[CHAPTER XVI]
Casimir Delavigne's Louis XI
Here is very little incident in the drama we have just been analysing. Very well, there is less still in the tragedy which we are about to examine.
Mély-Janin's mise-en-scène is quite improbable enough, is it not? Well—Casimir Delavigne's is more improbable still. In the first place, the landscape is the same. Here is the description of it—
"A countryside—the château of Plessis-les-Tours in the back ground, a few scattered cottages at the side. IT IS NIGHT."
You must know that if I underline the last three words it is not without a motive. As the curtain rises, Tristran, who is on sentry-duty, stops and compels a poor peasant named Richard to go back into his cottage instead of letting him go to Saint-Martin-des-Bois, to obtain the consolations of religion for a dying man. The scene has no other importance than to show in what manner the police of Louis XI. act in the neighbourhood of Plessis-les-Tours. The peasant re-enters his cottage, Tristran goes back into the fortress, and leaves the place to Comines, who arrives on the scene, holding a roll of parchment, and seats himself at the foot of an oak tree. It is still night. Guess why Comines comes there, in that particular place, where the police guard so strictly that they do not even allow peasants to go out to obtain the viaticum for the dying, and where they can be seen from every loophole in the château? Comines comes there to read his Mémoires, which deal with the history of Louis XI.
"But," you will say, "he cannot read because it is dark!"