264 - RACINE (Louis) 1692–1763, son of Jean Racine.

RACINE (Louis) 1692–1763, son of Jean Racine. Letter from “Racine,” sl [Paris], March 3, 1751, 3 pp. ½ in-4, address and wax seal bearing a coat of arms, to Gerhard Nicolaas HEERKENS (1726–1801), a Dutch physician, scholar, and Neo-Latin poet. A very interesting letter containing literary news addressed to his friend Heerkens, combining reflections on the decline of scholarship, a scathing critique of the elderly Fontenelle, and almost immediate accounts of the dispute between Voltaire and the financier Hirschel in Prussia. Having met Racine during Heerkens’s stay in Paris between 1748 and 1750, the young Dutch physician maintained a regular correspondence with him, devoted primarily to literature and intellectual exchanges between France and the Netherlands. Racine begins by lamenting the decline of classical studies and the proliferation of writings: “Scholarship is in sharp decline among us, and in a few years, a man in Paris who understands Latin well will be as rare as a man who understands Greek is today. Our ignorance does not prevent us from writing. Scribimus indocti. All we see are pamphlets on all sorts of subjects.” He then directs a particularly cruel barb at the very elderly Fontenelle, then ninety-four years old, who had just published two volumes of his prose comedies, supposedly written thirty-five years earlier: “I rather believe he composed them at the age of 93. It is certain that they appear to have been written by a man in childhood or in a delirium. Nothing is so pitiful.” Finally, Racine reports on the Parisian reactions to Voltaire’s sensational trial against the Jewish financier Abraham Hirschel, which had just concluded in Berlin: “It is said that Voltaire is involved in a major lawsuit in Prussia against a Jew over banknotes that the Jew claims are counterfeit. It is added that the King of Prussia said: ‘If Voltaire loses his case, I will expel him; if he wins it, I will ask him to leave’ [...]"" The affair, which arose in late 1750 from speculation on Saxon banknotes, had severely strained Voltaire’s relations with Frederick II; and indeed, on February 28, 1751—just a few days before this letter—the king had sent him a stern rebuke on the matter. The letter ends on a more personal note: Racine complains about his son’s lack of interest in his studies (““it is not intelligence that he lacks, but a love of work””) and reflects ironically on the spirit of the times: ““Perhaps he sees that science is no longer in fashion, and wants to follow the trend [...]""