, among
serious family troubles, through years of plague, of popular riots, of
military occupations.

[Footnote 73: The portrait of him reproduced in this chapter was
etched on steel in 1644, from a drawing by Michel Lasne of Caen.]

[Footnote 74: The fine chapel of the Lycee Corneille, with its facade
upon the Rue Bourg l'Abbe, is well worth visiting.]

His house in the Rue Corneille, formerly the Rue de la Pie, is still
preserved, though the front has been damaged by the widening of the
street, and it is marked by a bust of the poet over the entrance. In
the last few months it has been put up for auction, and it may be
hoped that the town authorities have taken advantage of the
opportunity to secure it from further mutilation. For it has been not
merely the home of Pierre Corneille and his brother Thomas, but the
meeting-place of several other men distinguished in French literature.
In the summer of 1658, for instance, Moliere brought his travelling
troupe to Rouen, and set up his theatre at the bottom of the Rue du
Vieux Palais. There he played in "L'Etourdi" and "Le Depit Amoureux,"
which Corneille went to see, and tradition says that the most
distinguished of her audience fell in love with du Parc, the pretty
actress, from the spectators' seats, not improbably on the occasion
when his own play of "Nicomede" was being performed. It is certain at
any rate that Moliere, who was then some thirty-six years old, visited
Corneille, who was sixteen years his senior, and already famous in the
wider world of literature. And it is at least curious that only after
the six months during which his visits to the elder poet must have
been both frequent and fruitful, did Jean Baptiste Poquelin become
recognised as the Moliere of "Le Malade Imaginaire," a play, which I
confess I would rather hear to-day than anything Corneille ever wrote,
even though Parisian audiences can still patriotically endure almost
the whole series of his heroic dramas. This was not Moliere's first
visit to Rouen, where a peculiarly dark and dirty street preserves the
memory of his light-hearted appearances. For there is his signature in
the town registers of 1643, when he was only twenty-one, and as the
date is November 3, the coincidence of time has tempted patriotic
antiquarians to suggest that his first _debut_ in public was at the
famous Foire du Pardon. What Rouen looked like at this time you may
see in the view, reproduced from Merian's engraving o