de Montpensier when he wrote _Pulcherie_ (1672), an heroic comedy in which an empress stifles the cries of her heart that she may listen to the voice of glory. _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. III