ABSTRACT
The history of the manners, of the patriotism, of the moral spirit, of the military spirit of France, bears witness to this, for one of its mainstays in the past as in the present has been the tragedies of Pierre Corneille. The heroic, the tragic Charlotte Corday gave reality in her own person to one of Corneille’s characters, so full of will power and ready for any enterprise: she was one of those aimables furies, nourished like the tyrannicides of the Renaissance on the Lives of Plutarch, whom her great forefather had set on paper with such delight. The figures of Corneille’s tragedies must be looked at through coloured and deforming glasses, as supplied by fashionable literature, in order to see in them such attitudes and gestures. The whole life of Corneille, the whole of his long activity, was dominated by the ideal, with a constancy and a coherence which leaps to the eye of anyone who examines the particulars.
