ON 22nd December 1639, Jean Racine was baptized
in the church of Saint-Vaast at La Ferté-Milon, a
small town some fifty miles north-east of Paris.
From the custom of the time, it is probable that
the date was very near his birthday.

He was the first child of young parents who both came
of families long established in the district. His father, Jean
Racine the elder, was a local official in the salt-tax office--
a position which his grandfather (another Jean Racine)
had also held. His mother, née Jeanne Sconin, was
of a line which produced lawyers, small officials, and priests.
On both sides, the ancestry of the future poet bound him
to a provincial clan whose roots went firmly into the local
earth and whose branches were more prolific than ornamen-
tal. His innumerable first and second cousins bore honest,
solid-sounding names--Du Chesne, Passart, Parmentier,
Chéron--and against this background of respectability the
name of his distant connexion La Fontaine stands out as a
rare exception. More typical of the young child's relatives
were the Vitart family. Like the Sconins, they were a
robust provincial stock fertile in lawyers and administra-
tors. They were related to the future poet through his
paternal grandmother, Marie (Desmoulins) Racine. One
of them was to play a not inconsiderable part in his later
life.

When Jean Racine was thirteen months old, his mother
died in giving birth to his sister Marie. Two years later his
father, after a brief second marriage, also died at the early

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