Finally, on April 22, the marchioness writes that all is at an end between her son and Mlle. de Champmeslé, and that she has been instrumental in preventing the young man from playing a singularly mean trick upon his former enchantress: "He has left his actress at last, after having followed her everywhere. When he saw her, he was in earnest; a moment later, he would make the greatest game of her. Ninon has completely discarded him; he was miserable while she loved him, and now that she loves him no longer, he is in absolute despair. She wished him, the other day, to give her the letters he had received from his actress, which he did. You must know that she was jealous of that princess, and wanted to show them to a lover of hers, in the hope of procuring her a few blows with a belt. He came and told me, when I pointed out to him how shameful it was to treat this little creature so badly, merely for having loved him; that she had not shown people his letters, as some would have him believe, but, on the contrary, had returned them to him again; that such treacherous conduct was unworthy of a man of quality, and that there was a degree of honour to be observed, even in things dishonourable in themselves. He acquiesced in the justice of my remarks, hurried at once to Ninon's house, and, partly by strategy and partly by force, got the poor devil's letters out of her hands. I made him burn them. You see by this what a regard I have for the reputation of an actress."
According to M. Gueullette (_Acteurs et Actrices du temps passé_), Racine, though deeply in love with Mlle. de Champmeslé, supported patiently the numerous infidelities of the lady, "so long as he believed them to be passing fancies and that he was still beloved." But when the actress embarked upon a more serious love-affair with the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, and a wit wrote--
"À la plus tendre amour elle fut destinée Qui prit longtemps Racine dans son coeur: Mais, par un insigne malheur, Le _Tonnerre_ est venu, qui l'a _déracinée_"--
he was so bitterly mortified that he left her never to return.
The brothers Parfaict and d'Allainval assert that disgust at his treatment at the hands of Mlle. de Champmeslé was the immediate cause of Racine's retirement from dramatic authorship, at the age of thirty-eight, at the height of his talent, in the heyday of his success; for after _Phèdre_ he wrote but two more plays, _Esther_ and _Athalie_, which were performed by the young girls of Saint-Cyr, and were not seen upon the Paris stage until many years after his death. This, however, is very unlikely, and it is quite possible, as M. Larroumet suggests, that Racine, instead of abandoning the theatre, because Mlle. de Champmeslé had discarded him, discarded the actress, because he had abandoned the theatre. The poet's retirement indeed seems to have been attributable to several different motives: disgust at the shameful cabal against _Phèdre_ and the various annoyances to which it gave rise; the fear that a repetition of such tactics might jeopardise his position as the greatest tragic dramatist of his time; weariness of a dissipated life, and, above all, the awakening, after a sleep of many years, of the religious sentiments with which his old teachers of Port-Royal had inspired him in youth. Indignation at Mlle. Champmeslé's conduct may, of course, have had something to do with the positive antipathy to the theatre which he manifested in his last years;[54] but to assert that it was the cause of his renunciation of a profession which had brought him fame and fortune is to credit him with a capacity for sincere affection which he certainly never possessed.