ABSTRACT
When Bérénice had been running for a month, Racine reached the age of thirty-one. The disappearance—hardly accidental—of his correspondence and of any other personal documents relating to this period has thrown into greater relief the interesting portrait attributed to François de * Troy. It shows a young man of strikingly handsome features: the delicate oval of the face frames intelligent, meditative eyes, a fastidious nose and chin, a mouth both supercilious and sensual. The portrait was held for nearly a hundred years to represent the poet in his late twenties or early thirties and its popularity is easily explained on the grounds that it satisfied almost equally his admirers and his detractors. The first saw in it the sensitive young man—poet, lover, and courtier—which they believed Racine to have been at this age. The second, by a slight exaggeration of the same pictorial suggestions, read hardness and a tendency to debauch in the clean-cut features. The portrait has been used as a central argument in elaborating an ‘immoral’ Racine as distinct from the ‘tender’ Racine or the ‘pious’ Racine of the majority of biographers.
