[Footnote A:  Racine first met this actress at the Marquis de Sevigne’s petit soupers; so much lamented by his more famous mother in one of her admirable letters, who speaks of “the Racines and the Despreaux’s” who assisted his prodigality.  In one of Madame de Sevigne’s letters, dated in 1672, she somewhat rashly declares, “Racine now writes his dramas, not for posterity, but for Mademoiselle Champmesle:”  she had then forsaken the marquis for the poet, who wrote Roxane in Bajazet expressly for her.  —­ED.]

When Racine read aloud he diffused his own enthusiasm once with Boileau and Nicole, amid a literary circle, they talked of Sophocles, whom Racine greatly admired, but from whom he had never dared to borrow a tragic subject.  Taking up a Greek Sophocles, and translating the OEdipus, the French poet became so deeply imbued with the Greek tragedian, that his auditors caught all the emotions of terror and pity.  “I have seen,” says one of those auditors, “our best pieces represented by our best actors, but never anything approached the agitation which then came over us; and to this distant day I have never lost the recollection of Racine, with the volume in his hand, full of emotion, and we all breathlessly pressing around him.”

It was the poet’s sensibility that urged him to make the most extraordinary sacrifice that ever poet made; he wished to get rid entirely of that poetical fame to which he owed everything, and which was at once his pleasure, his pride, and his property.  His education had been a religious one, in the Port-Royal;[A] but when Nicole, one of that illustrious fraternity, with undistinguishing fanaticism, had once asserted that all dramatic writers were public poisoners of souls, Racine, in the pride and strength of his genius, had eloquently repelled the denouncement.  But now, having yet only half run his unrivalled course, he turned aside, relinquished its glory, repented of his success, and resolved to write no more tragedies.[B] He determined to enter into the austere order of the Chartreux; but his confessor, more rational than his penitent, assured him that a character so feeling as his own, and so long accustomed to the world, could not endure that terrible solitude.  He advised him to marry a woman of a serious turn, and that little domestic occupations would withdraw him from the passion he seemed most to dread, that of writing verses.

[Footnote A:  For an account of this very celebrated religious foundation, its fortunes and misfortunes, see the “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. i. p. 94.—­ED.]

[Footnote B:  Racine ultimately conceived an aversion for his dramatic offspring, and could never be induced to edit a proper edition of his works, or even give a few lessons in declamation to a juvenile princess, who selected his Andromaque for the subject, perhaps out of compliment to the poet, whose first visit became in consequence his last.—­ED.]