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Updated: May 31, 2025
In her youth she was famous for her extraordinary acting in the performance, at Saint-Cyr, of Racine's Esther. Mme. de Sévigné wrote: "It is Mme. de Caylus who makes Esther." M. Saint-Amand describes her work thus: "Her friends, enchanted by her lively wit, had long entreated her to write—not for the public, but for them—the anecdotes which she related so well.
The Representation had begun, and behind the scenes, where a folding screen had formed a sort of room, in which stood a table with refreshments, and a few ottomans, sate the young girl who, as an author has said, understands how to chisel living statues out of Racine's and Corneille's blocks of marble. She was thin and slenderly formed, and looked very young.
Oh, I do not know the rights or wrongs of that great case at law; I only know that Louis Racine was not the judge or jury, but the avocat only, whose duty it was to do as he did. That he did it the more gladly because he was a Frenchman and you an Englishman, is not his fault or yours either. Louis Racine's people came here two hundred years ago, yours not sixty years ago.
Our dramatic ardor was considerably damped by this event, and when next it revived our choice could not be accused of levity. Our aim was infinitely more ambitious, and our task more arduous. Racine's "Andromaque" was selected for our next essay in acting, and was, I suppose, pronounced unobjectionable by the higher authorities.
Jamais l'aimable soeur des cruels Pallantides Trempa-t-elle aux complots de ses frères perfides. That is Racine's way of saying that Aricie did not join in her brothers' conspiracy.
It is particularly in regard to Racine's treatment of nature that this generalised style creates misunderstandings. 'Is he so much as aware, exclaims Mr. Bailey, 'that the sun rises and sets in a glory of colour, that the wind plays deliciously on human cheeks, that the human ear will never have enough of the music of the sea? He might have written every page of his work without so much as looking out of the window of his study. The accusation gains support from the fact that Racine rarely describes the processes of nature by means of pictorial detail; that, we know, was not his plan. But he is constantly, with his subtle art, suggesting them. In this line, for instance, he calls up, without a word of definite description, the vision of a sudden and brilliant sunrise: Déj
With better fortune Rachel appeared in the same author's "Virginie," and in the "Lucrèce" of Ponsard. Voltaire's "Oreste" was revived for her in 1845 that she might play Electre. She personated Racine's "Athalie" in 1847, assuming long white locks, painting furrows on her face, and disguising herself beyond recognition, in her determination to seem completely the character she had undertaken.
The subject has been treated by Champfort, a late French writer, and one of the best among Racine's school, in a play called Mustapha and Zeangir. I do not recollect, and have not now the means of ascertaining, whether that fine drama, the Solimano of Prospero Bonarelli is founded on the same tragic incident in the Turkish History.
RACINE'S earliest composition, as we may judge by some fragments his son has preserved, remarkably contrasts with his writings; for these fragments abound with those points and conceits which he afterwards abhorred.
To change the metaphor, Racine's work resembled one of those elaborate paper transparencies which delighted our grandmothers, illuminated from within so as to present a charming tinted picture with varying degrees of shadow and of light.
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