ of the Parisian press.
Gounod thought, he said, that he had found in her "an apostle of his art and a fanatic for his works," but he also found that her charity had an excellent business foundation, for, when their love affair came to an end, she claimed her property in his compositions. He refused to acknowledge her right, and when she clung to his "Polyeucte," he rewrote it from memory.
The conversation had now turned on Corneille's "Polyeucte" and the part of "Pauline," in which Silviane wished to make her debut at the Comedie Francaise. This extraordinary caprice, which had quite revolted the influential critic a week previously, now seemed to him simply a bold enterprise in which the young woman might even prove victorious if she consented to listen to his advice.
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