_The throne lifts the soul above all tenderness._
It is not impossible that Corneille had some such thought in his mind. Certainly Mademoiselle was a model close at hand. One day when her bold poltroon of a father told her, in the course of a sharp reproof, that she was compromising her house for the pleasure of "playing the heroine," she answered haughtily and truthfully:
"I do not know what it is to be anything _but_ a heroine! I am of birth so high that no matter what I might do, I never could be anything but great and noble. And they may call it what they like, _I_ call it following my inclination and taking my own road. I was born to take no other!"
Given such inclinations, and living in the Louvre, where Corneille's plays were constantly enacted by Queen Anne's order, Mademoiselle was accustomed to regard certain actions as the reverse of common and ignoble, and to consider certain other actions "illustrious."
The justice of super-exalted sentiments was proclaimed by nobility, and they who were disposed to closely imitate the examples set by the literary leader of the day ran the risk of losing all sense of proportions and of substance. Mademoiselle did lose that sense, nor was she the only one to do so among all the children of quality who were permitted to abuse their right to see the play. Through the imprudent fashion of taking young children to the theatre, the honest Corneille, who taught the heroism of duty, the poetry of sacrifice, the value of strong will and self-control, was not absolutely innocent of the errors in judgment and in moral sense by which the wars of the Fronde were made possible. When he attempted to lift the soul of France above its being, he vitiated a principle in the unformed national brain.
Mademoiselle had grown tall. She had lost her awkward ways; she was considered pretty--although the Bourbon type might, at any moment, become too pronounced. She had remained simple and insignificantly innocent and childish, in a world where even the children discussed politics and expressed opinions on the latest uprising. Side by side with all her infantine pleasures were two serious cares which had accompanied her from her cradle, one: her marriage; the other, the honour of her house. The two cares were one, as the two objects were one, because in that day a princess knew her exalted duty and accepted her different forms of servitude without a frown, and certainly the most painful of all those forms was the marriage in which the wife was less than nothing; a being helpless in her inferiority, so situated that she was unable to claim any share of the general domestic happiness. The noble princesses had consented to drink their cup to the dregs because it was part of their caste to do so, and many were they who went to the altar as Racine's "Iphigénie" went to the sacrifice. The idea that woman is a creature possessing a claim upon herself, with the right to love, to be happy, and to seat herself upon the steps of the throne, or even upon the throne, is a purely modern conception. The day when that mediocre thought first germinated in the brain of the noblewoman marked a date in the history of royalty, and it may be that no surer sign was given to warn the nations of contemporary Europe of the decay of the monarchical idea.