Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan (sometimes mistakenly listed as "marquis de Racan", although he never held this title) (5 February 1589 - 21 January 1670) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 aristocrat, soldier, poet, dramatist and (original) member of the Académie française

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

.

Biography

Racan was born at Aubigné-Racan

Aubigné-Racan

Aubigné-Racan is a commune in the Sarthe department in the region of Pays-de-la-Loire in north-western France.-Sights:The town has a Romanesque church from the 11th century....

 (in the Sarthe

Sarthe

Sarthe is a French department, named after the Sarthe River.- History :The department was created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790, pursuant to the law of December 22, 1789, starting from a part of the province of Maine which was divided into two departments, Sarthe to the east and...

) into an illustrious noble family (originally of Italian origin) from the region of Tours

Tours

Tours is a city in central France, the capital of the Indre-et-Loire department.It is located on the lower reaches of the river Loire, between Orléans and the Atlantic coast. Touraine, the region around Tours, is known for its wines, the alleged perfection of its local spoken French, and for the...

 (site of the Racan fief and the château of La Roche-Racan), Maine and Anjou

Anjou

Anjou is a former county , duchy and province centred on the city of Angers in the lower Loire Valley of western France. It corresponds largely to the present-day département of Maine-et-Loire...

.

An orphan at the age of 13 (both his uncle and father were killed in the wars), Racan came under the protection of the Count de Bellegarde (first gentleman of the king's chamber) and became a page for king Henry IV of France

Henry IV of France

Henry IV , Henri-Quatre, was King of France from 1589 to 1610 and King of Navarre from 1572 to 1610. He was the first monarch of the Bourbon branch of the Capetian dynasty in France....

. His education was minimal, and by his own account he learned only the rudiments of Latin, and was bored by most of his subjects, exception being made to French verse. Racan's successes as a courtier were limited by his physical appearance and his stuttering

Stuttering

Stuttering , also known as stammering , is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases, and involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the stutterer is unable to produce sounds...

 (he reputedly had difficulties with both the letters r and c). In 1605, he met the estimed poet François de Malherbe

François de Malherbe

François de Malherbe was a French poet, critic, and translator.-Life:Born in Le-Locheur , his family was of some position, though it seems not to have been able to establish to the satisfaction of heralds the claims which it made to nobility older than the 16th century.He was the eldest son of...

 at the court, and the elder poet would become for Racan both a father figure and teacher. In 1621 Racan participated in the Wars of Religion

European wars of religion

The European wars of religion were a series of wars waged in Europe from ca. 1524 to 1648, following the onset of the Protestant Reformation in Western and Northern Europe...

 and his military career would continue through the next decades (including the siege of Sancerre

Siege of Sancerre

The Siege of Sancerre was a siege of the fortified hilltop city of Sancerre in central France during the Wars of Religion where the Huguenot population held out for nearly eight months against the Catholic forces of the king.-Background:...

 and the siege of La Rochelle

Siege of La Rochelle

The Siege of La Rochelle was a result of a war between the French royal forces of Louis XIII of France and the Huguenots of La Rochelle in 1627-1628...

).

Around 1619, Racan's pastoral

Pastoral

The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...

 play in verse Les Bergeries (originally entitled Arthénice) - inspired by Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

, Tasso

Tasso

-People:*Torquato Tasso, the famous Italian 16th-century poet, author of Gerusalemme liberata**Tasso, Lament and Triumph, a symphonic poem by Franz Liszt based on the poet*Bernardo Tasso, his father, also a poet...

's Aminta, Giambattista Guarini's Il pastor fido, Honoré d'Urfé

Honoré d'Urfé

Honoré d'Urfé, marquis de Valromey, comte de Châteauneuf was a French novelist and miscellaneous writer.- Life :...

's L'Astrée, and, to a certain extent, the writings of Saint François de Sales

Francis de Sales

Francis de Sales was Bishop of Geneva and is a Roman Catholic saint. He worked to convert Protestants back to Catholicism, and was an accomplished preacher...

 - was performed to great acclaim. Racan had equal success with his Stances de la retraite (1618), his translations of the Psalms

Psalms

The Book of Psalms , commonly referred to simply as Psalms, is a book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible...

 - in an initial version in 1631, and later with his Odes sacrées (tirées des psaumes de David) (1651) and Dernières œuvres et poésies chrétiennes (1660) - and his memoirs on the life of Malherbe (1651). Not knowing Hebrew, Racan relied on accurate French paraphrases of the sacred texts (such as those by Clément Marot

Clément Marot

Clément Marot was a French poet of the Renaissance period.-Youth:Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496-1497. His father, Jean Marot , whose more correct name appears to have been des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman from the Caen...

), but departed from the literal translations in the interest of poetic grace. Racan's acceptance speech for the Académie française Contre les Sciences (1635), was an oration against "rules" and affectation, and in praise of "naturalness" (prefiguring Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...

 by over a hundred years).

Racan's poetry was rigorous (he reworked his poems throughout his life and his works were often published with last minute errata), but he did not completely reject the authors of Renaissance (unlike Malherbe, Racan appreciated Pierre de Ronsard

Pierre de Ronsard

Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet and "prince of poets" .-Early life:...

 and Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne

Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism...

) and was less inflexible on the question of the three unities. His elegies

Elegies

is the Hello! Project 2005 shuffle group consisting of Ai Takahashi and Reina Tanaka of Morning Musume, along with Melon Kinenbi's Ayumi Shibata and Country Musume's Mai Satoda. The name comes from the word elegy. They released the single "" on June 22, 2005....

 and pastoral show a sensitivity to the natural sights of his native region, and his poetry is often informed by a melancholy inspired by his youthful disappointments in love and the financial and personal tragedies of his life.

He died in Paris in 1670.

Sources

• Dandrey, Patrick, ed. Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le XVIIe siècle. Collection: La Pochothèque. Paris: Fayard, 1996.
• Allem, Maurice, ed. Anthologie poétique française: XVIIe siècle. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1966.