Regnard, JEAN FRANÇOIS, French comic dramatist, was born at Paris in 1655. A rich shop-keeper's son, he found himself at twenty master of a considerable fortune, and at once set out on his travels. In Italy he gave himself up to gambling, but, strange to say, increased rather than diminished his means. In his autobiographical romance, La Provençale, we read, but somewhat dubiously, of the passion of himself as Zelmis for a young Provençal wife (Elvire), his voyaging back to France with her and her husband, their capture and sale as slaves by Algerian pirates, how he made himself pleasing to his master by skill in cookery, was carried by him to Constantinople, and, at the end of his two years' captivity and many strange adventures, was ransomed, together with the lady, for 12,000 crowns. Her he was next about to marry when the husband reappeared, and sent the lover off again on aimless wanderings through Holland, Denmark, and Sweden, to Lapland, and back by Poland, Turkey, Hungary, and Germany. From his return to Paris (1683) he gave himself to letters, and found his true vocation in the success of Le Divorce at the Théâtre Italien in 1688. Eight years later his fine comedy, Le Joueur, achieved success at the Théâtre Français. Its successors were Le Distrait (1697), Le Retour Imprévu (1700), Les Folies Amoureuses (1704), Les Ménchmes (1705), and his masterpiece, Le Légataire Universel (1708). He died before his time, and so suddenly as to originate various contradictory reports, 4th September 1709. Regnard was an indifferent poet, but he was a master of dramatic situation and of comic dialogue, if not of verisimilitude or reality. To this day the reader endorses Boileau's judgment, expressed once when some one charged Regnard with mediocrity—'Il n'est pas médiocrement gai.' 'Qui ne se plaît point à Regnard,' said Voltaire, 'n'est pas digne d'admirer Molière.'
There are editions by Didot (1820), Michiels (1854), and Fournier (1875). See the study by Mahrenholtz (Oppeln, 1887), and Bibliographie by Marchéville (1877).