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French literature begins with a defeat. Around 1100, a poet of whom we may know only the name, Turoldus, set into verse the disaster of Roncevaux: a rearguard crushed in a Pyrenean pass, a hero who refuses to call for help, an emperor who arrives too late. The Song of Roland, some 4,000 lines declaimed by minstrels from castle to

“We set out five hundred, and saw ourselves five thousand on reaching the port”: that is how collective memory quotes the most famous line of Le Cid. It gets it wrong, fittingly. Corneille wrote “three thousand”, but the play is so large that everyone enlarges it again in quoting it. First performed on 7 January 1637 at the Théâtre du