Death provides an aesthetically convincing and pragmatically effective exit for the noble subject anxious to leave a courtly world grown too corrupt and debased to hold him. However, its unequivocal finality, both artistic and practical, makes it a performative strategy more suited to Corneille's theatre of absolutes than to the metaphorical theatre of late seventeenth-century court life at Versailles. Unlike the actor playing an entirely imaginary Suréna on Corneille's stage, a real-life nobleman choosing this kind of definitive exit will not be able to resurrect himself for the next performance; and there will always be a next performance, or rather the current one will never end. At Versailles, the curtain does not come down at the end of the fifth act, bringing all to a tidy close; instead, the show never stops. There is no opportunity for neat closure, either aesthetic or ethical. Survival is therefore a rather more popular option among the players on this stage, and so a different set of theatrical strategies must be evolved, meant not so much to exemplify virtue as to insure self-preservation. Suréna will have few imitators at Versailles.

In the last half of the seventeenth century, the imperative of self-preservation takes on a special urgency. The machine of royal power set in motion by Richelieu and Louis XIII has, for better or worse, triumphed over the particularizing energies of its noble subjects.