Jean-François Regnard

Jean-François Regnard (7 February 1655 – 4 September 1709), "the most distinguished, after Molière, of the comic poets of the seventeenth century",[1] was a dramatist, born in Paris, who is equally famous now for the travel diary he kept of a voyage in 1681.

He took to traveling, and on a return voyage from Italy in 1678 was at the age of twenty-two captured by an Algerian pirate, sold as a slave in Algiers and taken to Constantinople, where the French consul paid ransom for his release.

[2] reporting his trip through the Low Countries, Denmark and Sweden, where he dallied at the courts of Christian V and Charles XI and then north to Lapland, returning through Poland, Hungary and Germany to France, is mined by social historians.

The section often published on its own, his Voyage de Laponie, largely inspired by Johannes Schefferus, describes the way of life of the Sami of Lapland; it was not published until 1731, when its description of the backwardness and simplicity of the Sami people, their curious pagan customs, alcohol addiction and untidy lifestyle, introduced these strangers to cultured Europe.

[3] After his return to Paris he purchased a sinecure in the Treasury that required no attention, and wrote farces and skits for the Théâtre des italiens, 1688–96.