Jean-François Regnard

Jean-François Regnard (7 February1655 - 4 September 1709) was "the most distinguished, after Molière, of the comic poets of the seventeenth century", [Richard Adolf Ploetz, Carl Julius Ploetz, "A manual of French literature" 1878:254] was a dramatist, born in Paris, who is equally famous now for the travel diary he kept of a voyage in 1681.

Regnard inherited a fortune from his father, a successful merchant who had given him an excellent classical education; he then increased it, he affirms, by gambling. He took to traveling, and on a return voyage from Italy in 1678 was at the age of twenty-two captured by an Algerian pirate, sold as a slave in Algiers and taken to [Constantinople, where the French consul paid ransom for his release. He went on traveling, undaunted. His "Voyage de Flandre et de Hollande, commencé le 26 avril 1681." [Regnault's voyages, and excerpts from them have been reprinted several times.] reporting his trip through the Low Countries, Denmark and Sweden, where he dallied at the courts of Christian V and Charles XI and then north to Lapland, returning through Poland, Hungary and Germany to France, is mined by social historians. The section often published on its own, his "Voyage de Laponie", inspired by the published journey of Maupertuis to the arctic circle (1672), describes the way of life of the Sami of Lapland; it was not published until 1731, when its description of the backwardness and simplicity of the Sami people, their curious pagan customs, alcohol addiction and untidy lifestyle, introduced these strangers to cultured Europe. [Jarkko Saarinen, "Finnish Lapland" also mentions two seventeenth-century works in Latin on Lapland, in Gregory D. Ringer, "Destinations: Cultural Landscapes of Tourism" 1998:156]

After his return to Paris he purchased a sinecure in the Treasury that required no attention, and wrote farces and skits for the Théâtre italien, 1688-96. After inheriting his mother's considerable fortune in 1693, he devoted the time divided between his "hôtel" in Paris and his country house, the château of Grillon, near Dourdan, to writing comedies in verse for the Comédie française, twenty-three in total, the best of them being "Le Joueur" ("The Gamester", 1696), "Le Distrait" (1697), "Les Menechmes" and his masterwork, "Le Légataire universelle" ("The residuary legatee", 1706), following closely in the steps of Molière. [John Gassner, Edward Quinn, "The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama" (2003), "s.v." "Regnard, Jean François".] He was admired by Boileau.

He died at his château of Grillon in 1709.

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* [http://www.bibliomonde.net/auteur/jean-francois-regnard-803.html Bibliomonde: Jean-François Regnard]