Le Cid

Le Cid (1970) by Corneille
George G. Harrap — ISBN: 0245555595
Condition: Good
As sold by Crappy Old Books

There are some books that look as though they were born to sit quietly in school bags, awaiting reluctant translation, and Le Cid is gloriously one of them. This 1970 George G. Harrap edition of Corneille’s great French classic arrives in a shade of pink so determinedly earnest that it almost persuades you seventeenth-century honour, duelling, romantic anguish and public duty were always meant to be encountered in slightly faded educational hardback form. Which, in a way, they were.

Le Cid is, of course, one of the monuments of French drama: a play in which love, honour, family pride and heroic obligation collide with such theatrical force that one begins to suspect the French may have invented emotional overstatement purely to improve the stage. Corneille takes what might, in lesser hands, be a straightforward romantic dilemma and transforms it into an exquisitely structured crisis of loyalty. People do not merely feel things in Le Cid; they feel them nobly, at length, and with a degree of rhetorical finish that makes ordinary human sulking look embarrassingly underprepared.

At the centre is Rodrigue, torn between love and duty, and Chimène, who finds herself in the classic dramatic position of loving exactly the man she most ought, on paper, to denounce. Around them swirls a world in which honour is no vague personal preference but a kind of social oxygen. Fathers are offended, reputations are defended, swords are drawn, and everyone speaks as though they have spent their entire lives preparing for this precise moral emergency. Modern life, by contrast, tends to involve far less grandeur and significantly worse dialogue.

What makes Le Cid so fascinating even now is that it sits at the border between passion and discipline. The emotions are huge, but the form is controlled. The stakes are intensely personal, but everything is shaped by public expectation. It is a play about love that keeps being interrupted by honour, and about honour that keeps inconveniently discovering it has a heart. Corneille manages this with an elegance that has kept the work alive for centuries, even among readers who may not personally settle disputes with a rapier before breakfast.

This 1970 edition has an added charm of its own. It belongs to that now-vanishing world of sturdy classroom texts and educational hardbacks, made to survive generations of students, marginal indecision, and the occasional encounter with a satchel zip. It has the plain, practical dignity of a book intended not for ornament but for use. Yet there is something deliciously ironic in such an object containing a drama of such high feeling. Inside this modest, almost severe schoolbook exterior lies a storm of honour, grief, desire and reputation, all carried out at heroic pitch. The cover says “language exercise”; the contents say “your father has been insulted and civilisation may never recover.”

In Good condition, this copy has the appealing air of a survivor from the age when serious literature was regularly handed to pupils with the optimistic belief that they would emerge improved by it. Whether they did is another matter, but the books themselves often endure beautifully. This one still looks entirely capable of introducing a new reader to Corneille’s world of dignified anguish and polished conflict. It may once have been intended as a teaching text, but that only adds to its appeal now. Books with a practical past often carry more character than those that spent decades posing untouched on decorative shelves.

For modern readers, Le Cid offers several pleasures at once. It is a cornerstone of French literature, a masterclass in classical drama, and a wonderfully concentrated dose of heroic seriousness. It also provides the enduring amusement of watching human beings place themselves under impossible emotional strain because of principles they consider non-negotiable. That this produces some of the finest dramatic verse in the language is fortunate for posterity and somewhat less fortunate for the characters involved.

As a Crappy Old Books item, it is exactly the right sort of thing: compact, handsome in an understated way, faintly academic, and full of more passion than its exterior initially lets on. It will appeal to lovers of French literature, collectors of educational editions, theatre enthusiasts, and anyone who enjoys the spectacle of civilisation treating romantic distress as a matter for formal declaration and moral geometry.

In short, Le Cid is a classic of love, honour and impossible choices, wrapped here in a charmingly unpretentious 1970 Harrap edition. In Good condition, it remains a neat little hardback doorway into the grand, polished world of French classical drama — a world where people still had the decency to suffer magnificently and explain themselves in style.

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