After Racine shut his eyes, as complaisantly as the husband, to the splendid infidelities of La Champmeslé--when temptation was powerless, and religion took the place of passionate love--he moralised on the sins of his former mistress. ‘The poor wretch,’ he wrote contemptuously to his son, ‘in her last moments, refused to renounce the stage.’ Without such renunciation the Church barred her way to heaven! Racine, however, was misinformed. La Champmeslé died (1698) like so many of her gayest fellows, ‘_dans les plus grands sentiments de piété_.’ Her widowed husband, when the rascal quality died out of him, kept to drink, and he turned now and then to devotion. One morning, in the year 1708, he went to the church of the Cordeliers, and ordered two masses for the repose of the souls of his mother and of his wife; and he put thirty sous into the hand of the _sacristain_ to pay for them. The man offered him ten sous as change. But M. Champmeslé put the money back: ‘Keep it,’ he said, ‘for a third mass for myself. I will come and hear it.’ Meanwhile he went and sat at the door of a tavern (_L’Alliance_) waiting for church time. He chatted gaily with his comrades, promised to join them at dinner, and as he rose to his feet he put his hand to his head, uttered a faint shriek, and fell dead to the ground. As Racine formed La Champmeslé, so did the latter form her niece as her successor on the stage--Mdlle. Duclos, who reigned supreme; but she was a less potential queen of the drama than her mistress. Her vehemence of movement once caused her to make an ignoble fall as she was playing Camille in ‘Les Horaces.’ Her equally vehement spirit once carried her out of her part altogether. At the first representation of La Motte’s ‘Inés de Castro’ the sudden appearance of the children caused the pit to laugh and to utter some feeble jokes. Mdlle. Duclos, who was acting Inés, was indignant. ‘Brainless pit!’ she exclaimed, ‘you laugh at the finest incident in the piece!’ French audiences are not tolerant of impertinence on the stage; but they took this in good part, and listened with interest to the remainder of the play.