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Rh member of the French Academy, procureur général of the high court, and a count of the Empire. He was dismissed on the first restoration of the Bourbons, but resumed his posts during the Hundred Days, and after Waterloo persuaded the emperor to abdicate. He was exiled by the government of the second Restoration, but subsequently obtained leave to return to France. He died on the day of his return to Paris (11th of March 1819). Les Souvenirs du Comte Regnault de St Jean d'Angély (Paris, 1817) are spurious. His son, (1794–1870), an army officer, was dismissed from the army by the Restoration government, fought for the Greeks in the Greek War of Independence, and rejoined the French army in 1830. In 1848 he was elected deputy and sat on the right. Under the Second Empire he went through the Crimean and Italian campaigns, and was made senator and marshal for bravery at the battle of Magenta.

RÉGNIER, HENRI FRANÇOIS JOSEPH DE (1864–), French poet, was born at Honfieur (Calvados) on the 28th of December 1864, and was educated in Paris for the law. In 1885 he began to contribute to the Parisian reviews, and his verses found their way into most of the French and Belgian periodicals favourable to the symbolist writers. Having begun, however, to write under the leadership of the Parnassians, he retained the classical tradition, though he adopted some of the innovations of Moréas and Gustave Kahn. His gorgeous and vaguely suggestive style shows the influence of Stéphane Mallarmé, of whom he was an assiduous disciple. His first volume of poems, Lendemains, appeared in 1885, and among numerous later volumes are Poèmes anciens et romanesques (1890), Les Jeux rustiques et divins (1890), Les Médailles d’argent (1900), La Cité des eaux (1903). He is also the author of a series of realistic novels and tales, among which are La Canne de jaspe (end ed., 1897), La Double Maitresse (5th ed., 1900), Les Vacances d’un jeune homme sage (1904), and Les Amants singuliers (1905). M. de Régnier married Mlle. Marie de Hérédia, daughter of the poet, and herself a novelist and poet under the name of Gérard d’Houville.

REGNIER, MATHURIN (1573–1613), French satirist, was born at Chartres on the 21st of December 1573. His father, Jacques Régnier, was a bourgeois of good means and position; his mother, Simone Desportes, was the sister of the poet Desportes. Desportes, who was richly beneficed and in great favour at court, seems to have been regarded as Mathurin Régnier's natural protector and patron; and the boy himself, with a view to his following in his uncle’s steps, was tonsured at eight years old. Little is known of his youth, and it is chiefly conjecture which fixes the date of his visit to Italy in a humble position in the suite of the cardinal, Francois de Joyeuse, in 1587. The cardinal was accredited to the papal court in that year as “protector” of the royal interests. Régnier found his duties irksome, and when, after many years of constant travel in the cardinal's service, he returned definitely to France about 1605, he took advantage of the hospitality of Desportes. He early began the practice of satirical writing, and the enmity which existed between his uncle and the poet Malherbe gave him occasion to attack the latter. In 1606 Desportes died, leaving nothing to Régnier, who, though disappointed of the succession to Desportes’s abbacies, obtained a pension of 2000 livres, chargeable upon one of them. He was also made in 1609 canon of Chartres through his friendship with the lax bishop, Philippe Hurault, at whose abbey of Royaumont he spent much time in the later years of his life. But the death of Henry IV. deprived him of his last hope of great preferments. His later life had been one of dissipation, and he died at Rouen at his hotel, the Ecu d'Orléans, on the 22nd of October 1613.

About the time of his death numerous collections of licentious and satirical poems were published, while others remained in manuscript. Gathered from these there has been a floating mass of licentious epigrams, &c., attributed to Régnier, little of which is certainly authentic, so that it is very rare to find two editions of Régnier which exactly agree in contents. His undoubted work falls into three classes: regular satires in alexandrine couplets, serious poems in various metres, and satirical or jocular epigrams and light pieces, which often, if not always, exhibit considerable licence of language. The real greatness of Régnier consists in the vigour and polish of his satires, contrasted and heightened as that vigour is with the exquisite feeling and melancholy music of some of his minor poems. In these Régnier is a disciple of Ronsard (whom he defended brilliantly against Malherbe), without the occasional pedantry, the affectation or the undue fluency of the Pléiade; but in the satires he seems to have had no master except the ancients, for some of them were written before the publication of the satires of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, and the T ragiques of D'Aubigné did not appear until 1616. He has sometimes followed Horace closely, but always in an entirely original spirit. His vocabulary is varied and picturesque, and is not marred by the maladroit classicism of some of the Ronsardists. His verse is extraordinarily forcible and nervous, but his chief distinction as a satirist is the way in which he avoids the commonplaces of satire. His keen and accurate knowledge of human nature and even his purely literary qualities extorted the admiration of Boileau. Régnier displayed remarkable independence and acuteness in literary criticism, and the famous passage (Satire ix., À Monsieur Rapin) in which he satirizes Malherbe contains the best denunciation of the merely “ correct ” theory of poetry that has ever been written. Lastly, Régnier had a most unusual descriptive faculty, and the vividness of what he called his narrative satires was not approached in France for at least two centuries after his death. All his merits are displayed in the masterpiece entitled Macette ou l’Hypocrisie déconcertée, which does not suffer even on comparison with Tartuffe; but hardly any one of the sixteen satires which he has left falls below a very high standard.

REGNITZ, a river of Germany, and a left-bank tributary of the Main, the most important river of the province of Lower Bavaria. It is formed by the confluence, near Fürth, of the Rednitz and Pegnitz. The united river flows north through an undulating vine-clad country, past Erlangen, Baiersdorf and Forchheim, from which point it is navigable, and falls into the Main at Bischberg, just below Bamberg, after a course of 126 m. Near Bamberg it is joined by the Ludwigskanal, which, running parallel to it from Fürth and separated by the railway, forms the water-connexion between the Main and the Danube. Its main tributaries from the right are the Gründlach and the Wiesent, and from the left the Zenn, the Aurach and the Aisch.

 REGRATING (O.Fr. regrater, to sell by retail), in English criminal law, was the offence of buying and selling again in the same market, or within four miles thereof. (See .)

 REGULA, the Latin word for a rule, hence particularly applied to the rules of a religious order (see ). In architecture the term is applied to a rule or square, the short fillet or rectangular block, under the taenia (q.v.) on the architrave of the Doric entablature.