PELLEAS: O! O! what is this?... Your hair, your hair comes down to me!... All your hair, Melisanda, all your hair has fallen from the tower! I am holding it in my hands, I am touching it with my lips.... I am holding it in my arms, I am putting it round my neck.... I shall not open my hands again this night....
Doves (the doves of the body's chastity, perhaps) come out of the tower and fly around them. Golaud surprises the pair, and tells them they are children. What he suspects, however, we know from a scene in the caverns under the Castle, when he is on the point of pushing his brother over a ledge of rock into a stagnant pool that stinks of death. But his jealousy has not yet grown sufficiently to force him to murder, and he contents himself with warning Pelleas. There follows a scene which brings the house down whenever the play is acted: Golaud questions his little son by a former marriage as to how the pair behave when they are alone; and lifts the little boy up so that he may peep in at the window of the tower and tell him what they are doing in the room. Golaud in his anguish digs his nails into the child's flesh, but he finds nothing to justify his suspicions; nevertheless in a following scene he loses his self-control, and, in the presence of his grandfather, ill-treats Melisanda. In the meantime the father is declared to be out of danger (Fate needs the father's recovery now to precipitate the tragedy); Pelleas is free to go away, and he asks Melisanda for a last meeting, by night, in the forest. She leaves her husband asleep, and the lovers meet in the moonlight. "How great our shadows are this evening!" says Melisanda. "They enlace each other to the back of the garden," replies Pelleas. "O! how they kiss each other far from us." Here Melisanda sees Golaud behind a tree, where their shadows end. They know they cannot escape; they fall into each other's arms and exchange their first guilty kiss. Golaud kills Pelleas, wounds Melisanda, and stabs himself. But Melisanda, ere she dies (of a wound which would not kill a pigeon) gives birth to a daughter, "a little girl that a beggar woman would be ashamed to bring into the world." On her death-bed Golaud implores her to tell him the truth—has she loved Pelleas with a guilty love? But she can only whisper vague words.
The child-wife dies; and King Arkel, the wise old man of the play, closes it by a few fatalistic sentences:
"She was so tranquil, so timid, and so silent a little being.... She was a mysterious little being like everybody else.... She lies there as though she were the big sister of her child.... Come away, come away.... My God! My God!... I shall not be able to understand anything any more.... Don't let us stay here.—Come away; the child must not stay in this room.... It must live now, in its turn.... It's the poor little one's turn now...."
[1] Les Jeunes, p. 230.
[2] Johannes Schlaf's Maeterlinck, p. 32.
[3] See chapter "La Morale mystique" in Le Trésor des Humbles. This is the doctrine for which quietism was condemned. I find the following definition of the soul quoted in La Wallonie for February to March, 1889; "Qu'est-ce donc que l'âme? Une possibilité idéale qui réside en nous comme la substance réelle de nous-mêmes, que les erreurs et les tâches de la vie ne peuvent entamer, que ses découragements ne peuvent abattre et qui les contemple avec sérénité dans l'extériorité réelle, et séparés, pour ainsi dire de sa propre essence."—JOHNSON.
[4] "Le Réveil de L'Ame" (in Le Trésor des Humbles), p. 38.
[5] Perhaps a Gallicised form of Golo, the lover of Genoveva. The name of Golaud's mother is Geneviève.