ABSTRACT
RACINE in his fifties was a substantial citizen, far removed in his outward habit of life from the highly-strung young author of Andromaque and Britannicus. Marriage had given him a pious, practical wife and a comfortable bourgeois home established upon an income worth approximately £8,000 to-day. 1 * He had become the father of seven children of whom the 292eldest, Jean-Baptiste, was born in 1678, and the youngest, Louis, in 1692. Between the two sons were five daughters —less important, no doubt, than the male issue, yet tenderly regarded by their parents. Mirrored in these children, products though they were of a conventional, sheltered environment, are all the features which composed the personality of Jean Racine, not excluding, to a certain degree, his talent. But it is in the two first, the early offspring of his marriage conceived before he was forty, that his image is reflected most clearly. 1
