Some men do great things incidentally and unintentionally. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais bothered his clever head scarcely at all with schemes for the well-being of his country—was little concerned with humanity and very much with one man—himself. Yet by a special irony of destiny the author of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ played one of the chief parts in the prelude to the drama of the Revolution.

Born in Paris on January 24, 1732, the son of a watchmaker with a large family, Pierre Augustin Caron early learnt his father’s trade, picked up a little Latin at a technical school at Alfort and the rest of his education from experience and from the world.

A lively, impudent, good-looking boy, young Caron was from the first clever with that smart cleverness which is as distinct from genius or from wisdom, as kindness is distinct from sympathy

He was as sharp over his watchmaking as over everything he undertook in life. He had his first lawsuit—the first of so many!—over a discovery he made in his trade, and won it. But he was young, gay, musical, and Parisian. His trade was only a part of his life. There were debts and escapades. Then the watches took to disappearing mysteriously out of old Caron’s shop; and finally old Caron turned his scapegrace out of doors, till the mother pleaded, not in vain, for the prodigal’s return.

Then the prodigal made the loveliest and smallest of watches for Madame de Pompadour’s ring. The King was pleased to desire one also, and the King’s daughters, Mesdames, followed their father’s example; while the courtiers could not, of course, be out of the fashion. Pierre Caron, tall, handsome, audacious, was presented at Versailles, and made watchmaker to his Majesty. In 1755, another piece of luck befell him. (This Caron was one of the luckiest of human beings all through his life.)

A pretty young married woman, who had noticed him admiringly at Versailles, came to his shop to have her watch mended. Caron took it back to her house in person. A few months later the charming person’s elderly husband sold to Caron his post at Court, and on November 9, 1755, a patent was accorded to the watchmaker’s son declaring him ‘one of the Clerk Controllers of the Pantry of our Household.’ An agreeable little post, this of Pharaoh’s butler. Nothing to do, only be sure you do it handsomely! Caron, looking exceedingly effective and magnificent, preceded the King’s roast with a sword clanking at his side. At the end of a few months his predecessor in this arduous occupation died, and young Caron married the charming widow, Madame Francquet, who was certainly older than himself, but not the less agreeable to a very young man for that.

His marriage could not, at least, have been one of interest; or he was so far disinterested that he neglected to complete the marriage settlements, and when Madame Caron died, in ten months’ time, Caron found himself penniless. She had, it is said, a very small property, but it was apparently so small as to be invisible, for no one has ever discovered its whereabouts. But it is memorable as having suggested to Caron the name by which he now called himself, and has been ever since known—Beaumarchais.

In a very short time the young widower (he was only twenty-five) reappeared at Versailles, not as a watchmaker or butler, but as a musician.

All the social talents had Caron—tact, impudence, a witty tongue, a delightful voice, added to a real talent for the harp, which was the fashionable instrument of the moment. Mesdames killed a great deal of the too ample royal leisure with music; Madame Adelaide played every instrument down to the horn and the comb. This delightful young parvenu is the very man to teach us the harp! He not only did that, but he organised concerts, of which he was himself the bright, particular star.

On one occasion the King was so impatient for him to begin to play, that he pushed towards him his own armchair; while on another, Mesdames declined the present of a fan on which the painter had portrayed their concerts—without the figure of Beaumarchais. Of course the courtiers were jealous. The beautiful insolence of his manners, the perfectly good-natured conceit (surely one of the most exasperating of the minor vices) naturally made him enemies. One scornful young noble handed this new favourite, this royal instructor, his watch to look at.

‘Sir,’ says Beaumarchais, ‘since I have given up my trade I have become very awkward in such matters.’

‘Do not refuse me, I beg.’

Beaumarchais takes the watch, pretends to examine it, and drops it. ‘Sir,’ says he, with a bow to the owner, ‘I warned you of my clumsiness,’ and, turning on his heel, leaves the watch in fragments on the floor.

The new courtier was at least a match for the old ones. ‘I was born to be a courtier,’ says Figaro. ‘To accept, to take, and to ask; there is the secret in three words.’ Figaro’s father had the secret already. Soon he made friends with Paris-Duverney, financier and Court banker, ‘asked’ of him the art of making money, and ‘received’ so much of it that in 1761 he could buy himself a brevet of nobility. He would have bought also the post of Master of Woods and Forests, but that the other Masters objected so lustily to receiving such a bourgeois into their order, that even the patronage of Mesdames, and his own wit displayed in an amusing pamphlet, could not gain the bourgeois his point. So he bought the post of Lieutenant-General of the King’s Preserves instead, and in that capacity sat solemnly in a long robe once a week in judgment on the poachers of the neighbourhood of Paris.

In 1764, he made a journey into Spain, where one of his sisters, who had married a Spaniard, was living, and another had just been jilted with a peculiar insolence and brutality by a man called Clavijo. Beaumarchais brought Clavijo to book; the day of the wedding was fixed, when the shifty suitor absconded a second time. Beaumarchais made the episode famous in his account of the affair, which appeared in his Fourth Memoir against Goezman in February 1774, and which naturally does not tend to the discredit of M. Pierre Augustin Caron.

Besides protecting his sister and exposing her betrayer, this energetic person was carrying out a secret mission from Duverney and recovering bad debts of old Caron’s. Then, too, he was enormously enjoying Spanish society, and writing love-letters to a pretty creole, Pauline, whom he had left in Paris and whom he may magnificently condescend to marry if her estates in St. Domingo really turn out to be worth consideration. He was further corresponding with Voltaire, and, richest and most fruitful of all his Spanish transactions, studying the Spanish stage.

He came home in 1765. After his return, he appeared, in 1767, as a playwright, making his dÉbut in one of those heavy and tearful dramas in the unfortunate style of Diderot’s ‘Natural Son.’ No one reads or acts ‘EugÉnie’ now; but when the adaptable Caron had shortened and altered it, it mildly pleased the playgoing Parisians for a few evenings.

In 1768, Beaumarchais married another widow, Madame LÉvÊque, having abandoned Pauline, or having been abandoned by her on the score of his mercenariness. Madame LÉvÊque was rich and young, and when she suddenly died three years later there were not wanting envious enemies to accuse this aspiring Caron of having poisoned both his wives. The fact that their deaths left him the poorer might have exonerated him, if his own character did not; but, as Voltaire said—Voltaire, who was watching his rise in the world with a keen interest, and who rarely made a mistake in judging human nature—‘A quick, impetuous, passionate man like Beaumarchais gives a wife a blow, or even two wives two blows, but he does not poison them.’

It may be noted, moreover, that all the women who touched his life adored this Caron. He was so handsome and good-natured and successful! A little selfish certainly; but some women seem to love that quality in a man—it gives them so great a scope for denying themselves. And then he was always so brave and gay!

His success now deserted him for a little while. He offended the King by suggesting a mot with a meaning—Figaro, it seems, was getting apt in them already—which a duke gave forth at one of the little suppers of Madame Dubarry and which displeased his Majesty, who, to be sure, had reason to dread hidden meanings.

Then came the affair Goezman.

In 1770 Duverney died, and Beaumarchais immediately quarrelled with his heir, the Comte de la Blache, and plunged into a lawsuit over a sum of fifteen thousand francs. Beaumarchais won the first move in the game. But unluckily he had more than one iron in the fire just then. He fell out fiercely with the Duc de Chaulnes over a Mademoiselle Mesnard, with the result that the Duke was clapped into a fortress, and Beaumarchais into the prison of For-l’ÉvÊque. La Blache seized his opportunity, brought his lawsuit before the Parliament of Paris, represented dumb and imprisoned Beaumarchais as the greatest scoundrel unhanged, won his cause, seized Beaumarchais’ furniture, and entirely ruined him.

Beaumarchais seldom lost his coolness and courage, and he did not lose them now. While in For-l’ÉvÊque he had been let out on leave three or four times. He had taken these chances to try to win over to his side Goezman, who was Judge-Reporter in the lawsuit with la Blache, and a most unfavourable judge to Beaumarchais. By the simple and time-honoured expedient of handsome bribes to the wife, Beaumarchais attempted to gain the husband’s good will. Madame Goezman perfectly understands that, should Beaumarchais lose his cause, she is to return his gifts of a watch set in diamonds, and of money. The cause is lost. She returns the watch and money, save only a certain fifteen louis, to which, for some absurd raisonnement de femme, she considers herself entitled, and with which she will by no means part. Then Councillor Goezman comes forward and accuses M. de Beaumarchais of seeking to corrupt his integrity.

This ridiculous situation Beaumarchais seized as a golden opportunity to restore his credit before the world, to dazzle it with his wit, to entice it with his audacity, and to make it own him the man of matchless cleverness he was. He appealed to public opinion, nominally to judge between himself and Goezman, in reality to judge between him, Goezman, la Blache, the Paris Parliament, and all his enemies and rivals whomsoever, in four famous Memoirs, which divided Paris into two hostile camps and fixed on him the delighted attention of Europe.

Except by name, and for a brilliant quotation here and there, few people know the Goezman Memoirs now. But in fire, wit, and irony, they are little, if at all, inferior to the comedies by which Beaumarchais lives. In both are the same gay surprises of situation, banter and mockery, parry and thrust—every page as light and elusive as thistledown borne on a summer breeze. Their cleverness gained him the admiration not only of a senile King, but of Voltaire as well. Old Ferney declared he had never been so much amused in his life. ‘What a man!’ he wrote to d’Alembert. ‘He has all the qualities;’ and again, ‘Don’t tell me he has poisoned his wife, he is much too lively and amusing for that.’

Madame Dubarry had charades acted in her apartment, in which an interview between Beaumarchais and Madame Goezman was represented on the stage. The Memoirs were read aloud in the cafÉs. Of the Fourth, six thousand copies were sold in a single day. Horace Walpole delighted in them. Madame du Deffand gossiped of them. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre prophesied for Beaumarchais the reputation of MoliÈre.

What did it avail then, on February 26, 1774, when the case had lasted some three years, to give judgment against him, sentence him to civic degradation, prohibit him from the occupation of any public function, and condemn the Memoirs to be burnt as scandalous, libellous, defamatory? He was the victor not the less. ‘Le monde a beau parler, il faut obÉir,’ says Voltaire. The day after the sentence had been pronounced, the Prince de Conti and the Duc de Chartres fÊted the criminal, and a delightful woman fell in love with him. Marie Antoinette named her latest coiffure after a joke in the Memoirs. He was so wildly applauded when he appeared in public that Sartine, the Lieutenant of Police, advised him to appear no more. ‘It is not enough to be condemned,’ says Sartine, ‘one should be a little modest still.’ The Maupeou Parliament in attempting to destroy this wit had ruined itself. Its ban was worse than useless. Beaumarchais was the fashion.

The King, to be sure, had to enjoin silence on this ‘terrible advocate,’ but he promised him a revision of his suit; and then employed him, in March, 1774, as his secret agent in England to run to earth a person who had threatened to publish a scandalous pamphlet on Madame Dubarry. Beaumarchais succeeded in his mission. He always succeeded. But when he returned to France, Louis the Fifteenth was dying, so for all his pains his reward was, as he said, ‘swollen legs and an empty purse.’

Soon, however, news came of a libel against Marie Antoinette which was being prepared in London. Off starts Beaumarchais again, pursues the libeller (a shifty Jew) to NÜremberg, goes on to Vienna to procure from Maria Theresa an extradition treaty against him, is himself thrown into prison for a month, and then liberated with profusest apologies and the offer of a thousand ducats. All his adventures were delightfully romantic and picturesque; and with his eye for scenic effect, he took care they should lose nothing in the telling.

A year later, in 1775, he came to England on another and far more important secret mission connected with the rebellion of the American colonies. It was the one enterprise of his life, it is said, into which he put more heart than head. He attended parliamentary debates, and was constantly at the house of Wilkes. ‘All sensible people in England,’ he wrote to Louis the Sixteenth in September 1775, ‘are convinced that the English colonies are lost.’ He advised that, while France should not openly embroil herself with England, she should send secret aid to the insurgents. For this purpose, financed by his country, he equipped for war three ships—his ‘navy’ he called it—and when he returned to Paris he traded in the American interest under the name of Roderigue, Hortalez & Co.

England was naturally angry when she found out how she had been tricked, and America, so far as money acknowledgments were concerned, was not a little ungrateful. But the clever instrument, Beaumarchais, came out of the affair with his usual flourish and distinction, and would have deserved a paragraph in history, even had he not earned a page in literature.

On February 23, 1775, there was produced at the old ComÉdie FranÇaise in the Rue des FossÉs, Saint-Germain des PrÉs, opposite the famous CafÉ Procope, a play called ‘The Barber of Seville.’

Accepted by the ComÉdie FranÇaise in 1772, its first performance, fixed for Shrove Tuesday 1773, had been stopped by the authorities because just at that moment its author was unluckily serving a term of imprisonment for fighting the Duc de Chaulnes. Before the next date fixed for its dÉbut, he had been condemned by the Maupeou Parliament for the affair with la Blache. The third attempt was no luckier. The irrepressible creature had just published the Fourth Goezman Memoir!

And now, when the performance really did come off, it was a failure. La Harpe declared that its inordinate length bored people, its bad jokes irritated them, and its false morality shocked them. The parterre was loudly and vulgarly disgusted, and the boxes yawned behind their fans. By Beaumarchais? He was but mediocre before, we remember, in ‘EugÉnie.’ Watchmaker, courtier, advocate, secret agent, this—but clearly no playwright!

In twenty-four hours Caron had laid violent hands on his ‘Barber,’ shortened him, enlivened him, cut out his distasteful jokes and his dubious moralities, and ‘under the pressure of a discontented and disappointed public’ turned him into a masterpiece. At its second performance the play was applauded to the skies. It ran through the whole winter season. It delighted its author to print it with its title-page running: ‘The Barber of Seville, Comedy in Four Acts, represented and failed at the ComÉdie FranÇaise.’ It drew on him one of his dear lawsuits, and enabled him to place the rights of dramatists over their works on a new and firm basis, and to found the first Society of Dramatic Authors. Far above all, it led the way to ‘Figaro.’

The subject of ‘The Barber of Seville’ is the time-honoured one of the amorous old guardian who falls in love with his ward; only Beaumarchais’ guardian is a wit, not a fool. It is the defect, indeed, of both his great plays that all the characters are wits. He fell into Sheridan’s fault, and made his personÆ the mouthpieces of his own cleverness. He wholly lacked the far higher and finer genius, the exquisite fidelity to life and character, which made Shakespeare give to each of his creatures the special kind of cleverness, and no other, proper to its nature.

Not the less, Beaumarchais writes with a lightness and effervescence which are without counterpart in dramatic literature. ‘The Barber of Seville’ was taken, it is said, from an opera of Sedaine’s, and was itself originally designed to be a comic opera. Nothing but a quarrel with the composer of the score prevented it from first appearing in that form in which it is to-day most familiar to the world.

Yet it hardly needs an accompaniment of lively music. The airs and the singing are there already—in the gay bizarrerie of situation, the laughing swing of repartee, and the brilliant recitative of the longer speeches. The characters, called by Spanish names and dressed in Spanish clothes, are thoroughly and essentially French. Its exquisite delicacy of touch and its rippling mocking gaiety declare it, in fact, not only the work of a Frenchman, but one of the most Gallic pieces that have ever held the stage. It inaugurated a new order of comedy, and introduced into it a new character: the Barber, who was also wit, hero, and moralist—the character of Figaro.

Beaumarchais was not at all the man to sit down and tranquilly enjoy his first dramatic triumph. He must not only follow it up by writing another, but he must with enormous difficulty, at the risk of much money, and three years’ hard work, become the editor of the first complete edition of Voltaire’s works ever given to the public.

Then, too, he must prepare the reorganisation of the ferme gÉnÉrale with the Minister, Vergennes. Actresses consulted him when they were out of an engagement, and dramatic authors when their liberties were endangered. The author of the Goezman Memoirs can surely help a poor simpleton engulfed in a lawsuit, and the friend of Duverney, the rich man who began the world in a tradesman’s shop, may well assist a ruined speculator! Inventors, impatient to air their discoveries, carried them to him who had brought his first legal action over a discovery of his own. Girls deceived by their lovers begged the assistance of the man who had held up Clavijo to infamy.

One of the most fortunate characteristics Beaumarchais possessed was his power of suddenly changing his occupation, and one of his most extraordinary characteristics was his love of doing so. ‘Shutting the drawer of an affair,’ he himself called this faculty. He shut the drawer with a bang, and perfectly good-natured, self-conceited, and successful, turned from a secret agency in London to interfere with the marriage of the Prince of Nassau, and from the marriage to assist the Lieutenant of the Police in censuring the works of his brother-playwrights, and from that censorship to put into the mouth of Figaro such sentiments as, ‘Printed follies are without importance except in those places where their circulation is forbidden ... without the liberty to blame no praise can be flattering.’

By 1778, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was finished; and in 1781 it was received by the ComÉdie FranÇaise. But it contained that which no censor—not even dull Louis—could pass. In 1782, he read it, and flung it from him. ‘This is detestable, this shall never be played!’

But that prohibition was not enough for Beaumarchais. Forbidden fruit is ever the most tantalising and delicious. Daintily tied with pink ribbons he sent a copy of the play to this salon; and another to that. He announced a reading of it—and, coquettishly and without offering any reason, abandoned the reading at the last moment. In a little while he had raised all Paris on the tip-toe of excitement. Not to have scanned at least a scene or two of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was to confess oneself out of the fashion. Then the author read the whole of it to the Grand Duke of Russia, and recited selections of it to the Comtesse de Lamballe and to Marshal Richelieu, ‘before bishops and archbishops.’

After all, Louis was very weak, and public opinion very strong. The First Gentleman of the Chamber permitted the thing to be rehearsed, more or less publicly, in the theatre of the HÔtel des Menus Plaisirs. All the world and his wife crowded thither. The Comte d’Artois was actually on his way when, with an awakening of his feeble obstinacy, the King sent a mandate forbidding the performance. Even Madame de Campan, kindly old sycophant of the Court, confessed that there were angry whispers of ‘tyranny’ and ‘oppression,’ and murmurs of ‘an attack on liberty.’ Beaumarchais, stung to the quick, swore that it should be played, ay, even if it was in the choir of Notre-Dame! The pressure on Louis was great; the Court was in want of a new sensation, and to be made to laugh at its own follies was a very new one indeed.

In three months, the Comte de Vaudreuil, the leader of Marie Antoinette’s sociÉtÉ intime of the Little Trianon, obtained the royal permission to have it acted in his house at Gennevilliers, by the company from the ComÉdie, before the Comte d’Artois and the Queen’s bosom friend, the Duchesse de Polignac. The Queen herself intended to have been present, but was prevented by an indisposition. When the permission was accorded, Beaumarchais was in England. He hurried home, saw to the performance himself, and made his own conditions.

On September 26, 1783, three hundred persons, the very flower of Court society, crowded into Vaudreuil’s theatre, and would have died of suffocation if the resourceful Beaumarchais had not broken the panes of the windows with his cane. It was said he had made a hit in two senses. The aristocratic audience received his play with rapturous applause. He adroitly followed up his success by presenting his piece to a tribunal of censors who, for some unknown reason, ‘felt sure it would be a failure,’ and expressed themselves satisfied with it after they had made a few insignificant omissions. Finally, a reluctant permission was wrung from the King, and on April 27, 1784, seven months after the performance at Gennevilliers, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was first publicly performed at the new ComÉdie FranÇaise, built on the site of the HÔtel de CondÉ, and now known as the OdÉon.

The play was to begin at half-past five in the afternoon, but from early in the morning the doors were besieged by crowds, in which cordons bleus elbowed Savoyards, and the classes and the masses began their long struggle. In the press three persons were suffocated—‘one more than for ScudÉry,’ said caustic La Harpe. Great ladies sat all day in the dressing rooms of the actresses to be sure of securing seats, and duchesses were delighted to obtain a footstool in the gallery, a part of the house to which, as a rule, ladies never went. The theatre was lit by a new method. The famous Dazincourt played Figaro; and MolÉ, Almaviva. The author himself was in a private box between two abbÉs who had promised to administer ‘very spiritual succour’ in case of death. Then the curtain rose.

‘The “Marriage of Figaro,” said Napoleon, ‘was the Revolution already in action.’

As in the ‘Barber of Seville,’ the atmosphere and the clothes are Spanish, the spirit and essence wholly French. The story of Figaro, the servant who outwits his lord and wins Suzanne, whom his master has tried to steal from him, forms a plot simple enough. Count Almaviva, the master, is certainly one of the best representations of the great noble of the old rÉgime ever put on the stage. Continually worsted in argument by his valet, and perpetually in the most ridiculous situations, he never loses the dignity of good breeding—as Beaumarchais himself puts it, ‘the corruption of his heart takes nothing from the bon ton of his manners.’ Figaro is, of course, democracy with its wits awake at last, and stung to courage and action by centuries of wrongs. The Countess (the Rosina of the ‘Barber’) and Suzanne are the most charming and seductive reproductions of the eighteenth-century woman—‘spirituelles et rieuses,’ coquettish, graceful and gay. The chief fault of the play is the episode of Marceline, in which the playgoer wearily recognises two, too familiar friends—the long-lost mother and the mislaid baby with the usual convenient birth-mark on the right arm.

The morals of the piece are throughout the morals of the time—indelicacy, delicately expressed. Figaro hardly ever says anything inconvenant, but intrigue is in the very air he breathes. ‘The ripening fruit,’ writes Saint-Amand, ‘hanging on the tree, never falls but seems always on the point of falling.’ Virtue, of a kind, does triumph in the long run, but Beaumarchais knew his audience so well that up to the last moment he kept them fearing, or hoping, that it would not. If its unpleasant situations, and the character of the precocious page Cherubino (a particularly distasteful one to English ideas), gave spice to the wit in its own day, the modern reader can enjoy the sparkling and rippling stream of mocking gaiety without stirring up the mud it hides. One situation leads to another with the most complete naturalness, and yet that other is always perfectly unexpected. Moralisings and soliloquies, which spell ruin in other plays, are in this one rich in brilliancy and aptness. Those who as yet know ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ only by name, can purchase for a few pence one of the most exhilarating draughts of intellectual champagne ever given to the world.

But it is not only as literature that the play lives. It was the Revolution already in action. There are hardly six consecutive lines which do not contain some indictment against the old order; there is not an aphorism which does not push, with a laugh, some abuse down the abyss. ‘There is one thing more amazing than my play,’ said Beaumarchais, ‘and that is its success.’ He was right. One can but marvel still that the old order, so clearly hearing its sentence of death, took that sentence only as a stupendous joke, ‘laughed its last laugh’ over ‘Figaro,’ and applauded the warrant for its own execution till its hands tingled again.

The fine ladies heard their vapours defined as ‘the malady that prevails only in boudoirs;’ and my lord, surrounded by sycophants, saw himself for a mocking second as other men see him, when Figaro says to Bazile: ‘Are you a Prince to be flattered? Hear the truth, wretch, since you have not the money to pay a liar.’

With what a roar of laughter that tribunal of censors who had licensed the play heard the words: ‘Provided I do not mention in my writings, authority, religion, politics, morality, officials ... or anyone who has a claim to anything, I can print everything freely under the inspection of two or three censors;’ and with what amused self-complacency it listened to the axiom: ‘Only little minds fear little writings.’

The hereditary noble listened to this: ‘Nobility, money, rank, place, all that makes people so proud! What have you done for so much good fortune? You have given yourself the trouble to be born;’ and the bourgeois at his side, to whom merit had opened no path to glory, heard with a strange thrill Figaro continue, ‘While for me, lost in a crowd of nobodies, I have had need of more knowledge and calculation simply to exist, than has been employed to govern all the Spains for a hundred years.’

Did the Minister who had filled the snug posts in the Government with his own relations and friends see nothing but a joke in: ‘They thought of me for a situation, but unluckily I was fit for it; they wanted an accountant; a dancer obtained the place’? ‘Intelligence a help to advancement? Your lordship is laughing at mine. Be commonplace and cringing, and you can get anywhere.’ ‘To succeed in life, le savoir-faire vaut mieux que le savoir.’

The ubiquitous Englishman of the audience heard Figaro announce ‘Goddam’ to be ‘the basis of the English language.’ The political world listened to a scathing definition of diplomacy: ‘To pretend to be ignorant of what everyone else knows, and to know what everyone else does not know ... to seem deep when one is only empty and hollow ... to set spies and pension traitors ... to break seals and intercept letters ... there’s diplomacy, or I’m a dead man.’

The audience trooped out into the night—the performance lasted from half-past five till ten—with enthusiastic admiration on its lips and still ringing in its ears the seventh couplet of the vaudeville:

The writer, certainly, had as little idea as his audience that his was to be the wit to change everything. From first to last, Beaumarchais was the man we have always with us, who means to advance in the world and let that world take care of itself; whose argument is that posterity having done nothing for him, he need do nothing for posterity; the true time-server, just audacious enough to say what less courageous people only dare to think, and earning thereby their gratitude and applause. Caron had reaped place and fortune from the old order, and was not at all minded to overthrow it. Tyranny for tyranny, he preferred the despotism of the King to the despotism of the mob. If he revenged himself in his play for the slights and humiliations from which even his cleverness had not been able to save him—that was absolutely all. Overturn Throne and Church! Such a bouleversement would very likely overturn Caron de Beaumarchais too, and was not to be thought of.

Yet it was this man who gave light popular expression to the principles to which Voltaire and his friends devoted their lives, their ardour, and their genius. It was surely a cruelty of fate that the Master could not live to see ‘Figaro.’ Its author might miss its significance, but Voltaire—never.

Beaumarchais, indeed, had merely caught the accent of his age, as a child catches the accent of its nurse, and ‘wrote revolutionary literature, as M. Jourdain spoke prose, without knowing it.’ In ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ he said what all men were feeling, but not what he felt. He wished to be a successful playwright, and he was one; but he did not mean to be one of the greatest and most influential of Revolutionists—and he was that too.

He followed up the success of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ by generously founding a fashionable charity, to be known later as the Benevolent Maternal Institution, and the King followed up the success he had always disliked by punishing an imprudent letter Caron had written in a newspaper, and which had offended Monsieur, by writing on a playing card, as he sat at his game, an order for Beaumarchais’ imprisonment.

By one of those charming little surprises for which the old rÉgime was so celebrated, Beaumarchais, of fifty-three, found himself locked up in St. Lazare, then a house of correction for juvenile offenders. At first Paris went into roars of laughter, and then she became very angry indeed. In a few days she obtained the release of her playwright; and Louis, with the inconceivable inconsistency that distinguished his career, not only gave him enormous monetary compensation, but permitted as a further reparation, ‘The Barber of Seville’ to be played at the Little Trianon.

That representation marked the crowning point of Beaumarchais’ success. Dazincourt trained the company of royal and noble amateurs. Marie Antoinette was rehearsing the part of Rosina with Madame de Campan when she first heard of the opening of a grimmer drama, the scandal of the Diamond Necklace. On August 15, 1785, Cardinal de Rohan was arrested. On the 19th, ‘The Barber of Seville’ was played in the theatre of the Little Trianon, with lucky Beaumarchais in the audience, the Queen as Rosina, the Comte de Vaudreuil as Almaviva, the Duc de Guiche as Bartholo, and the Comte d’Artois as Figaro.

The Queen was infinitely vivacious in her part. Did Bazile’s terrible definition of Calumny disconcert her?

‘At first a mere breath, skimming the ground like a swallow, but sowing poison as it flies ... it takes root, creeps up, makes its way, goes ... from mouth to mouth: then, all of a sudden, one knows not how, Calumny is standing upright, rearing its head, hissing, swelling, growing visibly. It spreads its wings, takes flight, eddies round ... bursts, thunders, crashes, and becomes, thanks to heaven, a general outcry, a public crescendo, a universal chorus of hatred and proscription. What devil could resist it?’

If Queen or audience found in the words too awful an application and prophecy, history does not relate.

How strange, with the knowledge of after events, sound in the mouth of d’Artois the words: ‘I am happy to be forgotten, being sure that a great man does enough good when he does no harm. As to the virtues one requires in a servant, does your Excellency know many masters who are worthy of being valets?’ and, most strange of all, ‘I hasten to laugh at everything, lest I should have to weep at everything.’

The performance of the ‘Barber’ at Trianon was the last flicker of the dying fire of royal pleasure. Beaumarchais’ own light began to fail. He was shortly involved in a famous dispute with Mirabeau about the Paris Water Company, in which that great genius brought out his mighty guns of irony and invective and in one fierce blast blew, as it were, Beaumarchais’ nimble-witted head from his shoulders. ‘Figaro’ has dubbed my diatribes ‘Mirabelles,’ has he? Well, he shall pun at my expense no more. All Paris stood watching. Dazzling, burning, and terrible, Mirabeau’s sun was rising above the horizon, and Beaumarchais’ star was fading in the stormy sky. Then he had another lawsuit, in which he entered the lists as the champion of wronged beauty. His opponent was Bergasse, the young lawyer, who ‘had his reputation to make’ at some one’s expense, and made it at Beaumarchais’.

In 1786, Caron married Mademoiselle Willermaula, who had long been his mistress, and by whom he had a daughter, EugÉnie. For them, he built a splendid house looking on to the Bastille, near the Porte Saint-Antoine, which became one of the sights of Paris.

In 1787, he produced a very feeble opera, ‘Tarare,’ which had a small temporary success.

On July 14, 1789, the Bastille fell. Not only the fine house was in danger, but its fine owner as well. He had written ‘Figaro’? Yes. But he had been the courtier and the secret agent of kings. His pluck and energy did not in the least desert him. In the midst of the uproar he was writing a new play, ‘The Guilty Mother.’

La Harpe (no wonder his friends called him La Harpie) declared it was ‘downright silly;’ and perhaps this thorough-going verdict is but little too severe. ‘The Guilty Mother’ forms a sort of third volume to the ‘Barber’ and ‘Figaro,’ and falls as flat as most sequels. The same characters appear, grown old. The Guilty Mother is the Rosina of the ‘Barber’ and the Countess Almaviva of ‘Figaro;’ while Cherubino has grown up into the very objectionable young man such a boy would grow into. Beaumarchais had built a theatre—the ThÉÂtre du Marais—near his house, in which he proposed his new piece should appear.

On June 6, 1792, the day before it was to be produced, its author was denounced before the National Assembly by Chabot. He had indeed, with a view to making at once a coup for his country and for himself, and though he was now sixty years old and getting deaf, undertaken to bring into France sixty thousand guns—‘to massacre patriots,’ shouted unreasonable patriotism. On August 10 his house was searched; on August 23 he was taken to the Abbaye prison, and on August 30 he was freed by Manuel (his brother littÉrateur, as well as Procurator of the Commune), just two days before the September massacres. After all, his star had not yet declined.

After hiding in barns and roaming ‘over harrowed fields, panting for his life,’ he escaped to England, where very luckily for himself a London merchant, to whom he was in debt, prevented his returning to Paris and the guillotine by shutting him up in the King’s Bench Prison. In March, 1793, he did return, ‘to offer my head to the sword of justice, if I cannot prove I am a good citizen.’ That he did not thus pay for his imprudence proves that there was as much in that head as had ever come out of it.

Three months later, Beaumarchais was sent as the emissary of the Revolutionary Government to fetch those sixty thousand guns which had been left in Holland. He had many highly dramatic escapes and adventures; and, being wholly modern in his belief in self-advertisement, he once more made the most of them. In his absence the Government which had sent him, by one of those little mistakes which make its history so vivacious, declared him an ÉmigrÉ!

During the Terror he was at Hamburg, in direst poverty and in mortal anxiety as to the fate of his wife, his daughter, and his sister Julie. They escaped with their lives; but when Beaumarchais was at last taken off the list of ÉmigrÉs and returned to Paris in 1796, he found house and fortune alike in ruins, his door besieged by creditors, and his famous garden a wilderness.

He was sixty-four years old and had already done more in his life than a hundred ordinary men compress into a hundred ordinary careers. And now he must start afresh!

He saw his daughter married; revived his old social tastes, produced ‘The Guilty Mother,’ and took the keenest interest, both in prose and verse, in that young Lieutenant of Artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte. He also published two very anti-Christian letters in praise of Voltaire. The watchmaker’s son, who had charmed Mesdames at Versailles, was to the end witty, gay, bold, and practical.

On the morning of May 18, 1799, his friends found him dead of apoplexy. To die in his bed at last was surely not the least of his clevernesses.

Caron de Beaumarchais was not a very unusual type of character or even of intellect; but in the use he made of his brains, of his qualities and of his circumstances, he was a man in a million. His marvellous enterprise and industry enabled him to build more than one successful career on very ordinary foundations. His luck, that astonishing luck which followed him from the cradle to the grave, seems to have prevented such dangerous qualities as his conceit, his pugnaciousness, and his love of intrigue and speculation, from bringing their usual fatal results. Such gifts as a handsome face, a fine figure, a ‘parvenu grandeur of manner’ and real kindness and generosity, he used to their utmost advantage. For himself and his contemporaries he was a brilliantly successful individuality.

For posterity, he is the man who, with a single thrust, pushed open that door, which by long labour and bitter sacrifice Voltaire and the EncyclopÆdists had unbarred, upon the great Revolution and the Day.