These lines from André Campra's ballet Aréthuse, ou la vengeance de l’Amour (Arethusa, or Cupid's Vengeance, 1701) recount the tale from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which Alpheus falls in love with a chaste young nymph, and chases her relentlessly, despite her terror. Unlike the original story in which Arethusa escapes with the goddess Diana's aid, this adaptation allows Alpheus to achieve his desired union, after three acts of the heroine's resistance.At the end of the ballet, Arethusa tells him that she is exhausted and cannot run from him anymore. He and the remainder of the cast celebrate her capitulation to love. In 1752, the Opéra troupe revived Aréthuse in a highly abridged arrangement to much greater acclaim. This version practically eliminated the heroine's defiant stance against love, condensing her repudiation to almost nothing. Both the original performance and its 1752 revival demonstrate a character's transformation from a woman who wishes to control her destiny to a practically silent, submissive mistress.

Ovid's tales had long formed the source material for ballets and tragédies en musique (tragedies in music). Beginning in the eighteenth century, poets and dramatists began adapting the story to reflect current social issues, often reducing the limited agency of Ovid's heroines even further. Arethusa's surrender in the Campra/Danchet ballet marks an important shift in early modern retellings of this tale. Instead of reanimating a creation myth in which Arethusa escapes when Diana transforms her into a Sicilian fountain, the composer and librettist reworked the narrative to portray a psychological metamorphosis: Arethusa's transformation from headstrong, independent woman to acquiescent wife. In the ballet's revised ending, the heroine's surrender to Alpheus is portrayed as inevitable and her own wishes are drowned out by other characters’ declarations of Cupid's power.