Ruy Blas

Don Salluste de Bazan, a Grandee of Spain and the dreaded chief of the court alcaldes, learns at dawn that he is dismissed, disgraced, and exiled—for having seduced a lady-in-waiting to the queen and refusing to marry her. Twenty years of ambition, toil, and power crumble in an instant. Yet this man does not fall: he vanishes, and in the shadows, he begins to dig his mine. He needs an accomplice. His cousin Don César de Bazan, a ruined nobleman turned magnificent beggar under the name of Zafari, sleeps with his head in the shade and his feet in the sun before the palaces of Madrid: he flatly refuses to take part in a vengeance against a woman, throws the purse of gold at Salluste's feet, and declares he would rather live with wolves than with serpents. Don Salluste has him quietly abducted by three alguazils and sold to African corsairs.

There remains Ruy Blas, the lackey. Ruy Blas wears the brown livery braided with red and gold, but beneath this defiling garment, he conceals a hydra with flaming teeth: he is in love with the queen. An orphan nurtured out of pity in a college, a dreamer educated above his station, he has built grand designs upon the fate of mankind, pitied the wretchedness of Spain, and believed the world needed him—only for hunger to cast him into the idleness and ignominy of a valet's life. Yet every night, like a thief, he scales the walls of the royal park, tears his flesh on the iron brambles, and leaves on the queen's favorite bench a bouquet of those small blue German flowers she loves and is denied. He has even dared to slip a letter into the bouquet. Don Salluste, hidden behind the door, has heard everything. He strips Ruy Blas of his livery, drapes a silk sash and a sword around his neck, throws a velvet cloak over his shoulders, and presents him to the grandees of the court as his cousin Don César, Count of Garofa, returned from the Indies. The old Marquis of Santa-Cruz, a blind man who denies his blindness, eagerly recognizes him. When the queen appears beneath her scarlet canopy, Don Salluste crowns Ruy Blas with a plumed hat—for he is now a Grandee of Spain—and whispers his command in his ear: please this woman and become her lover.

Queen Doña Maria of Neuburg, a young German married to Charles II, who spends all his time hunting, suffocates in the frigid formalism of the court. The camerera mayor forbids her to go out, to play, to eat in company, to look out the window. Her German birds are dead, she is denied the flowers of her homeland, and never does a word of love vibrate in her ear. Alone in her drawing room, she ceaselessly rereads the letter of the suffering stranger, an earthworm in love with a star, and presses against her heart the blood-stained scrap of lace he left upon the iron spikes of the wall. When an usher announces a letter from the king, she believes for a moment she is saved—but the Duchess of Albuquerque unfolds the note and reads only these words: the wind is high and I have killed six wolves. Just then, the bearer of the message appears, this young lord introduced to her as Don César de Bazan. The queen recognizes the handwriting, identical to that of her secret letter; Ruy Blas falters, his cloak shifts and reveals his wounded hand, wrapped in bloody linens; the queen, drawing a vial from her bodice, drops the scrap of lace—and their eyes meet in a silence where everything is said. Don Guritan, an old majordomo enamored of the queen, scents the rival and challenges him to a duel for the morrow. But the queen, warned by Casilda, uses her cunning: she wrings from the old soldier an oath to do whatever she desires, embraces him around the neck, and dispatches him to Neuburg to deliver a casket of relics to her father—a journey of six hundred leagues. He will not kill him.

Six months pass. Ruy Blas, under the name of Don César, has become Duke of Olmedo, universal secretary, minister, the first figure of the realm after a king who is now but a shadow locked away in the Escorial with the dead. The queen, from a secret chamber carved into the wall by Philip III, listens to him govern. One morning, in the council chamber, the members of the Despacho Universal junta squabble over who will take the remnants of a ruined empire: Covadenga demands the arsenic, Montazgo wants the forests, Camporeal claims the salt and a thousand other revenues, and they all shake hands while trading favors. Ruy Blas suddenly appears in the midst of their quarrel. He greets them with a terrible phrase—Bon appétit, gentlemen—then unrolls before them the canvas of a Spain in its death throes: Portugal lost, Brazil, Roussillon, Goa, five thousand leagues of coastline, three hundred sunken vessels, four hundred and thirty million in gold sweated from the wretched people, mercenaries burning the harvests, corrupt judges, not a single soldier paid, and the imperial eagle of Charles V boiling, a poor plucked bird, in the infamous stewpot of these deformed dwarfs. Two councilors resign; he exiles them to their estates. The others fall silent in dismay.

The queen appears from behind the tapestry, radiant. She takes his hand, tells him she has heard him, that he seems to her the true king, the true master, and that she is the one who has made him ascend, step by step, to the summit. Ruy Blas falls to his knees and confesses his love for her, admitting he has fled her for six months, that he is a miserable wretch who loves her from below, from the depths of the shadows, as the blind man loves the daylight. The queen gives him her soul and kisses his forehead. Ruy Blas, alone, drunk with ecstasy, believes he sees the heavens open—but a hand rests upon his shoulder: Don Salluste is there, dressed in the flame-colored livery of Ruy Blas's page, smiling, his head covered, while Ruy Blas remains bareheaded. The master makes his valet close the window, pick up his handkerchief, and coldly reminds him that he is but the glove of which Salluste is the hand. Should Ruy Blas utter a single word, the queen will receive, under seal, the note signed in Ruy Blas's own hand wherein he pledges to serve the Marquis of Finlas as a good servant. Ruy Blas, broken, yields.

The real Don César, having escaped the African corsairs, tumbles down the chimney of Ruy Blas's secret dwelling, famished, ragged, and magnificent. He finds a cloak, ducats mysteriously delivered by a lackey, and a boisterous duenna who confirms a rendezvous with a lady—an entire snare set by Don Salluste for Ruy Blas, which Don César intercepts without understanding a thing, brimming with a thunderous joy for life. Don Guritan, returning from Neuburg with his two dueling swords, stumbles upon this stranger bearing the name of Don César; Don César kills him. But Don Salluste arrives, sees his plans jeopardized, and has Don César arrested by an alcalde, passing him off as the notorious thief Matalobos.

Ruy Blas is alone in the small, dark room, a vial of poison on the table. He has written to the queen to beg her not to leave the palace, but he knows Don Salluste is everywhere, that he holds all the keys to all the locks. He has lost his reason, his hope, his joy; all that remains is the certainty that he must save the queen or die. And the queen arrives—lured by a note Salluste has sent in his name. She enters through the small secret door, trusting and loving. Ruy Blas begs her to flee, but it is too late: Don Salluste appears, locks the exits, and proposes his bargain. Either the queen publicly confesses her affair with a lackey disguised as a Grandee of Spain, or she signs a letter renouncing the throne. Ruy Blas, pushed to the brink, snatches Don Salluste's sword and kills him. Then he turns to the queen and tells her everything: he is not Don César, he is Ruy Blas, an earthworm, a lackey, a wretch. The queen recoils in horror. Then he drinks the poison. And it is only when she sees him dying that she understands, that she forgives, that she calls him by his true name. Ruy Blas falls to his knees, asks if she forgives him, murmurs that he is happy, and dies in her arms, as she rests her hand upon his.