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
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PIERRE-AUGUSTIN-CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS.
From an Engraving, after Michon, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
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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,{238} 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, impu{239}dence, 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{240} 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{241} 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{242} 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.{243}
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{244} 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{245} 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{246} 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{247} 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{248} the old Comédie Fran?aise 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 Fran?aise 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{249} 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 Fran?aise.’ 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 person? 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{250} 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,{251} 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 {252}their circu............