While Toussaint drinks and sings with the Imperial captains, he leaves his sick wife to draw up a secret treaty with an emissary of the lawful king of France--for he meditates a timely treason, à la Talleyrand. Need I say that King Louis’s envoy is the Vicomte de Coûfontaine? Need I add that their negotiations are varied by the cruel reproaches of Coûfontaine, by the broken-hearted disculpations of Sygne. ‘Is there anything higher than Love?’ says he; ‘is there anything deeper than one’s Race? You have been a traitor to your heart and your blood.’ ‘There is God,’ says Sygne,-- ‘J’ai sauvé le Prêtre éternel.’ But Coûfontaine will not be convinced. At least he will wreak his vengeance on the usurper. So, having signed the papers which bring the king to his own, having carried them off, he takes, through the open French window, a parting shot at Toussaint Turelure, which Sygne intercepts, receiving it in her heart, while Turelure, with a shot of his pistol, kills the aggressor. Thus the two cousins perish; their kingdom is not of this world; yet they leave an heir: a child of the body of Sygne, an heir to the name and the titles of Coûfontaine by an act of legal substitution. Like Violaine, like Mesa, Coûfontaine can leave no child: the hateful Mara, the brutal Toussaint--brief the children of Action--can make the fruits of the spirit flourish and multiply, and they alone. Why does Sygne save the life of the husband she never forgives? Is it an act of sacrifice? A homage to the sacrament? No, for she dies unshriven because unforgiving. It is because Death is better than Life: ‘une chose trop bonne pour que je la lui eusse laissée.’ This heartrending last act of _L’Otage_ is especially moving in the last version, that acted in Paris during the summer of 1914, in which, mute, dying, relentless, Sygne opposes only silence to the blatant triumph of her odious master. It is, indeed, the dialogue of Life and Death. What will be the ultimate position of Claudel? It is yet too soon to say. His influence on the writers of our time is a fact. He is still young; he is incontestably original; he is no doubt obscure. But many of the greatest writers were and remain obscure--Dante, for instance, and Pascal. In our own times, Carlyle, Browning, Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, are often mysterious. And none the less, from the date of their appearance, they have been read with eagerness, and they continue to be read (a little less eagerly), and, indeed, to be revered, as the bearers of a message, by an undaunted band of followers. Like all these, Claudel aspires to be a conductor of souls. And in the things of the spirit a certain obscurity is no disadvantage, if there be a real message behind it. We fill out the author’s adumbrated meaning, as we read an intention into a fine musical phrase, and his sentence gains by all the priceless bulk of our accumulated interpretations.