Regnier, MATHURIN, a great French satirist, was born at Chartres, 21st December 1573. His father was a well-to-do citizen; his maternal uncle was the Abbé Desportes the poet. The boy was tonsured at nine, but grew up dissipated and idle. In early youth he seems to have visited Italy in the suite of the Cardinal de Joyeuse, and is supposed later to have transferred his services to Philippe de Bethune, who went as ambassador to Rome in 1601. He obtained a canonry at Chartres, and enjoyed the favour of Henry IV. and his court. But his follies sapped his health, and he died an untimely death, 13th October 1613. His first collection of satires had appeared in 1608. Regnier's whole work together scarce exceeds 7000 lines—sixteen satires, three epistles, five elegies, and some odes, songs, epigrams, and miscellaneous pieces—yet it is enough to place him high in the order of merit among the poets of France. He is greatest in his satires, written in the usual Alexandrine couplet, and admirably polished, yet vigorous and original. They touch social and moral questions only, and consequently are not of merely ephemeral interest, as political satires most often are; and, what is rare in French satire, they mostly escape the fault of handling abstract types instead of actual concrete embodiments of the type. Breadth, force, and reality characterise them all, but these merits together reach their highest point in the thirteenth, Mucette, a satire on a hypocritical old woman who corrupts the hearts of the young around her by her cynical views of life. Regnier imitated indeed the satire of Juvenal and Horace, yet he did not copy it, and he threw his own heart into the form he borrowed. He was the last of the great poets of the 16th century: after him was to follow a period of barrenness, alike from the poverty of nature and the sterilising influences of the traditions of Malherbe and his school. It was against the attacks of Malherbe that Regnier championed Ronsard, and later he himself was defended by Boileau.
Editions are by Brossette (1729), Lenglet Dufresnoy (1733), Prosper Poitevin (1860), M. de Barthélemy (1862), and E. Courbet (1875). See Cherrier's Bibliographie de Regnier (1889).