Hugo builds his famous tirade from "Hernani" on gradation, accumulating epithets of increasing grandeur to describe the outlaw hero before reaching the climactic self-identification that reverses the entire ascending sequence with a single devastating reversal; La Fontaine's moral fables often conclude with an ascending gradation of consequences, moving from small causes to large effects in a way that makes the moral lesson feel logically inevitable rather than arbitrarily imposed; Corneille constructs Rodrigue's emotional dilemma in "Le Cid" through a precise ascending gradation of conflicting obligations, each stanza adding a new consideration that intensifies the moral impossible choice he faces; A student writing a gradation should plan it like a staircase, each step reaching a higher level of intensity, abstraction, or emotional weight than the one preceding, ensuring that the series arrives at a climax that could not be replaced by any of the intermediate steps; The descending gradation, or anticlimax, achieves comic effects by deflating inflated expectations: after a grand buildup, the arrival at a trivial conclusion makes the gap between anticipation and realization itself the source of humor; Baudelaire uses gradation in his great prose poem "Enivrez-vous" through the ascending series of intoxicants, wine, poetry, virtue, each larger and more abstract than the last, creating a movement from the physical to the spiritual that organizes the poem's philosophical argument.