"
In the earlier play, Victor Hugo gives a striking picture of the
Spanish nobility in the days of its power and splendour.
In the earlier play, Victor Hugo gives a striking picture of the
Spanish nobility in the days of its power and splendour.
World's Greatest Books - Volume 17 - Poetry and Drama
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.
The King Amuses Himself[L]
_Persons in the Drama_
FRANCOIS I. , _King of France_
TRIBOULET, _his jester_
BLANCHE, _Triboulet's daughter_
SALTABADIL, _an assassin_
MAGUELONNE, _his sister_
DAME BERARDE
_A woman; a man; a crowd of people_
ACT I
SCENE. --TRIBOULET, _the ugly little hunchback jester to_ KING FRANCOIS,
_has stolen from the Louvre to a secluded house in a remote
part of Paris. He takes out the key to open the door, then
stops and glances round uneasily. _
TRIBOULET: I thought I heard a footstep.
Blanche must go
Back to the country. In this wild, rough town
My little lonely girl may come to harm.
I was a fool to bring her here.
