Crois-tu que sur la foi de tes fausses promesses Mon âme ose descendre à de telles bassesses? Prends mon sang pour le sien; mais, s'il y faut mon cœur, Périsse Héraclius avec sa triste sœur! And when she stays the hand of the menacing tyrant suddenly and with a word: ... Ne menace point, je suis prête a mourir. Or, finally, those sweetest words of all, spoken by Eurydice in the _Suréna_: Non, je ne pleure pas, madame, mais je meurs. These dying words form as it were the extreme points of the resolute will, of the will, fierce _usque ad mortem._ But the others, in which the volitional situations are fixed and developed and determination to pursue a certain course is asserted, are, as we have said, the proper and normal expression of the poetry of Corneille, which can be fully enjoyed, provided that we do not insist upon asking whether they are appropriate in the mouths of the personages, who should act and not analyse and define themselves, or whether they are or are not necessary for the development of the drama. Their poetry consists of just that analysis, that passionate self-definition, that arranging of the folds of their own decorous robes, that sculpturing of their own statues. Let us examine a few examples of it, taking them from the least known and the least praised tragedies of Corneille, for it is perhaps time to have done with the so-called decadence or exhaustion of Corneille, with his second-childhood (according to which, some would maintain that he returned to his boyish, pre-Cidian period in his maturity), and with the excessive and to no small extent affected and conventional exaltation of the famous square block of stone representing the four faces of honour (the _Cid_), of patriotism _(Horace),_ of generosity _(Cinna)_ and of sanctity _(Polyeucte)._ There is often in those four most popular tragedies a certain pomposity, an emphasis, an apparatus, a rhetorical colouring, which Corneille gradually did away with in himself, in order to make himself ever more nude, with the austere nudity of the spirit. It was perhaps not only constancy and coherence of logical development, but progress of art on the road to its own perfection, which counselled him to abandon too pathetic subjects. In any case, unless we wish to turn the traditional judgment upside down, we must insist that those four tragedies, like those that followed them, are not to be read by the lover of poetry otherwise than in an anthological manner, that is to say, selecting the fine passages where they are to be found, and these occur in no less number and in beauty at least equal in the other tragedies also, some of which are more and some less theatrically effective. Pulchérie is the last and one of the most marvellous Cornelian condensations of force in deliberation. She thus manifests her mode of feeling to the youthful Léon whom she loves: