Jacques Bordier, sieur du Raincy

Biography

Jacques Borider, Sieur de Raincy, frequented the salons of Gilles Ménage and Mlle. de Scudéry a decade or so before Julie's birth. He was a foppish poet known by the pseudonym "Agathyrse".

With Julie using the alias "Chevalier de Raincy" in her encounter with baron de Servan, it is somewhat tempting to think that she may have used the name more often than that, and given that the frequenters of salons such as Ménage's Wednesdays and de Scudéry's Saturdays were often known by pseudonyms, it is all the more tempting to think of her using the name in that context.

Nathaniel Cousin writes of him:

Agathyrse is that M. de Raincy, of whose madrigal Menage was memorably and meanly jealous, and to whose merits the Rambouillet ladies seem to have been all alive.

In Thomas Frederick Crane's "La société française au dix-septième siècle: an account of French society in the XVIIth century from contemporary writers", we read:

Agathyrse, Jacques Bordier, sieur du Raincy (generally known as M. de Raincy), died in 1666, He was the younger son of Jacques Bordier, a lawyer of Paris, who rose to be intendant des finances, built the château of Raincy, and bought for his younger son the title of sieur de Raincy. See V. Cousin, La Société Française, IL, p. 181