Modern poets and novelists do not insist that all men are equal in passion as they are equal in suffering and in death; but the people of the nineteenth century fully believed in such equality. George Sand expresses her real feelings in _La Petite Fadette_; and Pouvillon meant all that he said in _Les Antibel_. The contemporaries of Louis XIII. looked askance upon such theories; in their opinion the love, like the suffering, of the inferior was below the conception of the quality, a thing as hard for the noble mind to grasp as the invisible movement of life in an atom; to be ignorant of the needs, the hopes, the anguish of inferiors was one of the first proofs of exalted nobility. But the nobles knew that the shepherds of the dramatic stage were gentlemen travestied, and, therefore, they bestowed the interest formerly accorded to the heroes of the heroic drama upon the woes of the mimic Celadons of the comedy. Love would have become the dramatic pivot had it not been for Corneille's plays; d'Urfé's characters were "sighing like a furnace" when Corneille took command and gave the posts of honour to "the manly passions"; but not even Corneille could reach such a point at a bound; he attained it by strenuous effort. He began his literary career by writing comedies in verse. Before he produced the _Cid_, between the years 1629 and 1636, he wrote six plays; an inferior serio-comedy, _Clitandre; or, Innocence Delivered_, and a tragedy, _Médée_. To quote M. Lemaître: We now enter a world which is superficial, because its people have but one object in living: their only occupation, their only pleasure, their only interest is love; all else, all the interests of social life are eliminated.... To love.... To be loved, ... this is the only earthly object, according to the teachings of the drama, and truly, in the long run it becomes tiresome! Such a world must be impossible, because it is artificial; in it hearts are the subjects of all the quarrels; men fight for them, lose them, find them; they are stolen, they are restored to their owners, they are tossed like shuttlecocks through five acts of a play. As they "chassay" to and fro before the reader he loses all sense of their identity, and takes one for the other; in the end the mind is wearied. Excessive handling exhausts the vitality of the subject, and leaves an impression as of something vapid and unsavoury. But Corneille was Cornélien even when he wrote rhymed comedy--he could not have been anything else--and he never would have fallen into rhyme had he not wished to make concessions to the prevailing fashion.[69]