last in _Medee_, where the famous reply of the heroine 'Que vous
reste-t-il?' 'Moi,' struck at once the note which no one but Corneille
himself and Victor Hugo has ever struck since, and which no one had ever
struck before. Corneille, as has been said above, was one of Richelieu's
five poets, but he was indocile to the Cardinal's caprices; and either
this indocility or jealousy set Richelieu against _Le Cid_. This great
and famous play was suggested by, rather than copied from, the Spanish
of Guillem de Castro. It excited an extraordinary turmoil among men of
letters, but the public never went wrong about it from the first.
Boileau's phrase--

Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue,

is as sound in fact as it is smart in expression. The _Cid_ appeared in
1636, and for some years Corneille produced a succession of
masterpieces. _Horace_, _Cinna_, _Polyeucte_, _Le Menteur_ (a remarkable
comic effort, to which Moliere acknowledged his indebtedness), and
_Rodogune_, in some respects the finest of all, succeeded each other at
but short intervals. Half-a-dozen plays, somewhat inferior in actual
merit, and which had the drawback of coming before a public used to the
author and his method, followed, and the last and least good of them,
_Pertharite_, was damned. Corneille, always the proudest of writers, was
deeply wounded by this ill-success, and publicly renounced the stage. He
devoted himself for some years to a strange task, the turning of the
_Imitation_ of A'Kempis into verse. At last Fouquet, the Maecenas of the
day, prevailed on him to begin again. He did so with _Oedipe_, which
was successful. It was followed by many other plays, which had varying
fates. Racine, with a method refined upon Corneille's own, and a greater
sympathy with the actual generation, became the rival of the elder poet,
and Corneille did not obey the wise maxim, _solve senescentem_. Yet his
later plays have far more merit than is usually allowed to them.

The private life of Corneille was not unhappy, though his haughty and
sensitive temperament brought him many vexations. His gains were small,
never exceeding two hundred louis for a play, and though this was
supplemented by occasional gifts from rich dedicatees and by a scanty
private fortune, the total was insufficient. 'Je suis saoul de gloire et
affame d'argent' is one of the numerous sayings of scornful discontent
recorded of him. He had a pension, but it was in his later days very