“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 Marais in Paris, Le Cid was an instant triumph, set off the most famous literary quarrel of the French seventeenth century and left the language a bottomless supply of quotations. Plot, Cornelian dilemma, quarrel and immortal lines: here is why this play has not aged a day.
Key facts
- Le Cid is a verse tragicomedy by Pierre Corneille, first performed on 7 January 1637 at the Théâtre du Marais in Paris.
- The play draws on a Spanish work, Guillén de Castro’s Las Mocedades del Cid (1618), itself fed by the legend of the real Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar.
- Its plot rests on the “Cornelian dilemma”: Rodrigue must choose between his father’s honour and his love for Chimène.
- Its insolent success triggered the Quarrel of the Cid (1637-1638), arbitrated by the newly founded Académie française at Richelieu’s prompting.
- The exact line is “We set out five hundred; but with prompt reinforcement / We saw ourselves three thousand on reaching the port”, which memory almost always inflates.
Corneille before Le Cid
Pierre Corneille was born in Rouen in 1606 to a family of lawyers. A reluctant advocate, he first made his name with comedies. In 1637 he was only thirty when Le Cid lifted him to the summit of French theatre, a summit he would later share with Molière and Racine. He died in Paris in 1684, having given his name to an adjective: Cornelian.
The story: Rodrigue and Chimène
Rodrigue and Chimène are in love and about to marry. Everything collapses when their fathers quarrel: the Count, Chimène’s father, humiliates old Don Diègue, Rodrigue’s father, with a slap, and the old man is too frail to avenge himself. He entrusts his revenge to his son.
Rodrigue then faces the impossible choice: avenging his father means killing the father of the woman he loves; renouncing means dishonour, and unworthiness in her eyes. He challenges the Count and kills him in a duel. Chimène, torn in her turn, demands his head from the king while never ceasing to love him. Sent to repel a Moorish attack, Rodrigue returns a national hero, crowned with the title of “Cid”. After a final judicial duel, the king rules: time will do its work, and the marriage, postponed, remains on the horizon. This open ending, in which Chimène does not rule out marrying her father’s killer, would cause a scandal.
The Cornelian dilemma, now part of the language
A “Cornelian dilemma” today means any choice between two equally binding demands, typically duty against feeling. The phrase comes straight from Rodrigue’s stanzas, the monologue in which the young man weighs honour and love before choosing. Corneille’s greatness lies there: his heroes do not suffer their fate, they decide it, and their glory is born of that wrenching choice. Four centuries on, the expression is used in offices and cafés alike.
The Quarrel of the Cid: a triumph judged by the Académie
The play’s success was such that it stirred the jealousy of rivals. On 1 April 1637, the playwright Georges de Scudéry published his Observations sur le Cid, a full-dress indictment: the play allegedly violated the rules of classical theatre, plausibility and propriety, since a heroine could hardly marry her father’s killer. In June the case was brought before the Académie française, founded two years earlier, with Richelieu pressing for arbitration.
The verdict came on 23 November 1637: in The Sentiments of the Académie française on the tragicomedy of the Cid, the institution largely sided with Scudéry on the rules… while granting the play “an inexplicable charm”. The admission is delicious: the critics won the case, the public kept the play. The quarrel went on to fix the rules of French classical theatre, the very rules Molière and Racine would later have to master.
The lines France knows by heart
- “Ô rage ! ô désespoir ! ô vieillesse ennemie !” (“O rage! O despair! O enemy old age!”): humiliated Don Diègue’s lament, now the exclamation of spite par excellence.
- “Rodrigue, as-tu du cœur ?” (“Rodrigue, have you a heart?”): the father’s question, and the son’s reply, “Anyone but my father would learn on the spot.”
- “À vaincre sans péril, on triomphe sans gloire” (“To conquer without danger is to triumph without glory”): the Count’s maxim, now a proverb.
- “Nous partîmes cinq cents; mais par un prompt renfort / Nous nous vîmes trois mille en arrivant au port”: Rodrigue’s account of the battle against the Moors, so famous it is almost always misquoted.
- “Va, je ne te hais point” (“Go, I do not hate you”): Chimène’s veiled confession, the textbook example of litotes, the figure that says less to suggest more.
Did the Cid really exist?
Yes. Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, an eleventh-century Castilian knight, distinguished himself in the wars of the Reconquista to the point of becoming a legendary hero on both sides of the lines: his byname comes from the Arabic sayyid, “lord”. He died in 1099 and is buried in Burgos cathedral, where his equestrian statue still watches over the city. Between the historical warlord and Corneille’s torn young lover, legend did its work, by way of the Spanish romances and Guillén de Castro’s play that Corneille drew upon.
Why read Le Cid today
Because in two thousand lines you find everything theatre can do: an impossible conflict, characters who choose their destiny, and a language of unmatched density. Corneille’s alexandrine is an excellent French teacher: regular, sharp, made to be spoken aloud. It is also an ideal gateway to the classics of French literature, somewhere between François Villon, whose gift for the striking phrase he shares, and the theatre of Molière that would follow him onto the same stage. To read it in the original with a teacher, our French courses in Paris put literature on the syllabus from intermediate to advanced level.
Frequently asked questions
What is Le Cid about, in one sentence?
Rodrigue kills Chimène’s father in a duel to avenge his own father’s honour, and the two lovers, torn between love and duty, seek a way out that the king finally half-opens for them.
What is the exact “nous partîmes cinq cents” line?
“Nous partîmes cinq cents ; mais par un prompt renfort / Nous nous vîmes trois mille en arrivant au port” (Act IV, scene 3): three thousand, not the five thousand so often heard.
What was the Quarrel of the Cid?
The controversy set off in 1637 by the play’s triumph: Scudéry accused it of breaking the rules of theatre, and the Académie française, brought in with Richelieu’s backing, sided with him on the rules while granting the play “an inexplicable charm”.
What does “Cornelian dilemma” mean?
An impossible choice between two equally legitimate demands, typically duty against feeling. The phrase comes from Rodrigue’s choice between his father’s honour and his love for Chimène.
Is Le Cid a tragedy or a tragicomedy?
Both. The play was created in 1637 as a tragicomedy; Corneille relabelled it a tragedy in a later edition, after revising it to fit the classical rules more closely.
Article written by the team at the Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne and editorially reviewed before publication. Last updated: July 2026. Details drawn from the Académie française dossier on the Quarrel of the Cid and standard editions of the play.
