RUY BLAS: Have you done? [DON SALLUST _leaps at_ RUY BLAS, _and the two men reel into the further room, and the door closes behind them._ THE QUEEN _covers her face._ THE QUEEN: Oh, God! [_There is a silence._ RUY BLAS _returns without the sword._ RUY BLAS (_falling on his knees_): Pardon me, madam, pardon me! I am less guilty than I seem. At heart, I am an honest man. My love for you Led me into the trap that villain laid. Will you not pardon me? THE QUEEN: No! RUY BLAS: Never? THE QUEEN: No! [_Staggering to the table, he seizes the glass and drains it._ RUY BLAS: Well, that is over, then. THE QUEEN (_running up to him_): What have you _done_? RUY BLAS: Nothing. But, oh, to think you loved me once! THE QUEEN: What was there in that glass? I love you still! What was it? Poison? Tell me. RUY BLAS (_as she clasps him_): Yes, my queen. THE QUEEN: Then I have killed you! But I love you now! More than before. Had I but pardoned you-- RUY BLAS: I should have drunk the poison all the same. I could not bear to live. Good-bye! [_He falls down, and_ THE QUEEN _holds him up in her arms._ Fly! Fly! No one will know. That door. [_He tries to point to it, but sinks back in the agony of death._ THE QUEEN (_throwing herself on him_): Ruy Blas! RUY BLAS (_reviving at the sound of his name_): Thanks! Thanks! [_He dies._ FOOTNOTES: [K] In appearance, "Ruy Blas" is a pendant to "Hernani." In the earlier play, Victor Hugo gives a striking picture of the Spanish nobility in the days of its power and splendour. In the later drama, which he composed in 1838, he depicts in lurid light the corruption into which that nobility afterwards fell. But, as a matter of fact, "Ruy Blas" is a violent party pamphlet with a direct bearing on the French politics of the thirties. It is the decadent French nobility--vanquished in the revolution of 1830--that Hugo really attacks; and Ruy Blas himself is a representative Frenchman of the era of romanticism. Stendhal (Vol. VIII) was the first writer to study this new type of character--the young man of the lower middle classes, full of grandiose dreams and wild ambitions and strange weaknesses, who thought to arrive by intrigue at the high position which the great soldiers of the preceding generation had won on the battlefield. Balzac (Vol. I) elaborated the character in his "Human Comedy"; and Hugo, by ennobling and enlarging it, created the sombre, magnificent figure of Ruy Blas. The King Amuses Himself[L] _Persons in the Drama_