Théâtre du Marais, the second theatre in Paris. Whether Corneille's play was, as tradition says, suggested by an incident in his own earliest love affair, is a matter of small importance. What is important is that in it Corneille struck out, almost unaided, a new and interesting line. He knew nothing apparently of the academic comedy of Larivey, for he tells us he had never heard of the Unities: "Je n'avais pour guide qu'un peu de sens commun avec les exemples de feu Hardy." He preserves the conventional plot of the tragi-comedies of pastoral,—Mélite has been called "a pastoral without shepherds,"—but instead of unreal shepherds and romantic princes he endeavoured to draw gentlemen and ladies from real life. It is the first essay in polite realistic comedy,—for the Duc d'Ossone is merely a farcical and indecent extravaganza.
The success of Mélite brought Corneille to Paris, where he heard for the first time of the rule of Comedies. twenty-four hours. It was the only rule talked of at that time, he tells us—a proof that the revived interest in the Unities came mainly from the study of Italian pastoral plays. To fall in with the fashion Corneille wrote Clitandre (1630-32), a crude and thorough-going tragi-comedy, the absurdity of whose incidents is only heightened by their compression into twenty-four hours. He then returned to the kind of comedy he had sketched in Mélite, and La Veuve (1634), La Galerie du Palais (1634), La Suivante (1634?), La Place Royale (1635), and L'Illusion (1636), in themselves, and in the suc-
