Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/222

204 RACINE ing days of the month are variously given as his birthday ; all that is certain is that he was christened on the 22d. The ceremony was at that time often, though not invariably, performed on the day of birth. Racine belonged to a family of the upper bourgeoisie, which had indeed been technically ennobled some generations earlier and bore the punning arms of a rat and a swan (rat, cygne). The poet himself subsequently dropped the rat. His family were connected with others of the same or a slightly higher station in La Ferte and its neighbourhood, the Des Moulins, the Sconins, the Vitarts, all of whom appear in Racine's life. His mother was Jeanne Sconin. His father, of the same name as himself, was only four-and- twenty at the time of the poet's birth. He seems to have been a solicitor (procureur) by profession, and held, as his father, the grandfather of the dramatist, had done, the office of controleur au grenier d, sel. Racine was the eldest child of his parents. Little more than a year afterwards his sister Marie was born and his mother died. Jean Racine the elder married again, but three months later he himself died and the stepmother is never heard of in connexion with the poet or his sister. They were left without any provision, but their grandparents, Jean Racine the eldest and Marie des Moulins, were still living, and took charge of them. These grandparents had a daughter, Agnes, who figures in Racine's history. She was a nun of Port Royal under the style of Mere de Sainte Thecle, and the whole family had strong Jansenist leanings. Jean Racine the eldest died in 1649, and, apparently as a con- sequence of this, the poet was sent to the College de Beauvais. This (which was the grammar-school of the town of that name, and not the famous College de Beauvais at Paris) was intimately connected with Port Royal, and to this latter place Racine was transferred in November 1655. His special masters there were Nicole and Le Maitre. The latter, in an extant letter written to his pupil during one of the gusts of persecution which Port Royal constantly suffered, speaks of himself as "votre papa " ; the manner in which Racine repaid this affection will be seen shortly. It is evident from documents that he was a very diligent student both at Beauvais and Port Royal. He wrote verse both in Latin and French, and his Port Royal odes, which it has been the fashion with the more fanatical admirers of his later poetry to ridicule, are far from despicable. They show the somewhat gar- rulous nature -worship of the Pleiade tempered by the example of the earlier school of Malherbe. He seems also to have made at least a first draft of his version of the breviary hymns ; some, if not most, of a considerable mass of translations from the classics and annotations on them must also date from this time. Racine stayed at Port Royal for three years, and left it, aged nearly nineteen, in October 1658. He was then entered at the College d'Harcourt and boarded with his second cousin, Nicolas Vitart, steward of the duke of Luynes. Later, if not at first, he lived in the Hotel de Luynes itself. It is to be observed that his Jansenist surroundings' continued with him here, for the duke of Luynes was a severe Port Royalist. It is, however, clear from Racine's correspondence, which as we have it begins in 1660 and is for some years very abundant and interesting, that he was not at all of an austere disposition at this time. His chief correspondent is a certain young abb6 Le Vasseur, who seems to have been by no means seriously given. The letters are full of verse-making and of other diversions ; a certain Made- moiselle Lucrece, who seems to have been both amiable and literary, is very frequently mentioned, neither is she the only one of her sex who appears. Occasionally the liveliness of the letters passes the bounds of strict de- cency, though there is nothing very shocking in them. Those to Madame (or, as the habit of the time called her, Mademoiselle) Vitart are free from anything of this kind, while they are very lively and pleasant. It does not appear that Racine read much philosophy, as he should have done, but he occasionally did some business in super- intending building operations at Chevreuse, the duke's country house. He would seem, however, to have been already given up irrevocably to literature. This by no means suited the views of his devout relations at Port Royal, and he complains in one of his letters that an unlucky sonnet on Mazarin had brought down on him " excommunications sur excommunications." But he had much more important works in hand than sonnets. The marriage of Louis XIV. was the occasion of an ambitious ode, "La Nymphe de la Seine," which was submitted before publication to Chapelain, the too famous author of the Pucelle. Chapelain's fault was not ill-nature, and he made many suggestions (including the very pertinent one that Tritons were not usually found in rivers), which Racine duly adopted. Nor did the ode bound his ambitions, for he finished one piece, Amasie, and undertook another, Les Amours cFOvide, for the theatre. The first, however, was rejected by the actors of the Marais, and it is not certain that the other was ever finished or offered to those of the Hotel de Bourgogne. Racine's letters show that he was intimate with more than one actress at this time ; he also made acquaintance with La Fontaine, and the foundations at any rate of the legendary " society of four " (Boileau, La Fontaine, Moliere, and Racine) were thus laid. His relations were pretty certainly alarmed by this very pardonable worldliness, though a severe expostulation with him for keeping company with the abominable actors is perhaps later in date. Allusions in a letter to his sister leave little doubt of this. Racine was accordingly disturbed in his easy-going life at Paris. In November 1661 he went to Uzes in Languedoc to live with his uncle the Pere Sconin, vicar-general of that diocese, where it was hoped that Sconin would be able to secure a benefice for his nephew. It is certain that he was not slack in endeavour- ing to do this, but his attempts were in vain, and perhaps the church did not lose as much as the stage gained. Racine was at Uzes for an uncertain time. All that is known is that he was back in Paris before the end of 1663. His letters from Uzes to La Fontaine, to Le Vas- seur, and others are in much the same strain as before, but there is here and there a marked tone of cynicism in them. One passage in particular, in which he tells how he was disenchanted with a damsel of Uzes, has an un- pleasantly Swiftian touch about it. Once back in Paris, he gave himself up entirely to letters with a little courtier- ship. An ode on the recovery of Louis XIV. from a slight illness probably secured him the promise of a pension, of which he speaks to his sister in the summer of 1664, and on 22d August he actually received it. It is uncertain whether this pension is identical with "gratifications" which we know that Racine for some years received and which were sometimes eight and sometimes six hundred livres. It would seem not, as one of these gratifications had been allotted to him the year before he so wrote to his sister. All this shows that he had already acquired some repute as a promising novice in letters, though he had as yet done nothing substantive. The ode in which he thanked the king for his presents, " La Renomm^e," is said to have introduced him to Boileau, to whose censor- ship there is no doubt that he owed much, if not every- thing; and from this date, November 1663, the familiarity of " the four " undoubtedly existed in full force. Racine was at the time the least distinguished, but he rapidly equalled, if not the merit, the reputation of his friends. Unfortunately it is precisely at this date that his corre-