Mathurin Régnier | |
|---|---|
 A 19th century engraving of Régnier | |
| Born | 21 December 1573  |
| Died | 22 October 1613 (aged 39) |
| Occupation | Satirist |
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Mathurin Régnier (December 21, 1573 – October 22, 1613) was a Frenchsatirist.
Régnier was born inChartres, which at that time was part of theOrléanais.
His father, Jacques Régnier, was abourgeois of good means and position; his mother, Simone Desportes, was the sister of the poetPhilippe Desportes. Desportes, who was richly beneficed and in great favor at court, seems to have been regarded as Mathurin Régnier's natural protector and patron; and the boy himself, with a view to his following in his uncle's steps, was tonsured at eight years old.
Little is known of his youth, and it is chiefly conjecture which fixes the date of his visit toItaly in a humble position in the suite of thecardinal,François de Joyeuse, in 1587. The cardinal was accredited to the papal court in that year as protector of the royal interests. Regnier found his duties irksome, and when, after many years of constant travel in the cardinals service, he returned definitely to France about 1605, he took advantage of the hospitality of Desportes.
He early began the practice of satirical writing, and the enmity which existed between his uncle and the poetFrançois de Malherbe gave him occasion to attack the latter. In 1606 Desportes died, leaving nothing to Régnier, who, though disappointed of the succession to Desportes's abbacies, obtained a pension of 2000 livres, chargeable upon one of them. He was also made in 1609 canon of Chartres through his friendship with the lax bishop, Philippe Hurault, at whose abbey ofRoyaumont he spent much time in the later years of his life. But the death ofHenri IV. deprived him of his last hope of great preferments. His later life had been one of dissipation, and he died atRouen at his hotel, theEcu d'Orlans, in October 1613.
About the time of his death numerous collections of licentious and satirical poems were published, while others remained in manuscript. Gathered from these there has been a floating mass of licentiousepigrams, etc., attributed to Régnier, little of which is certainly authentic, so that it is very rare to find two editions of Régnier which exactly agree in contents. His undoubted work falls into three classes: regularsatires inalexandrine couplets, serious poems in various metres, and satirical or jocular epigrams and light pieces, which often, if not always, exhibit considerable licence of language.
The real greatness of Régnier consists in the vigour and polish of his satires, contrasted and heightened as that vigour is with the exquisite feeling and melancholy music of some of his minor poems. In these Régnier is a disciple ofPierre Ronsard (whom he defended brilliantly against Malherbe), without the occasional pedantry, the affectation or the undue fluency of theLa Pléiade; but in the satires he seems to have had no master except the ancients, for some of them were written before the publication of the satires ofVauquelin de la Fresnaye, and theTragiques ofAgrippa d'Aubigné did not appear until 1616. He has sometimes followedHorace closely, but always in an entirely original spirit. His vocabulary is varied and picturesque, and is not marred by the maladroit classicism of some of the Ronsardists.
His verse is extraordinarily forcible and virgorous, but his chief distinction as a satirist is the way in which he avoids the commonplaces of satire. His keen and accurate knowledge of human nature and even his purely literary qualities extorted the admiration ofBoileau. Régnier displayed remarkable independence and acuteness in literary criticism, and the famous passage (Satire ix., A MonsieurRapin) in which he satirizes Malherbe contains the best denunciation of the merely correct theory of poetry that has ever been written. Lastly, Regnier had a most unusual descriptive faculty, and the vividness of what he called his narrative satires was not approached in France for at least two centuries after his death. All his merits are displayed in the masterpiece entitledMacette ou l'Hypocrisie dconcerte, which does not suffer even on comparison withTartuffe; but hardly any one of the sixteen satires which he has left falls below a very high standard.
Les Premieres d'Euvres ou satyres de Regnier (Paris, 1608) included theDiscours au rol and ten satires. There was another in 1609, and others in 1612 and 1613. The author had also contributed to two collections :Les Muses gaillardes in 1609 andLe Temple d'Apollon in 1611. In 1616 appearedLes Satyres et autres cvuvres folastres du sieur Régnier, with many additions and some poems by other hands. Two famous editions byElzevir (Leiden, 1642 and 1652) are highly prized. The chief editions of the 18th century are that ofClaude Brossette (printed by Lyon & Woodman, London, 1729), which supplies the standard commentary on Régnier, and that ofLenglet Dufresnoy (printed byJ. Tonson, London, 1733). The editions ofProsper Poitevin (Paris, 1860), ofEd. de Barthlemy (Paris, 1862), and ofE. Courbet (Paris, 1875), may be specially mentioned. The last, printed after the originals in italic type, and well edited, is perhaps the best. See alsoVianey'sMathurin Régnier (1896);M. H. Cherrier,Bibliographie de Mathurin Régnier (1884).
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Régnier, Mathurin".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 23 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 47.
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