A MESSAGE FROM THE MARGINS: THE FUNCTION OF THE INFANTE IN CORNEILLE’S LE CID

Corneille’s reﬂections on Le Cid in particular [ ... ] herald a new conception of theatrical specta-torship in which emotional interest is dominant, and where the dramatic illusion is maintained as much through the audience’s interest levels as through the internal vraisemblance of the ﬁc-tional world. AbstractInthewake of its ﬁrst performances, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid provoked a critical debate in which, among other criticisms, detractors of the play dismissed the Infante as a super-ﬂuous character. Scholarship on Le Cid has responded periodically to this criticism, and often has sought to justify the Infante’s role by portraying her dilemma as a mirror of the central conﬂict. This article offers an alternative reading. Rather than echoing the conﬂicts of Chime`ne and Rodrigue, the Infante’s role as spectator of the main plot func-tions as a form of social commentary, supplying a critique of the culture of surveillance and strict social codes that characterized the court of Louis XIII. I will argue that in addition to underscoring the oppressive nature of the seventeenth-century French court, the Infante’s role resonates with the particular circumstances of Anne d’Autriche. The passivity of the Infante, and her isolation from the primary plot structure, work together to stimulate an identiﬁcatory response from the audience. This reading lends additional insight into the belated efforts of Richelieu to undermine the popularity of Le Cid .

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These two points are connected. I argue that, through its very separation from the central structure of the plot, the Infante's role forges a connection with, and invites reflection upon, the world of the audience. Her misery, derived primarily from isolation and passivity, resonates with court culture in the nascent absolutist state of Louis XIII and his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. In particular, I shall underscore parallels between the Infante and Anne d'Autriche, both royal women circumscribed by their positions in the court hierarchy. These parallels are troubling when considered in relation to Richelieu's statecraft, which suggests that they may have contributed to critics' motivation to discredit the play.
In the querelle, the two criticisms aimed at the Infante address both her isolation from the action of the plot and the indignity of her love for Rodrigue. The Académie's 'Sentiments de l'Académie françoise sur la tragi-comédie du Cid' was written primarily by Jean Chapelain and published in December of 1637, following Scudéry's 'Observations sur le Cid' by several months. Echoing Scudéry, Chapelain wrote, [nous] tenons tout l'Episode de L'Infante condannable. Car ce personnage ne contribüe rien, ny à la conclusion, ny à la rupture de ce mariage, et ne sert qu'à representer une passion niaise, qui d'ailleurs est peu seante à une Princesse. 4 Analogous to its judgement of the play as a whole, the Académie's criticism of the Infante touches on the nature of the character, her behaviour and motivations, and the construction of the play in relation to the norms of tragicomedy as Scudéry and Chapelain defined it. 5 This definition represents one of many interpretations of tragicomedy that coexisted in the seventeenth century. Tragicomedy is famously slippery, 'un genre aux frontières floues' that has defied precise definition from its heyday under Richelieu to the present. 6 It partakes of both tragedy and comedy, but early modern dramatic theorists disagreed about the extent to which it borrowed from each. Some viewed tragicomedy as a genre uniquely suited to experimentation and freedom on the part of the playwright, geared towards maximizing audience enjoyment through novelty (ibid., p. 36). Others, including Scudéry and Chapelain, portrayed audience edification and instruction as the goal of drama. They argued that a play's capacity to instruct its audience hinged on its believability, or vraisemblance, which they in turn associated with the classical rules of unity set forward by Aristotle (ibid., pp. [39][40]. In her study of the genre, Hélène Baby explains that, for Chapelain, 'la pratique antique est exemplaire seulement parce qu'elle se fonde sur l'exigence logique de la vraisemblance absolue' (ibid., p. 40). By this standard, tragicomedy was 'comedic' to the extent that it had a happy ending, but otherwise adhered more closely to the exigencies of classical tragedy. 7 The more conservative, rule-oriented model of tragicomedy provided Scudéry and Chapelain with a theoretical framework for their criticism of Le Cid. 8 Working from this foundation, the critics argued that the Infante is a poorly written character because she is both divorced from the plot structure, and invraisemblable for indulging a love 'si peu digne d'une fille de Roy'. 9 The latter criticism, couched in the subjective terms of seventeenth-century social norms, may strike the modern reader as alien, but the former is objectively valid. The Infante has little or no influence over the course of events. She engages directly with no one but Léonor and Chimène throughout the play, and hides her feelings from all but Léonor, who, as A. Donald Sellstrom observes, is a sounding board for the Infante's meditations rather than a character in her own right. 10 The Infante's storyline lacks progression and runs counter to the structural norms of tragicomedy, often characterized by a rapid succession of peripeteias, or 'une intrigue qui tienne tousjours l'esprit en suspends', culminating in a 'fin heureuse'. 11 She meditates on her unacceptable love but remains passive, and we leave her in the same state of secret anguish in which we first find her.
The critical scholarship on the subject has periodically attempted to justify the Infante's role. Over the course of the twentieth century, articles frequently portrayed the Infante as a device to reflect and magnify the love-versus-duty dilemma that both Chimène and Rodrigue face. According to Sellstrom, the Infante 'serve[s] as a frame of reference and as a focus for the most important thing in the play -the heroic love affair of Rodrigue and Chimène.' 12 For Robert Nelson, 'the role constitutes a dramatic as well as a lyrical echo of the main plot.' 13 For William O. Goode, the Infante 'is a mirror image of Chimène', and for P. J. Yarrow she serves as 'another example of feminine subservience to passion by the side of Chimène and so lend[s] consistency to the portrayal.' 14 Unanimously likening the Infante's conflict to that of the lovers, these explanations may ascribe a 7  purpose to the Infante, but they fail to account properly for her isolation. What kept Corneille from emphasizing these echoes by threading her words into the dialogue at court or crafting an exchange between her and Rodrigue, if only to give the play a greater sense of unity? As Scudéry emphasizes in his criticism of Le Cid, coherence was considered a hallmark of good theatre in the classical tradition. 'Il nous est enjoint par les Maistres', he writes, 'de ne mettre rien de superflu dans la Scene.' 15 Why, then, did Corneille systematically segregate the Infante from the central action?
Of the four aforementioned critics, only Sellstrom responds to this question. He observes that Corneille's Infante departs significantly from her counterpart in Las mocedades, who openly expresses her feelings for Rodrigue. 16 Sellstrom views this modification as an attempt to render the role more acceptable to seventeenthcentury standards of propriety: Corneille's Infante is ennobled by her silence. Second, by minimizing the Infante's interaction with other characters, Sellstrom argues, 'Corneille simplifies the action of the play and keeps his focus where it rightly belongs, on the two lovers' (ibid., p. 253). This account is unsatisfactory, and provides the key to its own unravelling. If Corneille had been concerned that the Infante would offend audience sensibilities and over-complicate the plot, he could have eliminated her altogether. Sellstrom himself attests to Corneille's willingness to depart from the framework of Las mocedades, and the Infante's presence arguably divides the reader's attention rather than concentrating it on the lovers.
In addition to leaving the question of her isolation unanswered, the idea of the Infante as a foil would seem to take seventeenth-century criticism of the play at face value. In other words, this reading of the Infante's role responds to the surface-level critique of the play's structural flaws, but fails to account for how the underlying political valence of that critique touches on her character. Through the recurring reproach that Le Cid flouts standards of vraisemblance, Scudéry and the Académie simultaneously convey and veil the fact that the play is subversive of the political and social order. As John D. Lyons notes, For the critical elite of Corneille's day, verisimilitude is not so much what the audience will believe as it is an ideal or corrected view of the world. Not the way the world is but the way the world should be. 17 This goes back to Gérard Genette's canonical observation, in the essay 'Vraisemblance et motivation', that there is a slippage between 'the believable' and 'the proper' in the use of the term by the seventeenth-century literary elite. 18 It is not that the Infante could not love Rodrigue because of her rank, but rather that she should not. Hélène Merlin-Kajman stresses the political point: On peut penser que la notion de vraisemblable permet de traduire en termes poétiques un problème d'ordre politique: il s'agit de régler le passage à la représentation [. . .] les 'préceptes de l'art' dissimulent la volonté politique d'ordonner la représentation théâtrale aux fins de l'état. 19 In dubbing the play invraisemblable, critics of Le Cid use what is almost an aesthetic euphemism to suggest that the play is politically and socially heterodox.
The involvement of Richelieu in the critical rebuke of Le Cid further demonstrates that the play resonated in troubling ways with the chief minister's doctrine. Although contending with external and domestic threats to the political order, Richelieu took the time to charge the Académie with the judgement of Le Cid, requiring the new institution to contravene its own policy of reviewing works solely at the behest of their creators. 20 Richelieu also closely reviewed Chapelain's draft. 21 David Clarke elaborates: We have only to look at Chapelain's allusions to the 'puissantes considerations' which bore upon the Académie's deliberations to realize that these were as much political as aesthetic. [. . .] Chapelain even expressed his willingness to abdicate his own judgement in favour of the Cardinal's wishes when it came to the final verdict on Le Cid. 22 The state, then, embodied in Richelieu, had a vested interest in the play's defamation. This article will now consider how the character of the Infante invites reflection on the human costs of the fins d'état, in a way that chimes with this adverse critical response.
An analysis of the Infante's unhappiness and how it differs from the plight of Chimène and Rodrigue offers a new reading of her dramaturgical function while also lending insight into her isolation. Chimène and Rodrigue are caught between their love for one another and their loyalty to their fathers. This loyalty is characterized by both familial duty and filial love. The Infante, on the other hand, is torn between her love for Rodrigue and the social principles of courtly bienséance: as a princess, she must marry a prince.
The terms in which the lovers and the Infante meditate on their plights illuminate the discrepancy between the conflicts they face. After the Comte's death, Chimène laments, Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez-vous en eau, La moitié de ma vie a mis l'autre au tombeau, Et m'oblige à venger, après ce coup funeste Celle que je n'ai plus, sur celle qui me reste. (III. 3. 809-12) Chimène's grief at the death of her father and the evocation of Rodrigue and the Comte as commensurate parts of her being demonstrate that she is torn between two kinds of love, intermingled with duty, rather than between love and duty as self-contained and separate concepts. Similarly, Don  Father and son are bound by affection as well as by name; in avenging Don Diègue, Rodrigue acts not merely to honour a social code, but also out of love and loyalty to his father as a beloved individual. By contrast, when reflecting on her dilemma, the Infante tells Léonor, 'j'épandrai mon sang j Plutôt que de rien faire indigne de mon rang' and asks herself, 'T'écouterai-je encor, respect de ma naissance[?]' (I. 3. 85-86; V. 2. 1575). Clarke underscores the nature of her plight: 'the Infante's attempts to deny her feelings are inspired by motives of rank and her suffering results from obligations placed on her within the political order.' 23 The Infante is duty-bound to a social construct rather than an individual who can reciprocate her loyalty.
Although the Infante's duty is undeniably tied to the fact of her relationship with her father, she does not refer to Don Fernand directly when discussing her conflict. In fact, the two never engage in dialogue over the course of the play. Crucially, when Don Fernand displays paternal kindness, it is directed at Chimène rather than his daughter. For example, when Chimène first asks the king for justice following the death of the Comte, he responds, 'Prends courage, ma fille, et sache qu'aujourd'hui j Ton roi te veut servir de père au lieu de lui' (II. 7. 681-82). Don Fernand also arranges Chimène's marriage to the victor of the trial by combat between Rodrigue and Don Sanche, a role that would have been played by her father if he had lived. The warmth the king displays towards Chimène underscores the absence of any comparable display of affection between him and the Infante, demonstrating that her quandary is derived from the social constraints of her position rather than an emotional tie to a parent.
Beyond filial affection, social pressures also bear strongly on Chimène and Rodrigue, but no matter how they choose to respond, they will bestow love and loyalty on an individual and receive both in return, satisfying at least a 'moitié' of their beings. It is also implied that Chimène and Rodrigue can escape the court to some degree. Rodrigue evades the court by throwing himself into military pursuits after the murder of the Comte, and Chimène contemplates joining a convent when she thinks Don Sanche has defeated Rodrigue (IV. 3. 1260; V. 6. 1765). The Infante, however, never considers this option, stuck fast in the courtly sphere. Social pressures weigh more heavily on her than on the lovers, unmitigated by the fulfilment of reciprocated love, whether romantic or familial.
The unhappiness of the Infante is further demarcated from the sorrows of Chimène and Rodrigue when considered in relation to contemporary philosophies of happiness. In Aristotelian philosophy, which exercised a palpable influence on 23 Clarke, Pierre Corneille, p. 139.
Corneille and his milieu, happiness is portrayed as fulfilment predicated on a kind of action. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's term for 'happiness', eudaimonia, is alternatively translated as 'fulfilment'. 24 He defines it as 'something final and selfsufficient, and [. . .] the end of action' (ibid., p. 11). 25 By stressing the passivity of the Infante, Corneille suggests that the rules of courtly propriety limiting her choices are antithetical to a happy life defined in terms of action. For this reason, she cannot co-exist with the tragicomic conventions of suspenseful plot and 'fin heureuse'.
Viewed in this light, the Infante's separation from the progression of the story illustrates that courtly propriety inflicts passivity, and subsequently unhappiness, upon her. In keeping with the conventions of tragicomedy, the denouement is determined by the interweaving of chance occurrences with the choices made by Rodrigue and Chimène. 26 These choices trigger actions that guide the story towards a resolution of their conflict, if a potentially uneasy one: Rodrigue challenges the Comte, submits himself to Chimène's judgement, and battles the Moors; Chimène brings her plight to the king, calls for trial by combat, and seems poised to acquiesce to marriage. These actions inevitably are delimited by political and social forces: 'If Corneille first characterizes his heroes by the freedom with which they will a course of action and accept responsibility for the consequences of that choice, their social situation in turn acts as a potent tragic constraint.' 27 The choices the protagonists face may be difficult, but nevertheless they possess the latitude for choice.
For Chimène and Rodrigue, this ability to choose in itself provides a step towards the possibility of fulfilment. This is evident when Rodrigue decides to challenge the Comte after a period of reflection, which takes the form of stances. 28 At first 'immobile', overcome by the necessity of choosing between his father and Chimène, over the course of the monologue Rodrigue moves towards the concluding resolution: Je m'accuse déjà de trop de négligence, Courons à la vengeance, Et tout honteux d'avoir tant balancé, Ne soyons plus en peine. (I. 7. 347- 50) Aware that his choice will rupture his relationship with Chimène, Rodrigue nevertheless attains a kind of equilibrium from the decision, a mitigation of the 'peine' of vacillation. He chastises himself for hesitating even briefly. 24  Meanwhile, the Infante is doomed to perpetual hesitation, and requires a different narrative logic than her peers. This is particularly apparent when her own monologue is considered alongside Rodrigue's, a comparison invited by the fact that it, too, is written in stances rather than rhyming couplets. The Infante begins by considering whether a union with Rodrigue would in fact be unworthy of her rank. His victory over the Moors, she reflects, has elevated his status: 'Après avoir vaincu deux Rois j Pourrais-tu manquer de couronne?' (V. 2. 1595-96). In the fourth stanza, however, she negates the previous three, and determines that the debate is moot; Rodrigue, even if worthy of her, 'est à Chimène' (V. 2. 1599). While Rodrigue's decision-making process unfolds in a linear progression from paralysis to resolution, the Infante's deliberation takes her in a tortuous figure of eight, suggesting that the choice tormenting her in fact does not exist. Rodrigue's monologue is a deep breath that precedes a plunge into the plot. The Infante's, by contrast, confirms that the story has progressed, and will continue to progress, without her.
Her alienation from the central story suggests that the constraints of courtly life, which operate on her more fiercely than the protagonists due to her rank, situate her in a fixed position where neither action nor chance can alter her circumstances. Corneille makes this explicit in her penultimate line: 'Viens me voir achever comme j'ai commencé' (V. 3. 1654). If it is a critical commonplace that 'Corneille's protagonists possess an undoubted freedom in pursuit of selfrealization as they respond to the constraints of their situation, a freedom which even enables them to redefine themselves from one act to another', it is correspondingly crucial that the Infante has no such capacity for redefinition. 29 From the beginning of the play to her final appearance, the Infante is static. Inaction is irreconcilable both with the peripeteias of tragicomedy and with happiness as fulfilment. In dooming her to meditation without action, the courtly culture dooms her simultaneously to exclusion from the plot and to misery.
It could be argued that in failing to pursue Rodrigue and abiding by the rules of propriety, the Infante makes a choice that constitutes an action. However, Corneille uses her isolation to suggest that any choice is theoretical alone; the Infante does not confront imminent realities as do her counterparts. While Chimène and Rodrigue are on the brink of engagement when the conflict between their fathers arises, their affection mutually acknowledged, the Infante never has spoken to Rodrigue of her love because propriety precludes her from doing so. It cuts her off from what Henry Phillips describes as the 'axis of recognition' that operates between Chimène and Rodrigue. 30 Even if they choose family over romantic love, the lovers gain fulfilment from one another through their mutual acknowledgement of their heroic renunciation. The Infante enjoys no such reciprocity. At no point is her union with Rodrigue a tangible possibility; the expectations of her station stymie her long before a set of concrete alternatives 29  materialize to demand a choice. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that possession of virtue alone 'seems actually compatible with being asleep, or with lifelong inactivity, and, further, with the greatest sufferings'. 31 Merely abiding passively by the 'virtue' of propriety does not constitute activity on the part of the Infante, but rather prevents it, and leads to the 'greatest sufferings'.
Although the link between happiness and the active pursuit of virtue, and the corresponding link between unhappiness and the kind of passivity forced upon the Infante, feature prominently in seventeenth-century French thought, alternative traditions also had their adherents. Corneille often is associated with the Christianized neo-Stoicism that became popular under Richelieu as its tenets trickled down from the writings of Justus Lipsius and Guillaume Du Vair into popular vernacular texts. 32 Upon first analysis, the Infante's passivity and disconnection from the chance twists of plot appear in keeping with the Stoic idea that happiness derives from withdrawal into the self and disregard for the vicissitudes of external circumstances. Paul Scott, for example, lauds the Infante's 'stoic forbearance' in '"Ma force est trop petite": Authority and Kingship in Le Cid'. 33 From this perspective, her role would function as an endorsement of detachment rather than a critique of court-imposed limitations. However, the Infante's passivity does not quite take this form, for she is still able to see her happiness as dependent on the actions of others; to this extent, she is paradoxically invested in the plot. The Infante believes that a marriage between Chimène and Rodrigue will end her suffering by eliminating the temptation to pursue her love. She tells Léonor, 'dans le bonheur d'autrui je cherche mon bonheur' (I. 3. 138).
The Infante's repeated claim to have brought Chimène and Rodrigue together is further proof of her simultaneous detachment from and investment in the central plot. The audience must question the validity of the Infante's claim; there is no evidence to corroborate the assertion that Chimène was indifferent to Rodrigue before the princess intervened (I. 3. 59-62). Ultimately it is Don Fernand, not the Infante, who brings about the betrothal. The Infante clings to this paradoxical sense of investment because it lends her a semblance of control, disguising her involuntary passivity as deliberate renunciation, 'stoic forbearance'. In dramaturgical terms, Corneille shows again that her circumstances impede her from pursuing happiness and render her dependent on external forces over which she has no power. Having asserted that she united the couple, she tells Léonor, 'Je dois prendre intérêt à la fin de leurs peines' (I. 3. 64). Her alleged involvement in their romance is formally intertwined with her own inaction.
I shall now argue that the distance between the Infante and the central conflict effects a rapprochement between her and the world of the audience, contributing to the play's incitement to viewers to reflect upon the social structures of seventeenth-century France. To some extent, critics have commented on this aspect of the play. When Merlin-Kajman discusses the relationship between the Infante and the audience, she interprets the princess's role in terms of the nascent public consciousness in Corneille's France. The Infante's private desires, Merlin-Kajman explains, are subordinated to public duty, and must therefore remain hidden from the public within the context of the play to preserve the Infante's image. Although hidden from the other characters, however, her plight is made public through its staging for the audience: 'la représentation théâtrale acquiert une espèce de fonction réparatrice puisqu'elle publie l'héroïsme secret, les remous caches dont l'exemple public est le produit'. 34 While passive characters abound in tragicomedy, typically in the form of fathers and rival lovers who contribute little to the action but stand as potential obstacles to the love of the protagonists, the Infante is 'la seule rivale passive à ne pas se déclarer à celui qu'elle aime. Sa menace demeure externe, c'est-à-dire constituant un obstacle pour le spectateur qui, seul, en connait la valeur effective'. 35 As the primary witness of the Infante's secret conflict, the audience is drawn to her.
This sense of attraction can only be strengthened by the resonance between the Infante's orientation towards the central plot and that of the audience. She, like the viewer, is relegated to the position of a spectator. In The Style of the State in French Theater, Katherine Ibbett provides insight into audience identification with passive female characters through her discussion of martyr plays from the first half of the seventeenth century. 'In these plays', Ibbett writes, 'we value not the historical martyr', whose death is displaced from the stage, 'but instead the secondary figure of the spectator, both the spectator represented as witness on the stage and the courtly audience present in the theater.' 36 By demonstrating a passive, gendered spectatorship, these secondary figures become exempla for members of the audience: 'The spectator figured on stage is now held up as a model to be followed, rather than merely a figure for whom one might feel pity' (ibid., p. 48). The valorizing of the mourner-as-spectator, Ibbett argues, reinforces power structures. She explains: 'these plays promote a new and politically productive aesthetic through which the state might imagine quelling the specter of resistance and instead look to co-opt a more gentile companionship' (ibid., p. 57). The audience is encouraged to behave not like the subversive male martyr, but rather like the resigned female spectator. Although she is not presented as a model to be followed, the Infante similarly forges a connection to the audience through her separation from the action of the plot. Here, importantly, the ensuing audience identification with the Infante engenders awareness of the human cost of the fins d'état rather than reinforcing them. Corneille's reflections on Le Cid in particular [. . .] herald a new conception of theatrical spectatorship in which emotional interest is dominant, and where the dramatic illusion is maintained as much through the audience's interest levels as through the internal vraisemblance of the fictional world. 37 It also points to a broader, more emotionally profound understanding of pity than was common in the period. While his contemporaries largely adhere to Aristotle's 'rigid pairing of pity and fear', Corneille does not portray pity as the mere fear that what befalls a character will happen to us, but rather, to quote Ibbett again, as a 'real-world compassion distinguished from that familiar from the precisions of the poetical tradition.' 38 The Infante may be seen to represent this theory in practice. As a spectator to the plot, she serves as a link between the world of the play and that of the audience; and as an object of compassion, she invites a potentially uneasy reflection on the norms of the state. If, as Ibbett observes, the more traditional conception of pity, characterized by a 'shying away from a shared social unhappiness [. . . ,] suited the political leanings of the centralized state', then audience compassion for the Infante runs counter to those leanings. 39 The Infante's limited involvement in the denouement bolsters this idea. Explaining the qualities of tragicomedy, Chapelain wrote in 1635 that the genre 'n'était connue des anciens que sous le nom de tragédie d'heureuse fin [. . . ;] les modernes Français l'ont fort mise en vogue'. 40 The Infante takes almost no part in the conclusion that finally brings the lovers together because, as we have seen, the inaction born of her complete subjugation to courtly norms is not compatible with fulfilment or an 'heureuse fin'. Entirely absent from the previous three scenes, the Infante does appear in the final one. She is silent, however, after uttering the opening line -reduced to a mere presence. She presides over the scene to fulfil her courtly function, but is no more involved in the denouement than she was in bringing it about. In the scene, the Infante occupies the same space as Rodrigue for the first time in the play, but only the audience can guess at her misery as she watches Don Fernand sanction Rodrigue's union with Chimène. Any expression of the Infante's sadness would work against her passivity and run counter to the norms of the genre by marring the happy ending, so, again, she can only participate as an observer. Even when present among the other characters, she is relegated to a separate narrative realm that, by dint of contrast with the primary storyline, points to the unique unhappiness inherent in her situation.
The designation of 'fin heureuse' to the denouement of Le Cid is, of course, problematic, and has given rise to a critical debate on the play's rightful genre. René Pintard argues that the ambiguity of the ending arose chiefly with Corneille's later revisions to the play, while 'dans son affectueuse complicité avec les personnages qu'il avait créés, le Corneille de 1636-1637 ne pouvait donner à sa pièce un autre dénouement que celui que lui imposait le genre même de la tragicomédie: un dénouement heureux'. 41 Clarke refutes this reading: As the text stands in both its original and its later forms, the final scene of the play remains profoundly disquieting, for all that it winds up the action at the level of tragicomedy [. . .]. By illustrating the obstacles which changing political circumstances place in the way of the lovers' fulfilment, Le Cid shows how heroic self-fulfilment can never be fully realized so long as those ideal values are neither apparent nor operative in the society of men. 42 In all versions of the play, Chimène continues to express misgivings about a union with Rodrigue through her concluding speech. She acknowledges that 'Rodrigue a des vertus que je ne puis haïr', but her final line reiterates the fear that their marriage would plunge her hands 'dans le sang paternel', rendering her complicit in the Comte's death (V. 7. 1829, 1838). The play closes with Don Fernand's deferral of the marriage, and his assurance that time and his blessing will enable Chimène to 'vaincre un point d'honneur' that troubles her (V. 7. 1865).
Although the ending is 'disquieting', there remains a sense of possibility for Chimène and Rodrigue. Meanwhile, the Infante's stasis is incompatible with the lovers' capacity for evolution. She is not only isolated from the conclusion of the central plot, but also denied any conclusion to her own story, which extends beyond the confines of the play. In the audience's first encounter with the Infante, she complains that Chimène is late to answer her summons, and Léonor observes, Madame, chaque jour même désir vous presse, Et je vous vois pensive et triste chaque jour L'informer avec soin comme va son amour. (I. 3. [56][57][58] The audience stumbles into a full-fledged quandary rather than watching it hatch; the Infante has grappled with her feelings for some time. Her vow in the fifth act to finish as she began is, then, a resignation to infinitude. In ending as she began, which is to say, without a beginning, she concludes without a conclusion. Her struggle has an unbounded temporality that distinguishes it from the central plot. Her story thus reflects the indeterminacy of life in the audience's world, which does not follow the schedule of the twenty-four-hour rule made prominent by Chapelain. Through this connection to the world of the audience, the function of the Infante's role as a criticism of court culture in Le Cid contributes to the play's implications for Corneille's society. 43  Greenberg explores how political pressures act on Chimène in particular, arguing that the circumvention of her resistance to a union with Rodrigue represents the reinforcement of a patrilineal genealogy that underlies and defines centralized monarchy, a dramatic echo of the historical forces moving France towards absolutism. 45 This restriction of the individual's actions to those sanctioned by his or her socio-political circumstances is also the precise root of the Infante's dilemma, precluding her from self-determination. Furthermore, and as Nicholas Hammond describes in his work on gossip and the circulation of rumour, the prominent members of the Bourbon court were under constant scrutiny, their sexual proclivities and personal relationships essentially common knowledge. 46 The inability of the Infante to express her feelings to anyone but Léonor reflects a system of mutual surveillance in which courtiers police one another to detect any deviation from the norms governing romantic relations and the political structures with which they are imbricated. Reading the Infante's isolation and unhappiness as a commentary on the strictures of courtly life under Louis XIII lends additional insight into Richelieu's involvement in criticism of the play, and the political motivations behind it. Criticism of Le Cid frequently has invoked its potentially dissident elements, but the Infante does not often feature in these discussions. The play, an homage to a Spanish prototype that portrays a weak king reliant on the military prowess of the nobility, was performed as France battled Spain for Corbie, and as Richelieu strove to quell aristocratic resistance to the authority of Louis XIII. 47 Both the Comte and Rodrigue represent powerful challenges to Don Fernand's legitimacy. While the Comte receives his comeuppance, it comes at the hand of Rodrigue rather than by dint of royal justice. Beyond his vengeance on the Comte, Rodrigue's victory over the Moors subverts the king's authority even as it saves the kingdom. Rodrigue acts without authorization from Don Fernand, taking charge of an independent 'troupe d'amis' (IV. 3. 1255). He explains himself when recounting the battle to the king: Greenberg argues that this same intersection of politics and sexual relationships at moments of historical transition structures Corneille's four 'great tragedies': 'All of the major dramas figure moments of passage; history as tragedy is always a threshold, always an indeterminacy. In them all the moments of historical passage from one order to another are mirrored as a psycho-sexual passage, a ritual sacrifice, the coming together of the masculine and feminine lines in the promised and yet infinitely displaced moment of marriage' (ibid., p. 55). 46  Rodrigue could not seek Don Fernand's approval for his plan because he was already a fugitive from justice, having flouted royal authority by killing the Comte. He asks forgiveness rather than permission, and is rewarded for his double offence with honour, the title 'Cid', and the prospect of marriage to Chimène. In addition to revealing the precariousness of royal authority in a would-be absolutist monarchy, the play could be said to romanticize the practice of duelling, which Richelieu had banned in 1634. 48 Although Don Fernand initially resists the idea of a trial by combat between Rodrigue and Don Sanche, he quickly concedes when Don Diègue complains that forbidding the duel would deprive Rodrigue of the right to display his skill in the lists, 'où tous les gens d'honneur cherchent un beau trépas' (IV. 5. 1430).
However, Richelieu did not immediately take issue with Le Cid despite its troubling resonance with current events. 49 In fact, he hosted two performances of the play at his own home in the months after Le Cid first appeared on stage. 50 Edmund Roney hypothesizes that Richelieu turned against the play in the summer of 1637 after intercepting letters written by Queen Anne to her Hapsburg relatives, enemies of France, and others known to oppose him. Richelieu had been monitoring the queen's correspondence for several years, but it was not until 1637 that his agents discovered that she had been using her cloak bearer as the 'first link in [. . . a] chain of couriers' to convey the illicit messages to their intended recipients. 51 Roney goes on to argue that audiences would have viewed Chimène, enmeshed in a conflict of loyalties, as an analogue to the queen. Richelieu, he writes, 'was concerned with [. . .] the political use that the queen's supporters might attempt to make of the [. . .] success of Le Cid', and so ensured that the Académie would condemn Chimène's behaviour to convey an indirect indictment of the queen's. 52 Roney makes a compelling argument for the queen's potentially treasonous activity as the motivating factor behind Richelieu's change of heart regarding Le Cid, but his focus on Chimène is misplaced. He fails to follow the thread of his analogy to its logical conclusion. Chimène, like Anne d'Autriche, confronts a division of loyalty between her father's family and her husband's, or would-be husband in Chimène's case. Chimène's duty to the Comte corresponds to the queen's loyalty to the Hapsburgs, and her loyalty to Rodrigue corresponds to the queen's loyalty to Louis XIII. Chimène ultimately allows her love for Rodrigue to supersede her pursuit of vengeance in the name of the Comte. She chooses husband over father, and in this sense at least she is a model of the behaviour that Richelieu would have desired from the queen, rather than a dangerous example.
We see that secondary criticism has ignored the significance of the Infante's dilemma in its analysis of Richelieu's involvement in the querelle. As the only female royal figure in the play, she is a more obvious analogue to Anne d'Autriche than Chimène. Her unhappiness, derived from courtly scrutiny and the demands of her rank, is pertinent to the circumstances of the queen, who, as daughter of Philip III of Spain, was an infanta herself before marrying into the French monarchy. In a biography of Anne, Ruth Kleinman explains that the queen's correspondence with her relatives and Richelieu's enemies was considered threatening not only because France was at war with Spain, but also in part because Anne 'was not supposed to engage in independent action'. 53 The queen persisted in her correspondence despite the risks it entailed because she craved human connection; she had 'no strong emotional ties in France, since the king apparently disdained her and her friends had been taken away from her one by one' (ibid., p. 84). The lives of the Infante and Anne are similarly characterized by involuntary passivity, their inability to 'engage in independent action', and isolation. The Infante's role invites reflection on the constraints that Anne confronted, particularly the state's surveillance and subjugation of the individual. For Richelieu, this surveillance, including interception of the queen's private correspondence, and the hierarchical court structure were crucial to maintaining order and the absolute power of the state. 'In Richelieu's France', explains William D. Howarth, 'there was to be no further room for attempts to found an alternative society on a basis of openly acknowledged free thought.' 54 From this perspective, the Académie's criticism of the 'inutilité' of the Infante, and the suggestion that she is unworthy of representation, could serve to minimize sympathy for her and her real-world counterpart, drawing attention away from the message that her unhappiness conveys. 55 The separation of the princess from the plot and its political machinations also reflects the exclusion of French queens from the line of succession under Salic Law. Women were precluded from ruling in their own right in the fourteenth century. From then on, Similarly, the political value of the Infante lies solely in the prospect her marriage presents for a political alliance. Otherwise, as in the final scene when she silently watches Don Fernande sanction the marriage between Chimène and Rodrigue, she is reduced to a 'rôle officiel de représentation', a silent symbol of the power she cannot wield rather than an active participant in the political sphere. According to Derval Conroy, the 'exclusionist discourse' employed by supporters of Salic Law 'is underpinned by an attempt to contain women, and to keep them out of the public space'. 57 The unhappiness inflicted upon the Infante by her containment, by her exclusion from the public space of the play, echoes this tradition.
The question of female rule was highly topical in the seventeenth century. It constituted one of the primary prongs of the querelle des femmes and frequently featured in the literature of the period. 58 The status of queenship is of great interest to Corneille throughout his career. As Alice Rathé argues in a discussion of Cornellian plays that feature female rulers, Dans ce débat portant sur les capacités de la femme [the querelle des femmes], il est aisé de reconnaître la position de Corneille. Loin de partager l'avis de ceux qui voient en elle un être faible et incompétent, il lui accorde dans ses structures dramatiques un rôle de plus en plus déterminant, souvent au détriment de ses partenaires masculins. 59 The presence of capable female rulers elsewhere in Corneille's oeuvre underscores the injustice of the Infante's marginalization. It also situates Corneille on the opposite side of the querelle des femmes from Richelieu: [The Cardinal] explicitly binds government and male 'nature' together as one indivisible unit. Government of kingdoms requires male virtue and an unshakeable steadfastness ('une vertu mâle et une fermeté inébranlable'); women are excluded from all public administration by their 'natural' traits -lazy and indiscreet, swayed by their passions, hence little inclined to reason and justice. 60 Richelieu enumerated these principles in his Testament politique, written, as Timothy J. Reiss emphasizes, from 1632 to 1638. Indeed, as Reiss observes, 'it often appears [. . .] as though Corneille were responding directly to Richelieu on this issue'. 61 The fact that Le Cid focuses audience attention directly on the sufferings of the Infante, and on her separation from the public realm of the play, works to counter these various intertwined aspects of Richelieu's statecraft.
This article has shown that the proliferation of discourse surrounding Le Cid from the seventeenth century to the present has generally served to silence the Infante rather than bring her to the fore, or rather to make her role speak only to establish that it has little to say. A marginalized character in the play, the Infante has been further marginalized by the critical tendency to accept and repeat the orthodox view that her role is irrelevant, or at best a buttress to more prominent characters. She has been sidelined by a failure to explore the relationships between her own onlooking and the position of the spectators, between her unhappiness and the central plot, and between her circumstance and those of Anne d'Autriche. This failure has perpetuated what may have been a deliberate effort by the dominant power structures under Louis XIII to sap the strength from a character who falls victim to the exigencies of the fins d'état.

Abstract
In the wake of its first performances, Pierre Corneille's Le Cid provoked a critical debate in which, among other criticisms, detractors of the play dismissed the Infante as a superfluous character. Scholarship on Le Cid has responded periodically to this criticism, and often has sought to justify the Infante's role by portraying her dilemma as a mirror of the central conflict. This article offers an alternative reading. Rather than echoing the conflicts of Chimène and Rodrigue, the Infante's role as spectator of the main plot functions as a form of social commentary, supplying a critique of the culture of surveillance and strict social codes that characterized the court of Louis XIII. I will argue that in addition to underscoring the oppressive nature of the seventeenth-century French court, the Infante's role resonates with the particular circumstances of Anne d'Autriche. The passivity of the Infante, and her isolation from the primary plot structure, work together to stimulate an identificatory response from the audience. This reading lends additional insight into the belated efforts of Richelieu to undermine the popularity of Le Cid.

Résumé
Les premières représentations du Cid de Pierre Corneille provoquèrent un débat critique au cours duquel, parmi d'autres plaintes, les détracteurs de la pièce soutinrent que le personnage de l'Infante était superflu. De nombreux critiques ont au contraire cherché à justifier le rôle de l'Infante en la rapprochant du conflit central et du dilemme des protagonistes dont elle constituerait le miroir. Cet article propose une lecture alternative. Au lieu de rappeler les conflits de Chimène et Rodrigue, le rôle de l'Infante fait office de critique sociale en portant un jugement négatif sur des pratiques de surveillance et les codes sociaux au coeur de la cour de Louis XIII. En plus de souligner la nature oppressive de la cour de France au dix-septième siècle, le rôle de l'Infante fait écho aux conditions de vie d'Anne d'Autriche. La passivité de l'Infante et le fait qu'elle soit détachée de l'intrigue principale engendrent chez le spectateur un sentiment d'identification à la situation de ce personnage. C'est en partie à la lumière de cette lecture que nous pouvons interpréter les tentatives tardives du cardinal de Richelieu pour diminuer la popularité du Cid.