Several of his daughters became nuns.

He feared above everything to see his eldest son devote himself to poetry, dreading for him the dangers he considered he himself had run.

"As for your epigram, I wish you had not written it," he wrote to him; "independently of its being commonplace, I cannot too earnestly recommend you not to let yourself give way to the temptation of writing French verses which would serve no purpose but to distract your mind; above all, you should not write against anybody." This son, the object of so much care, to whom his father wrote such modest, grave, paternal, and sagacious letters, never wrote verses, lived in retirement, and died young without ever having married.

Little Louis, or Lionval, Racine's last child, was the only one who ever dreamt of being a writer.
"You must be very bold," said Boileau to him, "to dare write verses with the name you bear! It is not that I consider it impossible for you to become capable some day of writing good ones, but I mistrust what is without precedent, and never, since the world was world, has there been seen a great poet son of a great poet." Louis Racine never was a great poet, in spite of the fine verses which are to be met with in his poems _la Religion_ and _la Grace_.

His _Memoires_ of his father, written for his son, describe Racine in all the simple charm of his domestic life.
"He would leave all to come and see us," writes Louis Racine; "an equerry of the duke's came one day to say that he was expected to dinner at Conde's house.