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Mathurin Regnier’s Macette: A Semiotic Study in Satire

Macette disturbs its readers unlike any other Regnier satire. Along with the conventionally searing attack on vice and folly launched in formal verse satire by the forces of ridicule and persuasion, this poem plays linguistic tricks on the reader, and with a masterful display of connotative juggling, manages at the same time to praise and blame evil. The reader, Macette's young and silent protegoe, and Regnier's narrator-voyeur all witness the promulgation of a life style of vice disguised as virtue. Confusing Macette with the dramatis personae, the reader is constantly questioning the validity of the main speaker's heretical and doubleedged pronouncements. In fact, the reader is the victim of what might on the surface appear to be a big joke, especially when at the very end of the satire the hidden narrator reveals himself, brutally unmasks the selfproclaimed Mentor, and exposes the villainous hypocrite for what she really is, a used-up old prostitute turned pious for convenience and all the more villainous for corrupting the morals of youth. From the very beginning of the poem, any reader acquainted with Regnier's satires is immediately aware of its uniqueness. Formally idio-