Madame de Sévigné was much distressed by the conduct of her son. "Madame de la Fayette and I are using every effort to wean him from so dangerous an attachment," she writes to her daughter. "Besides, he has a little actress (Mlle. de Champmeslé) and all the Despréaux and the Racines. There are delicious suppers—that is to say, diableries." Then, on March 18: "Your brother is at Saint-Germain. He divides his time between Ninon and a little actress, and, to crown all, Despréaux. We lead him a sad life. Ye gods, what folly! Ye gods, what folly!"
From the above passages, it would appear that Racine and his friend Boileau were not exactly in the odour of sanctity with their contemporaries; indeed, both were evidently regarded as corrupters of youth by anxious mothers like Madame de Sévigné.
Three weeks later, we learn that M. de Sévigné is not prospering in his love-affairs; Ninon has dismissed him, and Mlle. de Champmeslé is on the point of following her example: "A word or two concerning your brother. Ninon has given him his congé. She is tired of loving without being loved in return; she has insisted upon his returning her letters, which he has accordingly done. I was not a little pleased at the separation. I gave him a hint of the duty he owed to God, reminded him of his former good sentiments, and entreated him not to stifle all notion of religion in his breast. But this is not all; when one side fails us, we think to repair it with the other, and are deceived. The young Merveille (Mlle. de Champmeslé) has not broken with him, but she will soon, I believe.... The poor Chimène says she sees plainly that he no longer loves her, and has applied himself elsewhere. In short, this affair makes me laugh; but I wish sincerely it may be the means of weaning him from a state so offensive to God and hurtful to his own soul. Ninon told him that he was a pompion fricasseed in snow. See what it is to keep good company! One learns such elegant expressions."
Then, on April 17, Madame de Sévigné informs her daughter that the young gentleman's health has broken down under the strain of "the abandoned life he had led during Holy Week," and that he can "scarcely bear a woman in his presence." Profiting by his remorse, his fond mother becomes his confessor: "I took the opportunity to preach him a little sermon on the subject, and we both indulged in some Christian reflections. He seems to approve my sentiments, particularly now that his disgust is at its height. He showed me some letters that he had recovered from his actress. I never read anything so warm, so passionate; he wept, he died; he believed it all while he was writing it, and laughed at it a moment afterwards. I assure you that he is worth his weight in gold."
Finally, on April 22, the marchioness writes that all is at an end between her son and Mlle. de Champmeslé, and that she has been instrumental in preventing the young man from playing a singularly mean trick upon his former enchantress: "He has left his actress at last, after having followed her everywhere. When he saw her, he was in earnest; a moment later, he would make the greatest game of her. Ninon has completely discarded him; he was miserable while she loved him, and now that she loves him no longer, he is in absolute despair. She wished him, the other day, to give her the letters he had received from his actress, which he did. You must know that she was jealous of that princess, and wanted to show them to a lover of hers, in the hope of procuring her a few blows with a belt. He came and told me, when I pointed out to him how shameful it was to treat this little creature so badly, merely for having loved him; that she had not shown people his letters, as some would have him believe, but, on the contrary, had returned them to him again; that such treacherous conduct was unworthy of a man of quality, and that there was a degree of honour to be observed, even in things dishonourable in themselves. He acquiesced in the justice of my remarks, hurried at once to Ninon's house, and, partly by strategy and partly by force, got the poor devil's letters out of her hands. I made him burn them. You see by this what a regard I have for the reputation of an actress."
According to M. Gueullette (Acteurs et Actrices du temps passé), Racine, though deeply in love with Mlle. de Champmeslé, supported patiently the numerous infidelities of the lady, "so long as he believed them to be passing fancies and that he was still beloved." But when the actress embarked upon a more serious love-affair with the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, and a wit wrote—
| "À la plus tendre amour elle fut destinée |
| Qui prit longtemps Racine dans son cœur: |
| Mais, par un insigne malheur, |
| Le Tonnerre est venu, qui l'a déracinée"— |
he was so bitterly mortified that he left her never to return.
The brothers Parfaict and d'Allainval assert that disgust at his treatment at the hands of Mlle. de Champmeslé was the immediate cause of Racine's retirement from dramatic authorship, at the age of thirty-eight, at the height of his talent, in the heyday of his success; for after Phèdre he wrote but two more plays, Esther and Athalie, which were performed by the young girls of Saint-Cyr, and were not seen upon the Paris stage until many years after his death. This, however, is very unlikely, and it is quite possible, as M. Larroumet suggests, that Racine, instead of abandoning the theatre, because Mlle. de Champmeslé had discarded him, discarded the actress, because he had abandoned the theatre. The poet's retirement indeed seems to have been attributable to several different motives: disgust at the shameful cabal against Phèdre and the various annoyances to which it gave rise; the fear that a repetition of such tactics might jeopardise his position as the greatest tragic dramatist of his time; weariness of a dissipated life, and, above all, the awakening, after a sleep of many years, of the religious sentiments with which his old teachers of Port-Royal had inspired him in youth. Indignation at Mlle. Champmeslé's conduct may, of course, have had something to do with the positive antipathy to the theatre which he manifested in his last years;[54] but to assert that it was the cause of his renunciation of a profession which had brought him fame and fortune is to credit him with a capacity for sincere affection which he certainly never possessed.
With Racine departed not a little of the immense popularity which the theatre had enjoyed during the past half-century, for though of capable actors there was, fortunately, no lack, dramatists of even moderate ability were few and far between. In place of Andromaques and Iphigénies and Phèdres, Mlle. de Champmeslé had to resign herself to appear in such deservedly-forgotten plays as the Achille of Thomas Corneille, the Argélie of the Abbé Abeille, and the Troade of Pradon. Nevertheless, despite the barrenness of the field in which she laboured, she contrived to gather fresh laurels, and her masterly impersonation of Queen Elizabeth in Thomas Corneille's Comte d'Essex (January 1678) was enthusiastically received, and secured for a mediocre play a success out of all proportion to its merits. "One might have said of her," remarks M. Noury, "as a critic said of Adrienne Lecouvreur, after seeing her in the same part, 'I have seen a queen among actors.' She possessed, in fact, majesty."