[In the following essay, Harrison addresses the issue of royal gratitude as portrayed in The Cid.]

When the Académie Française delivered its judgment on Le Cid, Don Fernand's support for the marriage of Rodrigue and Chimène met with condemnation. The Academicians ruled that a marriage between a woman and her father's killer would have been immoral. At the same time, the Académie criticized the Castillean king as an abusive tyrant who lightly gave away property—namely Chimène herself—which did not belong to him (Académie 388-89). By questioning the appropriateness of the king's gift to Rodrigue, the Académie directs our attention to the problem of royal gratitude.

For a seventeenth-century audience, a king who has received extraordinary services from a subject is in a delicate position. The monarch's own interests dictate that he reward such services.¹ In so doing, he practices the liberality expected of all nobles. He inspires his subjects to work and to fight for him. On the other hand, service to the crown must remain a duty, not a venture motivated by self-interest alone. A king must never allow those beneath him to view his gifts merely as their due. Should reward and recognition become obvious payment, the bond between a king and his subjects would become a contractual one rather than a divinely ordained relationship. While a noble who has received a favor from a peer finds himself in the uncomfortable and inferior position of being obligé, no subject can gain such an advantage over a monarch.² The final scene of Le Cid is the culmination of a series of tests having to do with royal gratitude in this play. Not only the major characters but also the members of Corneille's public reveal their attitude toward monarchy as they assess the king's gifts and his method of bestowing them.³

The first discussion of royal gratitude privileges deferred rewards over immediate payment for services. As Don Diègue and the Comte leave the royal council, they disagree as to whether the king has been just in making Don Diègue tutor to the prince:

DON Diègue
Cette marque d'honneur qu'il met dans ma famille
Montre à tous qu'il est juste, et fait connaître assez
Qu'il sait récompenser les services passés.
LE Comte
Pour grands que soient les Rois, il sont ce que nous sommes
Ils peuvent se tromper comme les autres hommes,
Et ce choix sert de preuve à tous les Courtisans
Qu'ils savent mal payer les services présents.

(I.iv.148-54)

The two warriors share the assumption that services to the sovereign should receive compensation. The parallelism of verses 150 and 154 could be read as symptomatic of similar attitudes toward the relations between subject and monarch. On closer examination, however, these verses already reveal different stances toward the king and toward gratitude. The conflict between the two men is not simply a matter of whether or not the king has made a good decision, but a question of how all such decisions should be interpreted and of who has the right to judge the monarch.

For Diègue, the king's decision results from royal justice. Don Fernand has remembered the deeds of his old champion and has decided to reward them. The verb used by Don Diègue for the monarch's action is “récompenser,” which means, etymologically, to reestablish a balance, to weigh one thing with another (Wartburg, recompensare).⁴ Finding an appropriate recompense thus entails exercising judgment. The giver rather than the receiver decides in this context what the reward should be. In praising his monarch's decision, Don Diègue depicts the king as a unique being who displays his virtue to a global and undifferentiated audience, “tous.”

The Comte, in contrast, places the king on the same level with his nobles by destroying this uniqueness. He speaks not of “le roi” but of “les rois.” Monarchs become one class of beings who must prove themselves to another, potentially adversarial group, “les Courtisans.”⁵ Rather than seeing the political structure in terms of king and subjects, the current champion of Castille posits kings who need the goodwill of their vassals. In saying that kings “savent mal payer les services présents,” the Comte makes his sovereign little more than the employer of mercenary troops. His complaint hints that Fernand's poor example might discourage other nobles from serving him well. Nothing in his speech glosses over the immediate exchange which Chimène's father expects between the king and those who protect his realm.

The choice between Don Diègue and the Comte has thus served to expose differing views of kings and to make plain the sovereign's determination to place himself outside the bonds of obligation which would govern him were he only the first among equals. The king eschews using the coveted appointment for the purpose of retaining the military support he currently needs. He rewards good servants, but he does so in his own time and his own way. By selecting Diègue rather than Gomès, Don Fernand shows that temporal distance does not diminish the value of works which support the monarchy. The lapse of time between the older man's service and this particular reward obfuscates any resemblance which the appointment has to mercenary payment and also makes the example of royal gratitude more striking than a favor bestowed on Chimène's father would be. If pride and interest did not blind Don Gomès, he could read in the king's decision the message that the sovereign would remember and consider distinguished military service even after a warrior had lost his strength.

The ability to transcend the present and to remain above temporal constraints is a distinguishing feature of royal gratitude, and it is a feature which recalcitrant nobles such as the Comte cannot accept. As Chimène's father rages over the preference accorded past rather than present services, he reveals that his allegiance lies chiefly with the old, feudal order rather than with the absolutist regime which Don Fernand strives to create. Several critics have remarked upon the conflict between Gomès and Diègue as a tension between these two conceptions of society, but it is necessary to emphasize that the transition from feudalism to absolutism is underway before the play begins.⁶ Even Don Gomès has a foot in both camps. Hence he accepts, as does Don Diègue, a second defining feature of royal gratitude, namely that the reward for services to the crown should be an opportunity to perform more services. The two men want to teach the prince. Both the past and present champion sense that their prestige and identity depend upn the sovereign's favor.

The two great nobles want the king's reconnaissance in both senses of the word. Gratitude for their services constitutes recognition of their identities. The chance to serve as the prince's tutor can confirm the king's belief in a warrior's valor and merit. Such an expression of gratitude would demonstrate that the king and all his realm see Gomès as he wishes to be seen, as the incomparable champion of Castille.⁷ Hence the sharpness of the barb when Don Diègue, after a speech which at first seems conciliatory, adds “Un Monarque entre nous met de la différence” (I.iv.208). Gomès is enough of a modern courtier to feel that his worth has been denied if the king does not recognize him, yet not enough of a courtier to see that he must accept the sovereign's choices without murmuring. The apparent slight to his honor corrodes the Comte's allegiance to the new order, just as it saps his goodwill and admiration toward Diègue and his son.

As the initial dispute over the king's gratitude separates the adherents of a new absolutism from poorly adapted feudal lords, the scene between the fathers lays the groundwork for Don Arias's words on the king's superiority to debt: “Quoiqu'on fasse d'illustre et de considérable / Jamais à son sujet un Roi n'est redevable” (II.i.371-72). Despite his military service, Gomès has neither the right to expect special protection for his offenses, nor the right to demand payment for his acts of valor. No subject ever has such rights. In Don Fernand's first scene with Rodrigue, however, the monarch apparently belies Don Arias's words.

After Rodrigue defeats the invading Moors, the king finds himself in a position which offers him little hope of providing a suitable recompense to his champion. Everyone now knows that Don Fernand owes Rodrigue his kingdom. Monarch or no, Don Fernand appears as redevable. The challenge to him is to turn his indebtedness to his own ends, to make his expressions of gratitude enhance rather than diminish his prestige, despite the inadequacy of any tangible rewards which he can bestow on his champion.

In these circumstances, the king declares the debt openly and acknowledges his inability to repay it:

Pour te récompenser ma force est trop petite,
Et j'ai moins de pouvoir que tu n'as de mérite.
Le pays délivré d'un si rude ennemi,
Mon sceptre dans ma main par la tienne affermi,
Et les Mores défaits avant qu'en ces alarmes
J'eusse pu donner ordre à repousser leurs armes,
Ne sont point des exploits qui laissent à ton Roi
Le moyen ni l'espoir de s'acquitter vers toi.

(IV.iii.1223-30)

This speech, while denying that the hero will receive more than words of praise from his king, already constitutes a type of reward for the young courtier. The king himself recognizes Rodrigue's prowess. At the same time, this apparent declaration of royal bankruptcy works to lessen expectations that any further reward will be forthcoming. This heightens the effect of the benefits bestowed in the second part of the king's speech:

Mais deux Rois, tes captifs, feront ta récompense,
Ils t'ont nommé tous deux leur Cid en ma présence,
.....Sois désormais le Cid, qu'à ce grand nom tout cède,
Qu'il devienne l'effroi de Grenade et Tolède,
Et qu'il marque à tous ceux qui vivent sous mes lois
Et ce que tu me vaux et ce que je te dois.

(IV.iii.1231-32;1235-38)

On the one hand, the king protects himself and his new champion from any accusation of entering into a contractual, mercenary exchange. The king specifically says that he is still Rodrigue's debtor and that the récompense comes from the Moorish kings. Yet, in contrast to the Spanish source, no Moorish king is present to give the hero his new name (Castro y Bellvis 50). The king himself makes it public and thus creates for Rodrigue a new identity. In doing so, the monarch both shows his power to transform an individual and attributes prophetic powers to himself. He promises the Cid a future.

Once again, we see in this passage the ability of the king to transcend time as he displays his gratitude. All of what Rodrigue will do and be henceforth comes to read as the king's gift. Future services to the Crown become the reward bestowed for past services. And, in what is perhaps the most surprising move of all, the king's debt becomes a sign of his generosity.

Rather than negate his debt, the king memorializes it. By coopting the word Cid and making it a mark of the value he attaches to Rodrigue and the debt he owes him, Don Fernand links himself to the young hero, Rodrigue's fame to his. The personal pronouns in line 1238—tu, me, je, te—reinforce this association. Rodrigue's title becomes a monument not only to the young warrior but also to his sovereign.

The king's thanks to Rodrigue serve another strategic purpose. The speech provokes Rodrigue to restate the principle of a subject's endless indebtedness and to recognize his master's freedom from a system of payment:

Que votre Majesté, Sire, épargne ma honte,
D'un si foible service elle fait trop de compte,
Et me force à rougir devant un si grand Roi
De mériter si peu l'honneur que j'en reçois.
Je sais trop que je dois au bien de votre Empire
Et le sang qui m'anime et l'air que je respire,
Et quand je les perdrai pour un si digne objet,
Je ferai seulement le devoir d'un sujet.

(IV.iii.1239-46)

While the king's own words had at first seemed to echo the ideas of the Comte, Rodrigue's clearly recall the precepts recited by Don Arias. This exchange thus demonstrates that while Rodrigue replaces Chimène's father as military champion, he will not become Don Gomès. The modesty with which Rodrigue belittles his own heroic actions contrasts favorably with the Comte's overweening pride. Rodrigue will continue to see himself as the king's ever-obligated subject.

This second example of royal gratitude functions, as did the first, as a test. The king's gratitude toward Don Diègue tested Gomès's ability to serve the emerging order, the absolutism which the king envisions but which he cannot yet completely practice. The second example requires Rodrigue to prove his loyalty to the new regime. The scene with Rodrigue cannot disguise that the monarchy of Castille needs heroic defenders and will fall without them. Nonetheless, just as the king designates Rodrigue as a hero who will win lasting glory, Rodrigue affirms his lord's status as indisputable sovereign of the realm. Royal reconnaissance incites the subject's reconnaissance. Both men benefit from this mutual recognition, but it establishes a hierarchy in which the military hero, however glorious, remains subordinate to his monarch. In recognizing an insurmountable distance between his deserts and the monarch's generosity, Rodrigue presents an example for the spectators within Fernand's court and within the Paris theater to follow.

The third scene I have chosen presents, as we shall soon see, a test to Corneille's audience as well as to the members of Don Fernand's court. Don Fernand has allowed Chimène's champion to challenge Rodrigue to a duel, but has decreed that Chimène must accept the victor of this combat as her husband.⁸ This decree is not explicitly formulated as an expression of gratitude to Rodrigue, yet the king's words suggest that he views Chimène as an additional recompense for his new champion:

Et le combat fini, m'amenez le vainqueur.
Quel qu'il soit, même prix est acquis à sa peine,
Je le veux de ma main présenter à Chimène,
Et que pour récompense il reçoive sa foi.

(IV.v.1466-69)

Once Rodrigue has won the duel, Chimène's usefulness as royal recompense becomes even more apparent, though not unproblematic. Chimène has undergone a series of trials which prove both her love for Rodrigue and her loyalty to her father, and she now balks at a marriage which would place one above the other. The king grants her a delay of one year and enjoins Rodrigue to spend this time fighting the Moors in their own lands. Further service to the king will win Rodrigue additional glory and, according to Don Fernand, Chimène's hand. The king will collaborate with Rodrigue's valor to obtain the desired end: “Pour vaincre un point d'honneur qui combat contre toi, / Laisse faire le temps, ta vaillance, et ton Roi” (V.vii.1865-66).

Whether or not one believes that the marriage between Rodrigue and Chimène will occur depends upon whether one accepts the claims for royal gift-giving which earlier scenes supported. The king makes explicit in this scene the superiority to time which the text has already attributed to him. He has shown that he gives the future as well as the present. His decree is law, whether fulfilled immediately or in a year: “Cet Hymen différé ne rompt pas une loi / Qui sans marquer de temps lui destine ta foi” (V.vii.1845-46). This confidence functions as a sign of the king's power. Rather than make his rewards less real or less valuable, delay can in fact make his gift more palatable to Chimène and will incite Rodrigue to perform more feats for the good of the realm.⁹ Don Fernand's past generosity and his determination to establish himself as absolute should lead the audience to conclude that the marriage, which is after all historical, will take place.

Here I seem to be in the uncomfortable position of disagreeing not only with such perspicacious critics as Mitchell Greenberg but also with Corneille himself. The 1660 examen answers the critics of Le Cid who maintained that Chimène shows herself to be impudique in agreeing to marry the man who killed her father by asserting that the heroine never gives her consent to the marriage. Her response to the monarch's decree is silence, and Corneille warns against interpreting silence as consent in this case:

Je sais bien que le silence passe d'ordinaire
pour une marque de consentement; mais quand
les Rois parlent, c'en est une de
contradiction: on ne manque jamais à leur
applaudir quand on entre dans leurs
sentiments; et le seul moyen de leur
contredire avec le respect qui leur est dû,
c'est de se taire.

(Corneille, 1:701)

The remarks on universal eagerness to flatter kings seem more appropriate to the post-Fronde monarchy of 1660 than to either the France of 1637 or the Castille of the play. Louis XIII still faced insubordination from the grands and from his own family. As to Don Fernand, he is a king establishing an absolute monarchy, not yet the unquestioned center of an adoring and submissive court. Chimène's silence indeed protects her from having to give an unequivocal answer to the king's decree, but in the heat of the Querelle du Cid, neither Corneille nor his defenders explained her silence as dissent. As Couton notes, this passage from the examen has more to do with answering old objections to this tragi-comedy than with how Corneille or his contemporaries read the play in 1637 (Réalisme 102).

Greenberg views Chimène as a scandalous figure who clings to the old regressive order represented by her father and indefinitely defers marriage with Rodrigue (63-65). I would argue instead that the deferral of the marriage is a royal decision which places this example of royal gratitude in line with the two earlier ones. By demanding that Rodrigue place his hope in time and the king, Don Fernand reminds the audience that the Crown will not forget its servants. Le Cid depicts a world which has undergone radical change, and the king's increased power comes with that change. Yet, the king's insistence on his own memory and foresight makes him the conveyor of continuity. The scenes involving royal gratitude thus contain the reassurance that the new order still respects the virtues of the old one. Those who feel troubled by a world in which absolutism is conquering a feudal past should respond not by rebelling but by turning their faith and service to the monarch.

Royal gratitude does not necessarily exhaust state coffers, for it may, in concrete terms, be cheap. One can argue that Don Fernand gives nothing but promises and demands. Nonetheless, he makes his subjects and the audience believe in the worth of these promises and demands. By rewarding worthy subjects with opportunities for further service and by refusing to privilege the present over the past or the future, Don Fernand transforms his gratitude from a possible sign of weakness to a means of increasing his own glory and power.

As evidence of royal power and prerogatives, Don Fernand's gifts to his subjects and his demands upon them should have won the approval of all who wished the strength of the French crown to continue to grow. The extremely successful play had almost all theater-goers, including the nobles d'épée, admiring a triumph of absolutism over feudalism as they applauded the love and eventual marriage of Rodrigue and Chimène. The play both urged service to the monarchy and reaffirmed that the king, although a unique being, shared the values of his nobility. The two performances of Le Cid at the Palais-Cardinal, the dedication of the published text to Mme. de Combalet, Richelieu's niece, and the gift of nobility to Corneille's father all suggest that Richelieu recognized the merits, and perhaps the usefulness, of this tragicomedy when he first saw it.¹⁰ Yet, the Cardinal and his protégés turned against the Cid soon after its publication. What do the attacks launched against Le Cid tell us about the degree to which Corneille's treatment of gratitude conformed or failed to conform to the ideologies of his time?

First of all, the critical minority agreed that the insolent response to royal gifts exemplified by the Comte deserved censure. Scudéry and the members of the Académie viewed the Comte as a fanfaron (Observations 84-85, Académie 376-77). The Académie specifically related “l'insupportable audace avec laquelle il [Gomès] parle du Roy son Maistre” to the Comte's attitude toward payment for services to the Crown. Gomès, according to the Académie, fits the secondary definition of fanfaron: “homme de cœur, mais qui ne fait de bonnes actions que pour en tirer avantage, et qui mesprise chacun, et n'estime que soy-mesme” (377). These words, though not intended as praise of Corneille, suggest that he had succeeded in making the Comte's expectations of immediate royal payment appear to his contemporaries as outmoded and reprehensible.

Parallels between the Comte's ambition and the attitudes of the grands of the 1630s may partly account for Scudéry's disapproval of this character. Georges de Scudéry prided himself on being noble and on being both a poet and a warrior. His Observations are replete with reminders that he knows how the nobles who defend a country speak while Corneille knows only how to “parler de la guerre en bon bourgeois qui va à la garde” (102). Scudéry and his allies in the quarrel repeatedly remind the reader of Corneille's bourgeois origins.¹¹ Especially if we remember that Scudéry had close ties with the house of Condé, it seems quite credible that he would have resented the extent to which Don Gomès made the power and presumption of the grands and the ostentation of the old nobility look anachronistic.¹² Despite the Cardinal's patronage, Scudéry was not ready for complete acceptance of absolutism, as his loyalty to Condé during the Fronde showed. At least in later years, he believed that the Crown could indeed be “redevable” to its grands.

As for the final scene involving royal gratitude, the criticisms of the Académie suggest that Corneille, in the eyes of his judges and their patron, had gone both too far and not far enough in delineating the powers of the king. On the one hand, the Académie implicitly recognized that time could not diminish the effects of royal gratitude. Instead of reading the one-year delay as introducing the possibility that the marriage would never take place at all, the Academicians rebuked Corneille for letting his king abuse power. Don Fernand allows his gratitude to one subject to make him unjust towards another. Seen in this light, Don Fernand violates the restrictions which even absolutist theoreticians like Bodin place on sovereigns, for he confiscates property without sufficient cause or compensation.¹³ His liberality comes to resemble theft. There is so little doubt about the king's ability to keep his word to Rodrigue, whatever Chimène's intentions, that he may be viewed not merely as an absolute monarch but as a tyrant.

The remarks of the Académie also suggest that Corneille has not gone far enough in differentiating royal récompense from contractual exchange. As we have seen, the critique regards Chimène as the king's payment to Rodrigue. Thus, Corneille's efforts to glorify royal gratitude by showing the greatness of the gift—the Cid's future and his bride—and by using remoteness in time to decrease the resemblance between the gift and payment would appear less than wholly successful, at least according to the poet's rivals. Corneille had made his audience assume Don Fernand's power to fulfill his promises, but this success had attenuated the effect of the deferral of the marriage. Time no longer obfuscates the reward's resemblance to payment. An institution whose patron favored clearly didactic drama could still find that Don Fernand acted like Rodrigue's debtor.¹⁴

The 1660 edition of the play confirms how easily the king's superiority to obligation could be undermined and reminds us how much the ideological function of the play depended on the time of its reception. In this version, Chimène herself echoes the Académie's objections to Don Fernand's use of her: “Si Rodrigue à l'Etat devient si nécessaire, / De ce qu'il fait pour vous dois-je être le salaire?” (1: 1508). This verse appears to derive from the Académie's suggestion that the poet could have made Chimène's marriage more acceptable by positing it as necessary for the state. Yet, the change threatens the claims for royal rewards made earlier in the play. The word salaire underscores Chimène's commodification and makes the king's gift into a calculated payment to a powerful subject. Such calculation is at odds both with noble liberality and with the king's superiority to obligation.

The change in the final scene suggests, as do some of Corneille's critical observations in the 1660 Œuvres, that he no longer considered Don Fernand a worthy representative of emerging absolutism.¹⁵ His assumptions concerning the relative power of sovereign and nobles had changed in the course of thirty-three years, in part because the monarchical ideology of Le Cid had gained grounds. Shedding a favorable light on the origins of absolutism had become less pertinent. By 1660, Don Fernand had lost his potential importance as a promising precursor to modern monarchs. The differences between his Castille and modern France had grown far more evident than any similarity between his moves toward absolutism and the progress of the French state. Richelieu and Mazarin had triumphed. From the perspective of 1660, Le Cid could appear as a story from a distant feudal past rather than as an enactment of the demise of feudalism.

Yet, depiction of royal gratitude had not become irrelevant for Corneille. The first version of Le Cid had, after all, offered standards of gratitude which the Crown had never met. Disappointment in royal patronage, the strengthening of central power after the Fronde, and lingering bitterness over the treatment of Le Cid could have decreased the poet's faith in a monarchy that would surpass the liberality of the noblesse and honor past services as well as present ones. The use of royal ingratitude in Nicomède, first performed in 1651, suggests increasing doubt that sovereigns could be both unfettered by debt and generous toward deserving subjects. Such plays as Othon, Agesilas, and Suréna reflect Corneille's continued concern with the vicissitudes of royal gratitude.

The response to Le Cid as well as Corneille's revisions underscore the difficulties of creating a convincing monarch who rewards services not because he must but because he chooses to do so. Any later doubts about the generosity of kings notwithstanding, Corneille bolsters absolutist ideology in the 1637 Cid as he makes his public applaud royal gifts and forces his rivals to denigrate noble bravado. As the text privileges royal récompense over common payment, the play urges allegiance to the new order and challenges those in power to make absolutism's myths of royal gratitude a reality.

Notes

1. Machiavelli states that a prince who is blatantly ungrateful towards a subject risks lasting infamy. While Machiavelli justifies ingratitude if it derives from suspicion, fear of an overly powerful subject can make a monarch seem weak and untrustworthy (1: 277-78). Corneille would have known Machiavelli's discourses, but as Couton observes, the French poet's treatment of gratitude is far from Machiavellian. See Couton's “Notice” to Nicomède (Corneille 2: 1461-71).

2. For discussions of noble libéralité, see among others Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine 21-22, and Bénichou 182. On obligation and power over one's obligé, see Gross 41-42. The competition involved in noble expenditure resembles the potlatch discussed in Mauss 29-57.

3. In examining the king's gifts, I am obviously looking at only one aspect of exchange in this play. A more exhaustive study of exchange in Le Cid would of course treat the Infante's insistence that Rodrigue is her gift to Chimène as well as the vendetta system which the king abrogates.

4. In addition to Wartburg, Furetière's dictionary is enlightening as to differences of register between récompenser and payer. Examples of usage given under récompense and récompenser speak of heavenly recompenses and of “Dieu qui récompense.” No such examples occur under paier.

5. For a similar interpretation, see Mittag 158.

6. See Apostolidès, Le Prince sacrifié 60-61, Couton, Réalisme de Corneille 72, and Lyons 9. Lyons notes that the transition between orders has already begun and views the real change in this play as one in the system of justice.

7. Mittag notes Gomès's need for recognition and views his hyperbolic discourse as compensation for the king's failure to recognize him (157).

8. In the Spanish play, the king makes no such decree. Instead, Chimène offers her hand in exchange for Rodrigue's head. Since she omits to say the head must be detached from the shoulders, Rodrigue declares that he himself fulfills her demand. The king agrees but does not bring about the marriage himself (Castro y Bellvis 67).

9. As Apostolidès observes, those feats take place outside the king's own realm. This gift has the practical advantage of removing a hero who could compete with royal power (Prince sacrifié 62). I would argue that the terms of the gift also protect the king from competition by affirming his uniqueness and supremacy.

10. Differing views of the relationship between Richelieu and Corneille and of Richelieu's response to Le Cid may be found in Battifol, Howarth, Maurens, and Stegmann 69-80.

11. See, for example, Claveret 308 and Mairet and Scarron, Apologie pour M. Mairet 332.

12. For a very different view of Gomès's nobility, see Bareau.

13. On the king's duty to observe natural and divine law and to respect property rights, see Bodin 1: 140, 273.

14. For examples of Richelieu's theatrical taste, see Hall 162-99, especially 193-99.

15. See the “Examen” of Clitandre (Corneille 1: 103) and the “Examen” of Le Cid (1: 703).

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