'In the midst of this family, which reproduced in charming variety the traits of his own sensitive and restless nature, Racine practised all the virtues of a good father. He became a child again with his Babet, Fanchon, Madelon, Nanette, and Lionval; the two eldest alone, boy and girl, did not bear these diminutives, out of respect for the rights of seniority. He preferred the happiness springing from their society to courting the great. 'One day he had returned from Versailles, where he had gone to pay his respects, when a squire of the Duke's brought him an invitation to dinner for the same evening. "I shall not have the honour of dining with him," he said; "I have not seen my wife and children for more than a week, and they are looking forward to a treat in eating a very fine carp with me to-day; I cannot give up my dinner with them." And he had the carp brought up, adding: "Decide yourself if I can help dining to-day with these poor children, who have made up their minds to regale me to-day, and would have no more pleasure if they ate this dish without me. I beg you to plead this reason forcibly with his Serene Highness."' Racine, as we know, after giving up writing for the theatre, subsided into the most remarkable piety. But here again is a charming trait: 'I remember,' says Louis Racine, 'processions in which my sisters were the clergy, I was the rector, and the author of _Athalie_, singing with us, carried the cross.' And the inseparable figure of the excellent Boileau, who had then become as deaf as a post, appears close by: 'Monsieur Despréaux,'[15] writes Racine to his son Jean Baptiste, 'entertained us in the best of fashions; then he took Lionval and Madelon to the Bois de Boulogne, joking with them, and telling them that he meant to lose them. He did not hear a word of what the poor children said to him.' But before becoming this model paterfamilias, this pattern of piety and virtue, Racine had spent an eminently brilliant and passionate youth. Everybody knows that Du Parc and Champmeslé[16] were not content with merely playing in his pieces. The amours of Racine and Mademoiselle Du Parc had a terrible development in 1679, which was one of the reasons, if not the principal and the determining reason, of the resolution then taken by the poet to abandon the career of dramatic author. M. Larroumet recalls this page in his life in the following terms:--