Incensed at a literary and artistic cabal, by which a rival play of _Phèdre_, by Pradon, was momentarily preferred to his own, Racine now withdrew from the stage. Appointed soon after to the not very onerous post of historiographer to the King, he lived for a period of twelve years a retired life in the bosom of his family.
In 1689, at the request of Mme. de Maintenon, the secret wife of Louis XIV., he produced _Esther_, and in 1691, _Athalie_, both drawn from the Scriptures and intended for private performance only. Embittered by the indifference with which the latter tragedy was received,--although posterity has pronounced it his masterpiece,--Racine definitely gave up the drama. He died in 1699, after a few years devoted to his _Histoire du Règne de Louis XIV._, his death being hastened by grief at having incurred the King's displeasure on account of a memoir on the misery of the people, which he wrote at the request of Mme. de Maintenon.
A devoted husband and father, an adroit but sincere courtier, Racine has won the regard of posterity by his life as well as its admiration by his literary genius. As a poet, he was endowed with the purest gift of expression ever granted to a mind imbued with the works of the classical writers of Greece and Rome.
French tragedy is purely a work of art. It does not claim to mirror Nature in her infinite complexity; it is the professedly artificial presentment, in the noblest form, of _character_ unfolding itself by means of one action, as far as possible in one place, and within the limits of one day. It is bound by other formal and conventional rules: of versification--such as the alternation of masculine and feminine pairs of rhymes, and of taste--such as the avoidance of all "doing of deeds" on the stage (e.g., all fighting and dying take place behind the scenes) and the grouping of the fewest possible secondary parts around the one central situation.
There are but three names in the front rank of writers of French tragedy: Corneille (1606-1684), Racine (1639-1699), and Voltaire (1694-1778). Their tragic masterpieces cover but one century of time, from Corneille's _Le Cid_ (1636) to Voltaire's _Mérope_ (1743). Before these poets, French tragedy had not reached such a degree of perfection as to be entitled to an identity of its own; after them and their few feeble imitators, it was merged into a new form, and, as classical French tragedy, ceased altogether to be.