Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

This line is from Jean Anouilh’s play *Antigone* (1944), a modern reworking of Sophocles written and first staged in Nazi-occupied Paris. Anouilh’s version became famous for its charged wartime reception: audiences and critics debated whether it allegorized resistance, collaboration, or the moral paralysis of life under occupation. The remark about tragedy’s “rest” is spoken in the play’s reflective, meta-theatrical mode, where characters (and especially the Chorus) comment on the nature of tragedy itself. In that setting, Anouilh contrasts tragedy’s inevitability with the anxious uncertainty of ordinary life and melodrama.

Anouilh suggests that tragedy can feel “restful” because it abolishes the torment of possibility. In tragic form, the outcome is fixed; the audience and characters are released from bargaining with fate or clinging to last-minute rescues. “Hope” is called “foul” and “deceitful” because it prolongs suffering by keeping people invested in outcomes that may never arrive, encouraging self-deception and compromise. The line also implies an ethical clarity: once hope is removed, actions can be faced without illusion. In *Antigone*, this resonates with the heroine’s refusal to negotiate—she chooses a definitive stance over the messy, hopeful accommodations of survival.