SOURCE: "The Comic Illusion," in Pierre Corneille, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972, pp. 32-47.

"Such disorder, such irregularity!" Racine may or may not have thought of the very first plays of Corneille but there is no doubt that comedy in the late 1620's was of the lowest order, and Corneille was quite right in boasting, as he did in the Examen of Mélite which he penned decades later, that this play was really the first to be written for honnestes gens (gentlemen and ladies) and that, if it at times seemed to violate rules and unities, that was because they had not yet been established.

These early plays are a strange mixture of influences and independence. The influence of Hardy, one of Corneille's most prolific contemporaries, is readily seen in the violent melodrama of Clitandre, or in the numerous amorous deceptions scattered throughout all the early comedies. The effects of Italian comedy and of the pastoral vogue on Corneille cannot be denied either; witness the very names of the protagonists—Tirsis, Cloris, Lisis, Mélite, and so on. These influences, however, tend to be rather superficial, and even though Corneille did little to revolutionize the world of drama in the early 1630's, he did much to further the most salutary trends. To be sure, Corneille is a child of his times, and the ostentation, the illusion, the metamorphoses, the instability, all the commonplaces of Baroque literature are omnipresent in these early works. This is not only true of the content of the plays but of their form as well. It can truly be said that from Mélite to Le Cid, a period of some seven years during which he produced ten plays, Corneille was in constant search of a form. The fact that Le Cid was first called "tragicomedy" (an error that Corneille quickly corrected) is further indication of that. Call it Baroque or Romanesque, until Le Cid there is a certain exaltation, a youthful brio in these early plays which Corneille will never again be able to capture, not even in the verbal exuberance of later comedies such as Le Menteur. Thus, Corneille in search of Corneille is many things, unafraid as he is to borrow from everyone and everything that surrounds him. But he is above all, even in these early days, a man of taste. The psychological realism of Clitandre more than overshadows the borrowings from Hardy's shallow melodramas. Whereas Hardy had relied heavily on visual effects, Corneille used them but sparingly. The names of the first protagonists may recall those of the pastoral, but Mélite, as well as the later plays, is populated by gentle people who do not feel the need to disguise themselves in the ubiquitous shepherd's clothes, and for that alone Corneille deserves our gratitude. By the same token all the banal and gratuitous tricks of the theatrical trade are present in the plays—false letters; scenes of madness, real or feigned; commonplaces of words, plot, and character—but they are invariably enhanced by a grace and elegance of language and a psychological insight previously unknown in France.

I Mélite

Racine, when it came to plots, prided himself on "making something of nothing"; the same cannot be said of Corneille, as can be seen by the synopsis of Mélite, his first play. Eraste introduces Mélite, whom he loves, to his friend Tirsis, only to become jealous. To remedy the situation he sends some love letters (supposedly from Mélite) to Philandre, who is betrothed to Cloris, the sister of Tirsis. Philandre, thanks to the artifice and the persuasive powers of Eraste, decides to leave Cloris for Mélite and shows the letters of Tirsis. In despair the latter withdraws to the home of a friend, Lisis, who spreads false rumors of Tirsis' death. Mélite faints at the news. Thus assured of Mélite's true feelings, Lisis reunites the two lovers. However Cliton, having seen Mélite in a faint, believes her dead too, and spreads the news of this "double death" to Eraste, who goes mad with remorse. Brought back to his senses by the Nourrice, he asks forgiveness and obtains from the two lovers not only his pardon but the hand of Cloris, who has rejected Philandre because of his fickleness.

The complexities of the plot are at times aggravated by a language that has often been characterized as overly distilled and ostentatious. While there is much truth in that, it must be kept in mind that the language is not Corneille's but that of the fashionable dandy of the era and thus contributes no little to the verisimilitude of the characters. In this respect, it is rather unfortunate that in later years Corneille, responding to criticism prompted either by jealousy or by changing taste, toned down the language of his earlier days, and in so doing eradicated the very essence of the gallant world of the 1620's and 1630's that he had so beautifully depicted. While the secondary characters are seldom imbued with any relief and seem rather flat, the four main ones sparkle. Of particular interest is Tirsis. The world of Mélite is a highly mercurial one in which few things are certain and in which a protagonist might be readily forgiven for not wanting to involve himself with his fellow creatures. But while a Philandre wallows in a cowardly and self-indulging narcissim, Tirsis is saved by his love. Upon the backdrop of constant interplay between truth and sham, between appearance and reality—in words and deeds—Tirsis moves not toward deception and eventually self-deception, but away from it. In the first scene Tirsis appears as a man who seeks only tangible gains, who deceives so as not to be deceived, and who is sure that all a woman's beauty will not turn him against the notion that constancy is a folly (135-36). But this gay young blade's notions are soon reduced to nothing when he is dazzled by Mélite. What exactly has he seen? "I saw I know not what." Mélite has but to appear for Tirsis to realize that it is the tangible gain that is an illusion. The new evidence, the new truth is in her beauty. This is not a metamorphosis of sham into verity or being opposed to appearance; rather, it is being expressed in appearance. Tirsis, at the beginning, opposed beauty to his "truth." He now sees that truth and beauty are but one and the same thing, that "to see Mélite is to love her" [Robert J. Nelson, Corneille: His Heroes and Their Worlds, 1963]. Henceforth for Tirsis, as for Mélite, there can be no deception. The dazzlement is not the result of trickery nor does it lead to it;—it leads to a new, deeper vision of reality which brings about the inevitable defeat of trickery and deception.

II Clitandre

Corneille had no sooner found success with the formula of Mélite than he sought to shine in an entirely different vein. Clitandre is a tragicomedy, the most popular dramatic genre at the time. Why did Corneille, so successful with a true comedy, write something so foreign to that initial accomplishment? Most likely it was, as Antoine Adam suggests [in Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siecle, 1962], not because he courted facile success but because he wanted to leave no challenge unanswered, because he wanted to be the successful rival of the stars of the day. In short, the same notion that made him write a "Racinian" play later on in his life now made him try a tragicomedy replete with all the Romanesque traits then in fashion.

Insofar as plot is concerned, Mélite is rather complex. Yet Corneille had synopsized it in less than twenty lines. For Clitandre, he wrote an "argument" of over three hundred lines, poking gentle fun at the critics of Mélite's plot by exaggerating the complexities of this one. Reduced to its minimum, the story of Clitandre is as follows: Caliste and Dorise both love Rosidor who disdains the latter and loves the former. Dorise tries to kill her rival, fails, and is in turn attacked by a jilted lover, Pymante, who had also ambushed Rosidor. A rejected lover of Caliste, Clitandre, is blamed for the ambush, but he is finally recognized as innocent. He winds up in a joyless union with Dorise while Rosidor and Caliste live happily ever after. In the play the plot is anything but simple, and Corneille readily admitted in the preface that the least lapse in attention would result in the viewer, or reader, losing complete track of things.

Such a plot, of course, is typical of most of the tragicomedies of the era. Equally typical is the explicit brutality both in speech and deed: mad transports of anger, attempted murder and rape, an eye put out, and, to cap it off, nature as a whole matching the human violence with a storm of its own. In short, Clitandre is full of the type of physical and dithyrambic outbursts that the public was about to reject. For some time yet, this public was to keep its love of declamation, and many plays owed their success as much to great lyrical passages as to dramatic qualities—Tristan L'Hermite's Mariane is an excellent example of that—but the monologues of Clitandre are extremely passionate, verging on the brutal, and the play was far from successful. Its premiere passed unrecorded, and it had only three separate editions, the first in 1632, the last in 1689. As of 1644 it was included by Corneille in his collected works, but much reworked. In its revised version the play is somewhat toned down, but it remains a strange mixture of unexpected bedfellows, the most incongruous juxtaposition deriving from two tendencies that Corneille was to maintain in his work for a long time and which are, to some extent, hallmarks. On the one hand, as will be seen in plays such as Médée, Horace, and Théodore, Corneille kept a certain taste for brutality. On the other hand, Clitandre is already replete with those cameos of Cornelian expression, the brief passages that strike or spellbind, whose echoes remain long after the initial perception, and which every Frenchman knows by heart and loves to quote.

III La Veuve

With La Veuve Corneille returned to true comedy, though it must be clearly understood that in all of these plays laughter is evoked far less frequently than sophisticated smiles. La Veuve's resemblance to Mélite, however, goes well beyond that broad trait. As Corneille himself acknowledged, both in inspiration and in plot, this, his third play, owed much to the first. Sensing that the public was growing tired of the type of play exemplified by Clitandre, Corneille returned to comedy which to him had less to do with laughter than with "a portrayal of our actions and of our speeches." The plot, as can be seen from Corneille's own argument, is not unlike that of Mélite: "Alcidon, in love with Clarice, widow of Alcandre and mistress of Philiste, his good friend, fearing that the latter notice this love, feigns to love Philiste's sister Doris who, however, is not taken in by the stratagem and consents to marry Florange, as proposed by her mother. The false friend, under the pretext of avenging the insult that this newly proposed union is to him, gets Celidan to agree to kidnap Clarice and to bring her to his castle. Philiste, taken in by the false resentment of his friend, breaks up the proposed union with Florange, upon which Celidan tries to convince Alcidon to go back to Doris and to give Clarice back to her lover. Unsuccessful in his persuasion, he suspects an act of treachery and, deceptive in turn, gets the truth out of Clarice's nurse (who had been a willing accomplice of Alcidon) and, turning against the traitor, he brings Clarice back to Philiste and obtains Doris in return."

The parallel of structure is obvious, as are the literary commonplaces already found in the previous places (character of the Nurse, the betrayed betrayer, truth not being truth, and so on). There are, however, some major steps forward insofar as the dramatic canon of Corneille is concerned. Whereas the first two plays were very loosely knit and had little unity of action (to all intents and purposes, the first love problem is settled at the end of Act I of each of the first two plays), La Veuve shows a determined effort on Corneille's part to cope with the problem. It is true that there are two actions, but they are properly connected. The first three acts are fairly well linked with only a slight difficulty in the last two. Still, we are a long way from Racine's concept, as enunciated in the preface to Bérénice, of a plot involving a minimal action taking place in a single locale in a few hours. For the unity of time Corneille chose to compromise, allowing one act a day. As for the locale, there is no indication whatsoever in the original edition, and, ten years later (1644), Corneille clarified the situation but slightly by adding that the action took place "in Paris."

Another aspect of the unity of action deserves comment. Not only is the plot more unified but the style of the entire play is closely linked with the dramatic development. Long speeches that have little to recommend them outside of their undeniable lyrical qualities and that advance neither action nor character of development are far less frequent than in the two previous plays, resulting in a greater sense of continuity in La Veuve. As Robert Nelson has suggested, "Mélite was a body of lyrics and Clitandre a tone poem. La Veuve is much more of an action." This new awareness undoubtedly had much to do with the fact that La Veuve underwent relatively few changes in later editions, most of them involving the quality of the vocabulary, the propriety of certain expressions or manners—in other words, changes made naturally necessary by evolutionary processes in the realm of language and behavior.

This new awareness is also visible in Corneille's handling of the characters. Perhaps the most important scene of the play, as far as the study of the development of Corneille's psychological insight is concerned, is the one in which Clarice declares her feelings for Philiste (II, 4). In order to get the bashful swain to declare his own feelings, she goes as far as she can without violating the laws of propriety in a sense that is a masterpiece of delicacy and of psychological realism, a perfect wedding of preciosity and profundity. The author's insight is further demonstrated in the way he has the two lovers address each other. The first time they meet (I, 5) she uses the familiar tu while he uses the more polite vous. The next meeting occurs while the Nurse is present (II, 4), and so both use vous until Philiste dares declare his love openly, at which point Clarice, sure of herself, switches triumphantly to tu in a speech that also includes the then bold epithet "my Philiste." They do not see each other again on stage until V, 7, and by then Philiste is so torn between sorrow and joy, so insecure—can he believe his fortune? Does she really love him?—that he still insists on the more formal address while Clarice, sure of his love—"Do you see any signs of doubt in me concerning your love?" (1814)—never stops using tu. Of course, there are many reasons for this difference in expression. Clarice is a widow, that is to say a woman of a certain experience and knowledge, and so it is proper and natural that she display greater maturity, certainty, and even boldness. Her advantage in this respect is made greater by the fact that in social standing she is slightly above her suitor, if not enough to cause a scandal and make a union unbelievable, at least enough to make him doubt his good fortune. In Mélite, there had also been a tutoiement, a use of the familiar tu, a momentary lapse by Mélite immediately taken up by Tircis made sufficiently bold by it to ask for more tangible rewards. By 1648, however, Corneille considered this move too improper, and Tirsis, like his creator, learned how to keep his passion in check and to use the polite form of address under all circumstances. Clarice did not have to suffer from this unjust fettering, undoubtedly because Corneille felt that the ground had been well laid for her tutoiement. There is little doubt that much of La Veuve's success was due to these flashes of psychological brilliance which are demonstrated not only in the above display of finesse but also in the creation of the many cameos that dot the play. Unfortunately, these are but oases, for Corneille had not yet learned to maintain the quality of his insight or his expression. Nevertheless, they give a very good indication of things to come.

IV La Galerie du Palais

The sub-titles of Corneille's early plays—The False Letters for Mélite, Innocence Delivered for Clitandre, The Traitor Betrayed for La Veuve, and now The Rival Friend for La Galerie du Palais—are always more indicative of the content of the plays than the titles themselves, and so it is indeed ironic that any mention of amie rivale is dropped from all the editions of the play as of 1644. As a matter of fact, the subtitle of this play, as of all the previous ones, should have been The Dissimilations, with an emphasis on the plural.

The plot, for once, is relatively simple: Célidée and Lysandre are about to be engaged while Dorimant loves Hippolyte who, in turn, secretly loves Lysandre. Célidée suddenly begins to yearn for Dorimant, making it a nearly perfect quadrangle. Taking advantage of this new infatuation Hippolyte suggests that her friend Célidée put Lysandre to the test by feigning indifference. Paid by Hippolyte, Lysandre's servant advises Lysandre to pretend to court Hippolyte to make Célidée jealous, but he is too righteous to keep up such a sham. In fact, both male leads are so steadfast in their virtue and love that the inevitable is brought about, the union of Célidée with Lysandre and of Hippolyte with Dorimant.

After the success of La Veuve it was to be expected that Corneille would keep many of the features of that play for his next venture, and indeed he did, improving on several of them. He continued, for instance, in the portrayal of life as the mainstay of comedy. As the title of the play indicates, the locale of the play is real, and realistically described. Other authors had previously described shops, or merchants, or the language of the lower classes, but never had the French stage seen all of these elements combined, and so well. The descriptions and illustrations of the speech, the mentality, and the general behavior of the shopkeepers; the incisive portrayal of types such as the cowardly swashbucklers—changed in later editions to rogues, attacking a passerby; the delightful commentaries on tastes ranging from clothes to literature; the description of a rowdy theater crowd (at the rival Hôtel de Bourgogne, of course)—all these now, for the first time, were introduced not as colorless background but as a vivid part of the play itself.

Like La Veuve, La Galerie is a step away from tragicomedy and its ploys. While there is little frank laughter, and while there are many changes of fortune, there is never any danger of seeing the plays lapse into the maudlin melodrama of tragicomedy. Over-excitement and excessive adventures are carefully avoided, there being but one duel, a common event in those days. The language is quite simple, even in scenes of precious debate, and the unforeseen turns of event allow for a multiplicity of tone quite becoming a comedy. The only strong derogations to this otherwise favorable picture of the physical makeup of the play are the facts that the characters have little relief and the unity of time is still not too well applied, Corneille again allowing five days for the action to take place.

Of primary interest in La Galerie du Palais are some major innovations. There are four principals, paired off, with no "outside agitator." Whatever changes of fortune occur do so, not because of external forces, but because of the stengths and weaknesses of the characters themselves. As Philip Koch points out, if there is to be any treachery, it "must come from one of the four principal lovers" [PMLA 78 (June 1963)]. By the same token, there is no outside reconciler either, and so if the problem is from within, so is the solution, the former coming from the fickleness (Célidée) or the treachery (Hippolyte) of the women, the latter from the righteousness and willingness to act of the men. This "interiorization" of the action is of paramount importance to the comprehension of the evolutionary pattern of Corneille's dramatic technique. While secondary characters will continue to abound in his plays, their effect on the central action of the play will never again be of any consequence.

Perhaps of greatest interest is a concept of love destined to play a major role in later works and first introduced in La Galerie—though in the mouth of an insincere lover—namely, the concept of the importance of merit and esteem in the birth of love. When Lysandre, at the end of III, 6, claims that love as a blind passion is a thing of the past and that merit perceived intellectually gives rise to passion (916-18), he is not mocking a concept that later tragic heroes will exemplify. He, like so many comic antiheroes, believes that in matters of love, fraud is legitimate, whereas a Rodrigue will tell his father that there is but one honor, be it in love or in battle. But, and this is of paramount importance, Lysandre is a hypocrite, not an autohypocrite, and his statement is for public consumption, not to fool himself. He is, at the time of the utterance, not parodying but stating a valid concept, though he has not the slightest intention of fulfilling its promise.

V La Suivante

Late in life, Corneille stated that basically all his comedies had been predicated on a single theme: two young people in love, separated for a while, then reunited. Of all the plays examined so far, La Suivante is probably the one that would suffer least from such an oversimplification. To be sure, a plot synopsis could easily be made as long as the play, because this is basically a comedy of errors, and if each one of these errors were to be related it would be a long synopsis indeed. Nevertheless, the story can be told quite simply. Fundamentally, there are two

sets of characters: on the one hand Géraste, his daughter Daphnis, and her lover Florame; on the other, Théante, also in love with Daphnis, and the latter's suivante, Amarante. The first trio is fundamentally in agreement since Géraste wants the union of the other two, who love each other. The difficulties are introduced by the scheming pair, Théante and Amarante. After numerous misunderstandings, the true lovers are united while the schemers are not, the play ending with a bitter tirade by Amarante whose ambition has been thwarted. This last tirade, in alexandrine quatrains, shows her to be completely bewildered by all the misunderstandings, quid pro quos, and lies.

Outwardly, this is the most regular of the plays studied so far, with few innovations or surprises. The leading role is given for the first time to an attendant, but the Nurse as an old standby has already been replaced by a suivante in La Galerie. There is only one other innovation, one that will be of utmost importance in subsequent plays, and Robert Nelson has capsulized it to perfection: "The soliloquies do not merely recapitulate events or remind us of a character's role in a rapidly developing action, but serve rather to develop the character himself." That is indeed a step forward, as are a rigorously maintained balance between the acts (each one of which has 340 lines) and the strictly enforced unities, though the unity of action is forced by the presence of some lengthy episodes that keep the interest from being properly sustained.

In our days, it is fashionable to speak of "antiheroes," comic or other. The term could very properly be applied to the protagonists of this play in which supposedly "honest" people act out of the worst of intentions. Whereas in previous comedies men's enterprises were either prompted by good intentions or were doomed to failure, here they are prompted by bad intentions and succeed. In an effort to simplify the plot, I have categorized the protagonists in such a way as to possibly suggest that only two of them were treacherous, but that is not quite so. Deception is not entirely limited to Amarante and Théante since both young men enter the house of Géraste under the pretext of courting Amarante. This simultaneous seduction of the mistress and the servant is a commonplace that can be traced as far back as Ovid's Art of Love, and as Clindor of L'Illusion comique will say, "Love and marriage use different methods" (789). Théante, confessing his feelings to a friend who will only too readily betray him to his rival, puts it equally well: "However attractive she may be, she is only a servant, and my ambition is stronger than my love" (9-12). It is this calculating cold realism that bewilders Amarante more than anything else, and it is particularly the misfortune of pretty but poor women betrayed by greedy men desiring wealthy wives that she bemoans. In short, we are right back to the basic question of honor in love. In that sense, Florame is no better than Théante, and keeping this in mind one reaches the inevitable conclusion that, while Amarante is a schemer, to be sure, she is a defensive one, as she is more victim—or even tool—than sinister plotter. Once more, a comedy ends, leaving the reader with the mixed feelings that perforce result from the perversion of the old axiom into "all is fair in the war of love."

VI La Place Royalle

The mood at the end of La Suivante is, if anything, amplified in the following play, La Place Royalle. Except for a few lighthearted moments, the humor of this play is grating. Even the plot gives an indication of the indistinct nature of the play: Angélique and Alidor are in love, but he wants to break with her in order to assert his freedom, and tries to "give" her to his friend Cléandre. Angélique receives a letter supposedly from Alidor to a rival, confronts him with it, and receives mocking insults in answer to her queries. Doraste, taking advantage of the rift, asks for the hand of Angélique. Considering his glory at stake Alidor asks for forgiveness so that Angélique might run

away with him, planning to allow Cléandre to take his place at the last moment. This elopement, occurring at night, in the darkness Cléandre takes Phylis, sister of Doraste, by mistake. Horrified by all this, Angélique escapes to a cloister, a solution that satisfies Alidor who now feels free again.

Throughout the play Angélique is very close to being a tragic figure, mocked, tortured, finally seeking refuge in God, but not really sure or satisfied as a result of that decision. The reader may well ask himself whether Corneille, tired of the genre, had worked himself into a rut, or whether, perhaps, the play is nothing less than the logical outcome of the evolution we have witnessed so far, namely, if the comic protagonist insists on an immoral or amoral pursuit and succeeds, what is one to expect? Just as Alidor's ancestors are to be found in the previous plays, so are hints of the black comedy that develops here. In this respect, then, La Place Royalle offers nothing new to the reader. By the same token, while Alidor and Philis are marvelously drawn characters, beautifully delineated, Corneille had succeeded in doing that before, though the exact degree of such a success is debatable. The exterior realism—the Place Royalle is today's Place des Vosges—is not new either to the author, and the unities are observed no better or worse than before. In what sense then does the play deserve attention? Its importance resides, in part at least, in the fact that the action is more than ever the result of inner forces, in this case the struggle between two feelings within the breast of the protagonist.

From the first line of the play, a rapid tempo is established, though this rapidity is often verbal, not involving the advancement of the plot or character development. Soon the attentive reader perceives that this breathless rush is indeed deceptive, and the play grinds to a teethgnashing end. But does all that matter? The plot is, as a matter of fact, well conceived, and the unity of action fairly well kept, but all that is nothing more than a framework for the real play, the inner struggle within Alidor, one whose ups and downs no doubt have much to do with the varying tempos of the "outer" play. In that respect there is a certain harmony between décor, subject, and characters which overrides all other considerations. Alidor is forever torn between a genuine love and an equally genuine, and eventually much stronger, desire for freedom which might easily be construed as a misguided sense of self-respect. He wants to love because he chooses to, not because of an obligation due to the lady's own attentions. He demands to be master of his love, not its slave (209-32). As Koch puts it, Alidor is thus simultaneously the hero and the "fourbe," the protagonist and the antagonist. He strives to be extraordinary, to rise above social norms (209-10). Here, as in previous plays, the subtitle, "L'Amoureux extravagant" or the "Extragavant Lover," helps immensely in the understanding of what the play is all about. The word extravagant, in the Cotgrave dictionary (1611), is defined as "astray, out of the way." Alidor, whatsoever his concept of self may be, is a comic antihero. Although he does not lack in will to act, he is quite incapable of doing anything about it, thus forever allowing the situation to backfire and turning any potential sympathy one might have for him into derision. He seeks freedom above all else, yet constantly depends on others, mostly on Angélique. Concerning his relationship with the latter, he does not even have the strength of character to abandon her, and must therefore behave so that she will reject him. It is precisely this divorce between the concept he has of himself and his actual being that makes Alidor comic and, in an anachronistic way, a parody of the real Cornelian hero. Alidor's "extravagance" is further demonstrated by his lack of a true sense of values, and therefore of a goal. The few values that he manages to enunciate are negative, as if the author had wished to warn us against these before proposing more valid ones. Wandering aimlessly Alidor thus stumbles into victory, unaware not only of the misery he has created for others, but also of the emptiness of what seems a triumph to him, but is nothing more than utter failure. It is precisely what he states that "henceforth I live, since I live for myself (1579), that one feels like asking him "why?" What is this "moy" for which he so wants to live? The best that can be said for it, the most that he can guarantee for himself at the time of that last tirade is that he will never again be caught or hurt by love. Poor victory indeed, and not much of a career. It may well be, as Octave Nadal has suggested, that Alidor "announces Rodrigue," but hardly in any positive manner [Le sentiment de l'amour dans l'œvre de Pierre Corneille, 1948].

VII L'Illusion comique

With La Place Royalle, Corneille must have felt that he had exhausted the vein that had brought him great fame and some fortune and he turned to tragedy, a form that was enjoying a tremendous revival at the time. Still, he did not abandon comedy entirely, and within months of the creation of Médée, in the summer of 1635, L'Illusion comique was performed for the first time. Insofar as the plot and the characters are concerned, L'Illusion is a radical departure from the previous plays.

Pridamant, a good burgher, alienated his son Clindor through excessive severity ten years previously. To obtain some news of him, he consults the magician Alcandre who proposes to show him, magically, some of his son's many adventures. As the play within the play begins, we see Clindor—who has had many adventures and jobs in the ten years—in the employ of a swashbuckling Mata-more. Both love Isabelle who is further admired by Adraste, while Lise, the maid of Isabelle, loves Clindor. While Matamore boasts of imaginary exploits and flees at the slightest danger, Clindor and Isabelle confess their love to each other. Jealous, Adraste fights Clindor who wounds him and is cast in jail for it. He is about to be condemned to death, but Lise conspires to allow him to escape by offering herself to the jailer, who loves her. The four are about to escape when the magician interrupts his evocation to show something even more startling to Pridamant. As the last act begins we see Clindor, who has obviously forsaken Isabelle, courting a princess whose husband sends men to kill Clindor for his boldness. But this tragic scene is an illusion in every way: we have just been allowed to witness a play within the play within the play, in that Clindor and Isabelle, after their successful escape, had joined a troupe of actors and were merely performing this fragment of tragedy. Pridamant, impressed by his son's success, goes to join him in Paris.

As can readily be seen from this plot summary, L'Illusion is indeed a departure from the vein previously mined by Corneille. This departure, however, concerns only the story and the main characters, for in theme, L'Illusion is the culmination, not the rejection, of the earlier plays. Until this play Corneille had shown a deftly controlled verve which he now let loose in what Garapon had called "verbal fantasy," concentrated in the person of Matamore, the miles gloriosus of antiquity, brilliantly revived by Corneille. More important still is the idea, not that Matamore lives in a world of fantasy (in that his exploits are imaginary), but that his world is literally an illusion which is not to be taken seriously. L'Illusion not only contains a very eloquent apology for the theater—culminating in the scene that sends father to rejoin son—but it is the embodiment of Corneille's dicta. The people creating illusions, be they magicians or actors, and illusion itself are the real heroes of the play. Appearances forever preempt reality, and Alcandre is not unlike Corneille himself in that respect. One might well ask why Alcandre does not, as requested, satisfy the father by giving him news of his son in a straightforward manner. If he did, of course, there would be no play, but the real reason is more complex for, as Clifton Cherpack points out, Alcandre, like a playwright, is compelled by the very presence of a captive audience to "demonstrate his talents" [Modern Language Notes 81 (1966)]. For all their supposedly realistic descriptions, the early plays revolve around the reality-fantasy dichotomy. At the end of L'Illusion the realistic father who, by his own confession, had been too harsh with his son, runs to escape into that son's newly found never-never world.

Nor is this the only way in which L'Illusion caps off the early plays of Corneille. The Machiavellian lover, not averse to wooing both servant and mistress, is again found in Clindor, courting both Isabelle and Lise. The father cast in the role of benevolent despot because of his desire to impose a reasoned will on rebellious lovers is the remorseful spectator of his son's adventures. In La Place Royalle a young man was willing to sacrifice his love for the sake of an inner peace. In L'Illusion the young people constantly remind the older "spectators" that such is precisely their quest. Isabelle intends to be absolute mistress of her destiny (906, 515-16, and so on) in her search for "happiness and inner calm" (664). The father realizes soon enough that when he opposed his paternal authority to his son's quest for freedom (26), he invited disaster. But most important is the idea, implicit in all the plays from Mélite to La Place Royalle, explicit here, that all the world is a stage. L'Illusion comique deserves its complete title not only in that it ends well, but because "illusion" is the basic characteristic of "comedy," a word frequently used in the seventeenth century in its broader sense, denoting "drama" or "theater." L'Illusion comique is, in fact, the triumph of theatrical illusion.

If these early plays had to be reduced to one or two central ideas or themes, it would have to be the very Baroque ones of instability and illusion. All the titles or subtitles, from Les Fausses letters to L'Illusion comique bear witness to that. The world of these plays is, in the words of La Veuve's Philiste, chaotic beyond remedy (919-20), and is ruled by fickle fate with only "uneven order" (L'Illusion, 1725-28). To make matters worse, men contribute to this chaos, so that nothing is really as it seems: letters are not letters, friends are foes, confidants are spies, reality is a dream, and dreams are real. Small wonder then that many characters, like Philis of La Place Royalle, reject fidelity as a "vanity" (47-48), believing that steadfastness in an unstable world can only lead to unhappiness. Freedom, to these characters, is thus not a goal sought for its intrinsic value, or a sine qua non of self-attainment, but a protective wall saving the "hero" from involvement. Nowhere is this more evident than in La Place Royalle where the walls that imprison Angélique not only protect her from an unreliable world but also save Alidor from a dreaded servitude; it is no less apparent in L'Illusion, where all escape into the make-believe world of the theater. It is this world of marionettes on a treadmill that Médée, the first truly tragic heroine of Corneille, rejected, because she was essentially a stranger in it, and by so doing gave the theater audience of 1635 a preview of what we have come to call Cornelian drama.