The treatise was written for the benefit of light-minded people, who saw no harm in playgoing. In the beginning of his work the Prince said: "I hope to prove that comedy in its present condition is not the innocent amusement that it is considered; I hope to prove that a true Christian must regard it as an evil." As his treatise progressed it became explicit; his arraignment was animated by Astrée; he declared that a play free from the sentimentality and the passions of love and from the thoughts and the actions of lovers was not acceptable to the public. Love forms the foundation of the play, and therefore it must be discussed freely from its first principles. Now a play, however fine its dramatic composition may be, can have no other effect than to disgust refined minds and to ruin the reputations of its actors, unless the love on which it is based is represented delicately, and in a tenderly impassioned manner. And as few actors are capable of producing a perfect representation of the most subtle and many-sided of passions, the general effect of our comedy is deteriorating. As its basis and its structure depend upon one single subject, it can have but one subject of interest. Our comedies are considered commendable according to their manners of discussing love; the divers beauties of our dramas consist in their various exposures of the intimate effects of love. Love is the theme, and the mind must either accept it and work upon it or rest unemployed; there is no choice; no other theme is given. When love is not the chief agent, it serves as an irritant to draw out some other passion and to make sensuous display not only possible but cogent, if not imperatively necessary; be the play what it may, love is represented as the "passion ruling the heart." Conti opposed to the popular "corruption of the drama" the grave lessons offered by the great tragedies. Segrais treated the subject in the same way; he said: "During more than forty years nearly all of the subjects of our plays have been drawn from Astrée, and, generally speaking, the dramatists have been satisfied with their work if they have changed to verse the phrases which d'Urfé put in the mouths of his characters in plain prose."
Segrais exaggerated. Astrée did not furnish "nearly all" of the subjects of the plays; but the extraordinary importance of stage love and of stage lovers was drawn from Astrée, and, despite the temporary reaction due to Corneille, Astrée persuaded the great body of French society that there was nothing pathetic in the world but love, and neither our dramatists nor our moralists have been able to break away from an error which singularly circumscribes their art. Love is now the subject of the romance and of the play, as it was in the early days of La Grande Mademoiselle.
Invitations to the Louvre or to the homes of the great were not too easy to procure, and there were many people who never entered the private theatres; but there were two "paying theatres," or theatres to which the public were admitted on paying a fixed price; one of the two houses was the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which stood in the rue Mauconseil, between the rue Montmartre and the rue Saint Denis; the other was the Théâtre du Marais, in the Veille rue du Temple. The Marais was then an out-of-the-way quarter, very dangerous after nightfall. I have not spoken of this place until now, because it was almost impossible for any one in the polite society of which I have written to visit it. No woman dared to enter the Marais unless she lived there. The woman of quality could not even think of entering it except on gala days, when the Court of France went in a body to visit the play-actors in their own quarter. At ordinary times the Hôtel de Bourgogne "was neither a good place nor a safe place." In form and arrangement the audience hall was like the hall of the Théâtre de Richelieu; two galleries, one above the other, ran the whole length of the walls, and in certain places the walls were connected with the gallery to form stalls or boxes. The parterre was a vast space in which people watched the play standing. In that part of the theatre there were no seats. An hour, or perhaps two hours, before the play began the great unclean space was filled with the most boisterous and ungovernable representatives of the dregs of Paris and with all the active members of the lesser classes[62]: students, pages, lackeys, artisans, drunkards, the scum of the canaille, and professional thieves; and there, on the floor of the parterre, they gambled, lunched, drank, and fought each other with stones, with swords, or with any weapon which came to hand; and as they gratified their appetites or abused their neighbours, all strove in the way best known to them to protect their purses and to keep the thieves from carrying off their cloaks. The air resounded with shouts, shrieks, songs, and obscene apostrophes. Contemporary writers regarded everything as fit for the record, and therefore in all our researches we come upon heartrending evidences of inenarrable depravity. The charivari of the assistants of the pit continued throughout the performance, ending only when the vociferous throngs were turned into the streets so that the theatre might be locked for the night. At their quietest the spectators of the parterre were noisy and obstreperous. To quote one of their chroniclers[63]:
"In their most perfect repose they continued to talk, to whistle, and to scream without ceasing; they did not care at all to hear what the comedians were saying." We differ from the chroniclers as to this last opinion; it is probable that they cared only too much; it was to please the rabble that abominably gross farces were played in the paying theatres. Tragedy was relished only by the higher classes.
An eye-witness, the Abbé d'Aubignac,[64] wrote: "We see that tragedies are liked better than comedies at the Court of France; while among the lesser people comedies, and even farces and unclean buffooneries are considered more amusing than tragedies." The same d'Aubignac wrote in or about the year 1666: "Fifty years ago an honest woman dared not go to the theatre."[65] Between the universally ardent desire to enjoy the fashionable form of pleasure and the efforts to make the stage less licentious the purification of the drama was accomplished.
The increasing delicacy of the public taste demanded a reform, and in deference to it the moral atmosphere of both of the popular theatres was renewed at the same time; a new and decent repertory was adopted, and the foul programme of the past was cast away. Popular feeling acclaimed the change and hastened the accomplishment of the reformation.
At the time when the Cid[66] was played the lower classes had ceased to rule the paying theatres; the masses went out of Paris for their pleasure; to the fairs of Saint Laurent and Saint Germain, and to the entertainments on the Pont-Neuf or the Place Dauphine; they crowded around the trestled planks, they hung about the stands of the charlatans, the buffoons, and the trick players. The paying theatres were filled by the upper middle classes. Women who had not dared to go to the play in 1620 attended the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne as freely as they would have attended or as they did attend the Luxembourg.[67] The fine world of the quality had found its way to the theatre of the Marais; the Cid was in course of representation when the stage of the Marais and the courtiers thronged to the obscure quarter to witness its marvels. The Cid was played in the private theatres as well as in the Hôtel de Bourgogne. M. Lanson tells us that the comedians were summoned to the Louvre three times and twice to the Hôtel de Richelieu, but the great were too impatient to wait for the play to come to them, they ran to meet it; every one longed to see it not at a future time but on the instant, and therefore they flocked to the Veille rue du Temple.
In 1637 (18th January) Mondory, the actor, who played the part of Rodrigue, wrote to Balzac: