To my mind, the most interesting of Claudel’s plays, is L’Otage (The Hostage), an historical piece in the sense that our poet has captured the atmosphere and character of the period he revives. Though, as for the facts, he invents them at his pleasure. This is the more startling that the time is 1814, and among the personages are Louis XVIII. and Pope Pius, whose ghosts must be surprised to learn some of their adventures.
We are at the end of the First Empire; Napoleon has the Pope safe in his keeping, a prisoner; so far so good. But here Claudel parts company with History. He imagines that a Royalist conspirator, the Vicomte de Coûfontaine, carries off the Pope by a deed of derring-do, and conveys him by night to a half-ruined abbey hidden in the woods of Picardy—all that is left of his family estate. Coûfontaine is an émigré, a dangerous exile, with a price set on his head, and the abbey is inhabited by a young girl, his cousin, Mademoiselle Sygne de Coûfontaine, who lives there in great retirement, striving by endless patience, tireless economy, to piece again together the tattered fragments of the family fortunes—not for herself, but for the little children of that exiled cousin whom, half-unwittingly she adores.
The opening scene is exquisite: its delicate yet homely poetry recalls Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula asleep. But Sygne keeps vigil. She is alone by night in the library of her abbey. The books of the exiled monks line the walls; on the one side left bare, a Christ of bronze is nailed to a huge blackened cross made of the charred beams of the Château de Coûfontaine, burned under the Revolution. The tall shuttered windows have no curtains. There is no carpet on the speckless floor, where the very nails are burnished. Great solemn chairs are ranged against the wall. In one corner, on a wicker hurdle, the harvest of plums is laid out to dry. In another corner of the huge bare place the young mistress of the abbey has established her abode; over her head, sole ornament, is hung a torn fragment of tapestry, snatched from the burning, blazoned with the arms of Coûfontaine. In front of her, a pretty old-fashioned bureau is covered with ledgers and files of papers neatly tied. Close by a little table is spread with bread and wine and the cold meat for a frugal supper, as though some belated visitor might be expected.
Coûfontaine arrives in the dead of night; he brings with him an old nameless priest for Sygne to house and hide; the girl does not guess it is the Pope. She greets her cousin with quiet joy, and with a girlish pride shows him her filed accounts, her savings, all the store accumulated for the two exiled children whose miniatures stand on her writing-table. But both little ones are dead; the scarlet fever has killed them over in England. And their mother is dead too, their mother who had betrayed hearth and home, their mother who had been the Dauphin’s mistress. Coûfontaine is a desolate man, beset with bitter memories. What future is there for the race of Coûfontaine? The scene closes on a betrothal. But (as in Corneille’s Polyeucte) the hearth of plighted love is destined to be shattered by the stroke of Grace, and the act of God.
The second act rises on the same background, but it is afternoon. The sun streams in at the uncurtained windows and illuminates the bare room; and the delicate beauty of Sygne, and the figure of ruse and power in front of her. This is her foster-brother, the son of the village sorcerer and of her old nurse; Toussaint Turelure is now a person of importance, one of Napoleon’s barons, and Prefect of the Marne. Toussaint Turelure is a vigorous portrait: the vulgarity, the unmannerliness, the ostentation, the parvenu quality of the First Empire are manifest in him; but also its real capacity and power, its grasp of life and men. Toussaint is an Amalric under other circumstances. He loves his delicate and fearless foster-sister even as Napoleon was attracted by the aristocratic Josephine. But so far he has had no hold over her. A woman who asks for nothing and dreads nothing, and cares for nothing, is difficult to terrorise or to seduce. Now Toussaint has surprised her secret: he knows that she has in her keeping the life of Coûfontaine—and that her hostage is the Pope!
So he puts the bargain to her: her hand or their heads! He gives her two hours to decide on all their fates. And the English readers of Claudel remember William Morris and the ‘Haystack in the Floods’—more than once Claudel will remind us of the pre-Raphaelites of yesterday.
The natural woman in Sygne decides for death and freedom. But her parish priest comes to her and (in a heartrending scene) points out to her the path of sacrifice. No law, no obligation, compels a human being to immolate his happiness to the welfare of the community. Should Sygne, in the interest of her personal honour, give up the Pope, no priest dare refuse her absolution: she is within her rights. But there are rights and duties superior to our human rights. Man does not live for man, but for God; and Sygne hears the voice that, in the midst of his reasoning, surprised the philosopher of Königsburg—the voice that whispers: ‘Du kannst, denn du sollst!’
The third scene rises on the Château de Pantin. Toussaint Turelure is Prefect of the Seine; he holds in his hands the destinies of France. A bevy of Napoleon’s officers are drinking the health of his first-born, whose bells of baptism are ringing loud and clear—for France has re-entered the fold of the Church. But the mother is not present at the festival: the Baronne Toussaint Turelure is a shattered invalid. Her head, half-palsied, moves continually from side to side, slowly from right to left, and again from right to left, in the weariest gesture of denegation and denial. She is the wreck of Sygne de Coûfontaine.
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.’