Ruy Blas (as she clasps him): Yes, my queen.
The Queen: Then I have killed you! But I love you now!
More than before. Had I but pardoned you—
Ruy Blas: I should have drunk the poison all the same.
I could not bear to live. Good-bye!
[He falls down, and The Queen holds him up in her arms.
Fly! Fly!
No one will know. That door.
>[He tries to point to it, but sinks back in the agony of death.
The Queen (throwing herself on him): Ruy Blas!
Ruy Blas (reviving at the sound of his name):
Thanks! Thanks! [He dies.
FOOTNOTES:
[K] In appearance, "Ruy Blas" is a pendant to "Hernani." In the earlier play, Victor Hugo gives a striking picture of the Spanish nobility in the days of its power and splendour. In the later drama, which he composed in 1838, he depicts in lurid light the corruption into which that nobility afterwards fell. But, as a matter of fact, "Ruy Blas" is a violent party pamphlet with a direct bearing on the French politics of the thirties. It is the decadent French nobility—vanquished in the revolution of 1830—that Hugo really attacks; and Ruy Blas himself is a representative Frenchman of the era of romanticism. Stendhal (Vol. VIII) was the first writer to study this new type of character—the young man of the lower middle classes, full of grandiose dreams and wild ambitions and strange weaknesses, who thought to arrive by intrigue at the high position which the great soldiers of the preceding generation had won on the battlefield. Balzac (Vol. I) elaborated the character in his "Human Comedy"; and Hugo, by ennobling and enlarging it, created the sombre, magnificent figure of Ruy Blas.