Since, in modern literature, there are so few really good comedies that we may count them all upon our fingers, a man who has written two must be worth knowing. We ask permission to introduce Jean François Regnard to those who do not know him.
He comes recommended by the great critic Boileau, who liked him, quarrelled with him, and made up again. Forty years later, Voltaire wrote that the man who did not enjoy Regnard was not capable of appreciating Molière. Then came M. de La Harpe, the authority in such matters for two generations: he devotes a chapter to Regnard, and calls him the worthy successor of Molière. And Béranger, in his charming autobiography, an epilogue worthy of the noble part he had played upon the stage of the world, speaks of the unflagging gayety and abundant wit of Regnard's dialogue, and of his lively and graceful style. "In my opinion," he adds, "Regnard would be the first of modern comedians, if Molière had not been given to us."
In spite of the idle complainings into which authors are betrayed by the pleasure human nature takes in talking about self to attentive listeners, all who are familiar with the history of the brethren of the quill know, that, as a class, they have had a large share of the good things of the earth,—cheerful occupation, respected position, comfortable subsistence, and long life. France, in particular, has been the Pays de Cocagne of book-makers for the last two hundred years. Neither praise, pay, nor rank has been wanting to those who deserved them. But in the long line of littérateurs who have flourished since Cardinal Richelieu founded the Academy, few were so fortunate as Regnard. He entered upon his career with wealth, health, and a jovial temperament: three supreme blessings he kept through life.
He was born in Paris in 1655, three years before Molière brought his company from the provinces to the Hôtel de Bourbon, and opened the new theatre with the "Précieuses Ridicules." Regnard's father, a citizen of Paris and a shopkeeper, died when his son was a lad, leaving him one hundred and twenty thousand livres,—a fortune for a man of the middle class at that period. Like most independent young fellows, Regnard made use of his money to travel. He went to Italy, and spent a year in the famous cities of the Peninsula,—but returned home with thirty thousand additional livres in his pocket, won at play. He soon went back to the land of pleasure and of luck. At Bologna he fell in love with a lady from the South of France, whom he calls Elvire. The lady was married, the husband was with her; they were travellers like himself. Regnard joined the party, and sailed with them from Civita Vecchia in an English ship bound for Toulon. The vessel was captured, off Nice, by a Barbary corsair, and brought into Algiers; the crew and passengers were sold to the highest bidder. One Achmet Talem paid fifteen hundred livres for Regnard, and one thousand for the lady. This low price might lead us to imagine that the Moorish taste in beauty differed from that of Regnard; but the Algerine market may have been overstocked with women on the day of sale. Achmet took his new chattels to Constantinople. Perceiving Regnard's talent for ragoûts and sauces, he made a cook of him. What became of Elvire history has omitted, perhaps discreetly, to relate. After two years of toil and ill-treatment, Regnard received money from home to buy his freedom. He paid twelve thousand livres for himself and the fair Provençale. Achmet more than quadrupled his investment, and no doubt thought slavery a divine institution.
In Paris once more, Regnard hung his chains in his library and was preparing to lead a comfortable life with Elvire, when the superfluous husband, whose death had been reported, most unseasonably reappeared. He had been ransomed by the Mathurins, a religious order, who believed it to be the duty of Christians to deliver their fellow-men from bondage,—Abolitionists of the seventeenth century, who, strange as some of us may think it, were honored by their countrymen and the Christian world. Regnard yielded gracefully the right he had acquired by purchase to the prior claim of the husband, and made preparations for another journey. With two compatriots, De Fercourt and De Corberon, he traversed the Low Countries and Denmark and crossed over to Stockholm. The King of Sweden received the travellers graciously and proposed a visit to Lapland. Furnished with the royal letters of recommendation, they sailed up the Gulf of Bothnia to Torneo, and thence pushed north by land until they came to Lake Tornœtrask. Eighteen miles from the lower end of the lake they ascended a high mountain which they named Metavara, "from the Latin word meta and the Finlandic word vara, which means rock: that is to say, the rock of limits." "We were four hours in climbing to the top by paths which no mortal had as yet known. When we reached it, we perceived the whole extent of Lapland, and the Icy Ocean as far as the North Cape, on the side it turns to the west. This may, indeed, be called arriving at the end of the world and jostling the axle of the pole (se frotter à l'essieu du pôle)." Here they set up a tablet of stone they had brought with their luggage,—monument éternel, Regnard says. "It shall make known to posterity that three Frenchmen did not cease to travel northward until the earth failed them; that, in spite of the difficulties they encountered, which would have turned back most others, they reached the end of the world and planted their column; the ground was wanting, but not the courage to press on." These sounding verses were cut upon the eternal monument:—
"Gallia nos genuit; vidit nos Africa; Gangem
Hausimus, Europamque oculis lustravimus omnem;
Casibus et variis acti terrâque marique,
Hic tandem stetimus, nobis ubi defuit orbis.
De Fercourt, De Corberon, Regnard.
Anno 1681, die 22 Augusti."
"The inscription will never be read, except by the bears," Regnard adds. A melancholy thought to the French mind! If nobody saw it or talked about it, half the pleasure of the exploit was gone. The Frenchmen had foreseen this difficulty, and had taken their precautions. Four days' journey to the southward stood an ancient church, near which the Lapps held their annual fair. In this church, in a conspicuous position, they had already deposited the same verses, carved upon a board. In 1718, thirty-six years after, another French traveller, La Motraye, read the lines upon the stone tablet,—too late to gratify Regnard.
"Travellers' stories,"—"A beau mentir qui vient de loin,"—these proverbs date from the seventeenth century. It was not expected of such adventurous gentlemen that they should tell the simple truth, any more than we expect veracity from sportsmen. We listen without surprise and disbelieve without a smile. Some exaggeration, too, was pardonable to help out the verse; but "nobis ubi defuit orbis" goes beyond a reasonable license. The mountain Metavara is in Lat. 68° 30'; the North Cape in 71° 10'. There were still one hundred and fifty miles of solid orbis before Regnard and his friends; and they had need of optics sharp to see the Cape from the spot they stood upon.
The 27th of September found the three Arctic explorers back again in Stockholm. Thence they took boat for Dantzic, travelled in Poland, Hungary, and Austria, and left Vienna for Paris a few months before the famous siege, when Sobieski, the "man sent from God whose name was John," routed the Turks and delivered Christendom forever from the fear of the Ottoman arms.
Before this time Regnard must have heard that Duquesne had avenged his African sufferings. In the autumn of 1681 the Huguenot Admiral shelled Algiers from bomb-ketches, then used for the first time. The Dey was forced to surrender. His lively conquerors treated him with the honors of wit as well as of war. They made a mot for him, of the kind they get up so cleverly in Paris. When the Turk is told how much it had cost the great monarch of France to fit out the fleet which had just reduced a part of his city to ashes, he exclaims, amazed at the useless extravagance,—"For half the money I would have burned the whole town."