The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

"Rotomagi patriæ versu volo pandere mores,
Quis captum patriæ damnet amore suæ?"

No one will blame his patriotic love of every detail of the life around him; and though the Latin that he uses might well have been exchanged for his own language, it must be remembered that even when Malherbe and Corneille, Racine and Boileau, were writing French, the older language kept a firm hold on such men as de Thou, Descartes, Bossuet, Arnauld, and Nicole, who desired to appeal to European audiences. "Victurus Latium debet habere liber" was their motto; and by Jesuits and Oratorians, University dignitaries and ecclesiastics, lawyers and doctors, the same language was used as that in which Hercule Grisel has preserved the life of the town from 1615 to 1657.

PIERRE CORNEILLE, FROM THE ENGRAVING BY LASNE

The greatest name of seventeenth-century Rouen is Pierre Corneille,[73] "ce vieux Romain parmi les français" as Voltaire called him; and we may be grateful that after getting the second prize for Latin verses in the third class of the Jesuit College,[74] he gave up stilted affectations for the vigorous phrases of his mother-tongue. Though his brother Thomas passes over the little episode in silence, his nephew Fontenelle lets us into a literary secret which reveals Corneille's first love affair in Rouen. In the comedy of "Mélite," the heroine is Catherine the daughter of the Receveur des Aides, Eraste is the poet himself. In real life, Thomas du Pont, the Tircis of the play, supplanted his friend and married the lady. It was to another Rouen acquaintance that Corneille owed the advice to study Spanish plays, which resulted in his imitations of de Castro, and no doubt the many Spanish families then settled, for commercial reasons, in the Rue des Espagnols and elsewhere, helped to turn the young poet's thoughts in the same direction. His evident knowledge of the details of legal procedure, when it cannot be ascribed to the natural Norman turn for lawsuits, is accounted for by his position as Avocat du Roi and one of the Admiralty Court (called the "Marble Table") of Rouen. Though in the "Cid" his law is Spanish, and in "Horace" it is a paraphrase of Livy, yet Corneille was the first to realise that the speeches of lawyers, which were then little known to the general public, would form a very interesting scene upon the stage. His immediate success proved the worth of the idea. But that such success was possible at all is even more extraordinary than any particular form it may have taken. He created types for well-nigh every kind of dramatic literature in France, in the midst of his work as an advocate, among serious family troubles, through years of plague, of popular riots, of military occupations.

His house in the Rue Corneille, formerly the Rue de la Pie, is still preserved, though the front has been damaged by the widening of the street, and it is marked by a bust of the poet over the entrance. In the last few months it has been put up for auction, and it may be hoped that the town authorities have taken advantage of the opportunity to secure it from further mutilation. For it has been not merely the home of Pierre Corneille and his brother Thomas, but the meeting-place of several other men distinguished in French literature. In the summer of 1658, for instance, Molière brought his travelling troupe to Rouen, and set up his theatre at the bottom of the Rue du Vieux Palais. There he played in "L'Etourdi" and "Le Dépit Amoureux," which Corneille went to see, and tradition says that the most distinguished of her audience fell in love with du Parc, the pretty actress, from the spectators' seats, not improbably on the occasion when his own play of "Nicomède" was being performed. It is certain at any rate that Molière, who was then some thirty-six years old, visited Corneille, who was sixteen years his senior, and already famous in the wider world of literature. And it is at least curious that only after the six months during which his visits to the elder poet must have been both frequent and fruitful, did Jean Baptiste Poquelin become recognised as the Molière of "Le Malade Imaginaire," a play, which I confess I would rather hear to-day than anything Corneille ever wrote, even though Parisian audiences can still patriotically endure almost the whole series of his heroic dramas. This was not Molière's first visit to Rouen, where a peculiarly dark and dirty street preserves the memory of his light-hearted appearances. For there is his signature in the town registers of 1643, when he was only twenty-one, and as the date is November 3, the coincidence of time has tempted patriotic antiquarians to suggest that his first début in public was at the famous Foire du Pardon. What Rouen looked like at this time you may see in the view, reproduced from Mérian's engraving of 1620, printed with this chapter.

Even if the language and ideas of Corneille's plays do not touch a sympathetic chord in these days when the musketeers of Dumas and the bravery of Cyrano de Bergerac hold the stage on both sides of the Channel, it is impossible to refuse to Corneille a very high position in any estimate of French dramatic literature. With that estimate I am not here concerned, but in sketching the history of his birthplace, I may be permitted to suggest some of the influences which may be traced from it upon his work. And in addition to those already mentioned, I would especially refer to an occurrence some time previously, which left its undoubted marks upon the writing of Corneille, and may also serve to introduce you to yet another interesting figure in the tale of Rouen. For when he was only thirty-three, when he had won fame with the "Cid," and had followed up his success by "Horace" and by "Cinna," Corneille had the advantage of meeting a family of particular distinction.

In 1639 the father of Blaise Pascal was sent down to Rouen as an "Intendant du Roi." Though but sixteen, the youth had already attracted the notice of the mathematical world by his treatise on conic sections. Even when only twelve the precocious boy had worked out the solutions of the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid unaided. While at Rouen he invented a calculating machine, and got a workman in the town to set it up. In 1646 he made his famous experiments on the vacuum before more than five hundred people, including half a dozen sceptical Jesuit fathers. Though his famous letters on the burning question of Jansenism were not written until 1656, after he had returned to Paris, yet the religious influence of the family must have been a strong one upon all their intimate friends, and it is hardly too much to suggest that under this influence Corneille wrote "Polyeucte" and "Théodore," even if it be too great an extension of the idea to suggest that Racine's "Esther" and "Athalie," even Voltaire's "Zaïre," were also due to the same impressions.

It is pleasant to imagine that cultured circle, conversing over the troubles of the time or arguing on literary and scientific subjects. There were two girls in the Pascal family, the pretty Gilberte, who very soon married a young councillor of Rouen at twenty-one, and Jacqueline, five years her junior, who won the prize at the Puy des Palonods, and had the honour of an ode from Corneille on her literary success. There was Berthe Corneille too, the mother of Fontenelle, and though Thomas was but young, he may well have had his share in a friendship which must have been very attractive to his older brother. This house of theirs in the Rue Corneille was not the only one in which Pierre wrote his tragedies. Indeed, I imagine it was more the town-lodgings of his legal father, and only used by the sons when business kept them near the Law-courts. In the country outside, at Petit-Couronne south of the Seine, Corneille did nearly all his best work; and in estimating that work it is well to remember that he was not merely born at Rouen, but that he lived and wrote there till he was fifty-six.