"The Marriage of Figaro"--Previous History and Character of Beaumarchais.
--The Performance of the Play is forbidden.--It is said to be a little
altered.--It is licensed.--Displeasure of the Queen.--Visit of Gustavus
III. of Sweden.--Fête at the Trianon.--Balloon Ascent.
In the spring of 1784, the court and capital wore wrought up to a high
pitch of excitement by an incident which was in reality of so ordinary and
trivial a character, that it would be hard to find a more striking proof
how thoroughly unhealthy the whole condition and feeling of the nation
must have been, when such a matter could have been regarded as important.
It was simply a question whether a play, which had been recently accepted
by the manager of the principal theatre in Paris, should receive the
license from the theatrical censor which was necessary to its being
performed.
The play was entitled "The Marriage of Figaro." The history of the author,
M. Beaumarchais, is curious, as that of a rare specimen of the literary
adventurer of his time. He was born in the year 1732. His father was a
watch-maker named Caron, and he himself followed that trade till he was
three or four and twenty, and attained considerable skill in it. But he
was ambitious. He was conscious of a handsome face and figure, and knew
their value in such a court as that of Louis XV. He gave up his trade as a
watch-maker, and bought successively different places about the court, the
last of which was sold at a price sufficient to entitle him to claim
gentility; so that, in one of his subsequent railings against the nobles,
he declared that his nobility was more incontestable than that of most of
the body, since he could produce the stamped receipt for it. Following the
example of Molière and Voltaire, he changed his name, and called himself
Beaumarchais. He married two rich widows. He formed a connection with the
celebrated financier, Paris Duverney, who initiated him in the mysteries
of stock-jobbing. Being a good musician, he obtained the protection of the
king's daughters, taught them the harp, and conducted the weekly concerts
which, during the life of Marie Leczinska, they gave to the king and the
royal family. He wrote two or three plays, none of which had any great
success, while one was a decided failure. He became involved in lawsuits,
one of which he conducted himself against the best ability of the Parisian
bar, and displayed such wit and readiness that he not only gained his
cause, but established a notoriety which throughout life was apparently
his dearest object. He crossed over to England, where he made the
acquaintance of Wilkes, and one or two agents of the American colonies,
then just commencing their insurrection; and, partly from political
sympathy with their views of freedom, partly, as he declared, to retaliate
on England for the injuries which France had suffered at her hands in the
Seven Years' War, he became a political agent himself, procuring arms and
ships to be sent across the Atlantic, and also a great quantity of stores
of a more peaceful character, out of which he had hoped to make a handsome
profit. But the Americans gave him credit for greater disinterestedness;
the President of Congress wrote him a letter thanking him for his zeal,
but refused to pay for his stores, for which he demanded nearly a hundred
and fifty thousand francs. He commenced an action for the money in the
American courts, but, as he could not conduct it himself, he did not
obtain an early decision; indeed, the matter imbittered all his closing
days, and was not settled when he died.
But while he was in the full flush of self-congratulation at the degree in
which, as he flattered himself, he had contributed to the downfall of
England, the exuberance of his spirits prompted him to try his hand at a
fourth play, a sort of sequel to one of his earlier performances--"The
Barber of Seville." He finished it about the end of the year 1781, and, as
the manager of the theatre was willing to act it, he at once applied for
the necessary license. But it had already been talked about: if one party
had pronounced it lively, witty, and the cleverest play that had been seen
since the death of Molière, another set of readers declared it full of
immoral and dangerous satire on the institutions of the country. It is
almost inseparable from the very nature of comedy that it should be to
some extent satirical. The offense which those who complained of "The
Marriage of Figaro" on that account really found in it was, that it
satirized classes and institutions which could not bear such attacks, and
had not been used to them. Molière had ridiculed the lower middle class;
the newly rich; the tradesman who, because he had made a fortune, thought
himself a gentleman; but, as one whose father was in the employ of
royalty, he laid no hand on any pillar of the throne. But Beaumarchais, in
"The Marriage of Figaro," singled out especially what were called the
privileged classes; he attacked the licentiousness of the nobles; the
pretentious imbecility of ministers and diplomatists; the cruel injustice
of wanton arrests and imprisonments of protracted severity against which
there was no appeal nor remedy; and the privileged classes in consequence
denounced his work, and their complaints of its character and tendency
made such an impression that the court resolved that the license should
not he granted.
The refusal, however, was not at first pronounced in a straightforward
way; but was deferred, as if those who had resolved on it feared to
pronounce it. For a long time the censor gave no reply at all, till
Beaumarchais complained of the delay as more injurious to him than a
direct denial. When at last his application was formally rejected, he
induced his friends to raise such a clamor in his favor, that Louis
determined to judge for himself, and caused Madame de Campan to read it to
himself and the queen. He fully agreed with the censor. Many passages he
pronounced to be in extremely bad taste. When the reader came to the
allusions to secret arrests, protracted imprisonments, and the tedious
formalities of the law and lawyers, he declared that it would be necessary
to pull down the Bastile before it could be acted with safety, as
Beaumarchais was ridiculing every thing which ought to be respected. "It
is not to be performed, then?" said the queen. "No," replied the king,
"you may depend upon that."
Similar refusals of a license had been common enough, so that there was no
reason in the world why this decision should have attracted any notice
whatever. But Beaumarchais was the fashion. He had influential patrons
even in the palace: the Count d'Artois and Madame de Polignac, with the
coterie which met in her apartments, being among them; and the mere idea
that the court or the Government was afraid to let the play be acted
caused thousands to desire to see it, who, without such a temptation,
would have been wholly indifferent to its fate. The censor could not
prevent its being read at private parties, and such readings became so
popular that, in 1782, one was got up for the amusement of the Russian
prince, who was greatly pleased by the liveliness of the dramatic
situations, and, probably, not sufficiently aware of the prevalence of
discontent in many circles of French society to sympathize with those who
saw danger in its satire.
The praises lavished on it gave the author greater boldness, which was
quite unnecessary. He even meditated an evasion of the law by getting it
acted in a place which was not a theatre, and tickets were actually issued
for the performance in a saloon which was often used for rehearsals, when
a royal warrant[1] peremptorily forbidding such a proceeding was sent down
from the palace. A clamor was at once raised by the friends of
Beaumarchais, as if "sealed letters" had never been issued before. They
talked in a loud voice of "oppression" and "tyranny;" and any one who knew
the king's disposition might have divined that such an act of vigor was
sure to be followed by one of weakness. Presently Beaumarchais changed his
tone. He gave out that he had retrenched the passages which had excited
the royal disapproval, and requested that the play might be re-examined. A
new censor of high literary reputation reported to the head of the
police[2] that if one or two passages were corrected, and one or two
expressions, which were liable to be misinterpreted, were suppressed, he
foresaw no danger in allowing the representation. Beaumarchais at once
promised to make the required corrections, and one of Madame de Polignac's
friends, the Count de Vaudreuil, the very nobleman with whom that lady's
name was by many discreditably connected, obtained the king's leave to
perform it at his country house, that thus an opportunity might be
afforded for judging whether or not the alterations which had been made
were sufficient to render its performance innocent.
The king was assured that the passages which he had regarded as
mischievous were suppressed or divested of their sting. Marie Antoinette
apparently had her suspicions; but Louis could never long withstand
repeated solicitations, and, as he had not, when Madame de Campan read it,
formed any very high opinion of its literary merits, he thought that, now
that it was deprived of its venom, it would be looked upon as heavy, and
would fail accordingly. Some good judges, such as the Marquis de
Montesquieu, were of the same opinion. The actors thought differently. "It
is my belief," said a man of fashion to the witty Mademoiselle Arnould,
using the technical language of the theatre, "that your play will be
'damned.'" "Yes," she replied, "it will, fifty nights running." But, even
if Louis had heard of her prophecy, he would have disregarded it. He gave
his permission for the performance to take place, and on the 27th April,
1784, "The Marriage of Figaro" was accordingly acted to an audience which
filled the house to the very ceiling; and which the long uncertainty as to
whether it would ever be seen or not had disposed to applaud every scene
and every repartee, and even to see wit where none existed. To an
impartial critic, removed both by time and country from the agitation
which had taken place, it will probably seem that the play thus obtained a
reception far beyond its merits. It was undoubtedly what managers would
call a good acting play. Its plot was complicated without being confused.
It contained many striking situations; the dialogue was lively, but there
was more humor in the surprises and discoveries than verbal wit in the
repartees. Some strokes of satire were leveled at the grasping disposition
of the existing race of courtiers, whose whole trade was represented as
consisting of getting all they could, and asking for more; and others at
the tricks of modern politicians, feigning to be ignorant of what they
knew; to know what they were ignorant of; to keep secrets which had no
existence; to lock the door to mend a pen; to appear deep when they were
shallow; to set spies in motion, and to intercept letters; to try to
ennoble the poverty of their means by the grandeur of their objects. The
censorship, of course, did not escape. The scene being laid in Spain,
Figaro affirmed that at Madrid the liberty of the press meant that, so
long as an author spoke neither of authority, nor of public worship, nor
of politics, nor of morality, nor of men in power, nor of the opera, nor
of any other exhibition, nor of any one who was concerned in any thing, he
might print what be pleased. The lawyers were reproached with a scrupulous
adherence to forms, and a connivance at needless delays, which put money
into their pockets; and the nobles, with thinking that, as long as they
gave themselves the trouble to be born, society had no right to expect
from them any further useful action. But such satire was too general, it
might have been thought, to cause uneasiness, much more to do specific
injury to any particular individual, or to any company or profession.
Figaro himself is represented as saying that none but little men feared
little writings.[3] And one of the advisers whom King Louis consulted as
to the possibility of any mischief arising from the performance of the
play, is said to have expressed his opinion in the form of an apothegm,
that "none but dead men were killed by jests." The author might even have
argued that his keenest satire had been poured upon those national
enemies, the English, when he declared what has been sometimes regarded as
the national oath to be the pith and marrow of the English language, the
open sesame to English society, the key to unlock the English heart, and
to obtain the judicious swearer all that he could desire.[4]
And an English writer, with English notions of the liberty of the press,
would hardly have thought it worth while to notice such an affair at all,
did he not feel bound to submit his judgment to that of the French
themselves. And if their view be correct, almost every institution in
France must have been a dead man past all hopes of recovery, since the
French historical writers, to whatever party they belong, are unanimous in
declaring that it was from this play that many of the oldest institutions
in the country received their death-blow, and that Beaumarchais was at
once the herald and the pioneer of the approaching Revolution.
Paris had scarcely cooled down after this excitement, when its attention
was more agreeably attracted by the arrival of a king, Gustavus III. of
Sweden. He had paid a visit to France in 1771, which had been cut short by
the sudden death of his father, necessitating his immediate return to his
own country to take possession of his throne; but the brief acquaintance
which Marie Antoinette had then made with him had inspired her with a
great admiration of his chivalrous character; and in the preceding year,
hearing that he was contemplating a tour in Southern Europe, she had
written to him to express a hope that he would repeat his visit to
Versailles, promising him "such a reception as was due to an ancient ally
of France;[5]" and adding that "she should personally have great pleasure
in testifying to him how greatly she valued his friendship."
Her mention of the ancient alliance between the two countries, which,
indeed, had subsisted ever since the days of Francis I., was very welcome
to Gustavus, since the object of his journey was purely political, and he
desired to negotiate a fresh treaty. But those matters he, of course,
arranged with the ministers. The queen was only concerned in the
entertainments due from royal hosts to so distinguished a guest. Most of
them were of the ordinary character, there being a sort of established
routine of festivity for such occasions. And it may be taken as a proof
that the court had abated somewhat of its alarm at Beaumarchais's play
that "The Marriage of Figaro" was allowed to be acted on one of the king's
visits to the theatre. She also gave him an entertainment of more than
usual splendor at the Trianon, at which all the ladies present, and the
invitations were very numerous, were required to be dressed in white,
while all the walks and shrubberies of the garden were illuminated, so
that the whole scene presented a spectacle which he described in one of
his letters as "a complete fairy-land; a sight worthy of the Elysian
Fields themselves.[6]" But, as usual, the queen herself was the chief
ornament of the whole, as she moved graciously among her guests, laying
aside the character of queen to assume that of the cordial hostess; and
not even taking her place at the banquet, but devoting herself wholly to
the pleasurable duty of doing honor to her guests.
One of the displays was of a novel character, from which its inventors and
patrons expected scientific results of importance, which, though nearly a
century has since elapsed, have not yet been realized. In the preceding
year, Montgolfier had for the first time sent up a balloon, and the new
invention was now exhibited in the Court of Versailles: the queen allowed
the balloon to be called by her name; and, to the great admiration of
Gustavus, who had a decided taste for matters which were in any way
connected with practical science, the "Marie Antoinette" made a successful
voyage to Chantilly. The date of another invention, if, indeed, it
deserves so respectable a title, is also fixed by this royal visit. Mesmer
had recently begun to astonish or bewilder the Parisians with his theory
of animal magnetism; and Gustavus spent some time in discussing the
question with him, and seems for a moment to have flattered himself that
he comprehended his principles. But the only durable result which arose
from his stay in France was the sincere regard and esteem which he and the
queen mutually conceived for each other. They established a
correspondence, in which Marie Antoinette repeatedly showed her eagerness
to gratify his wishes and to attend to his recommendations; and when, at a
later period, unexpected troubles fell on her and her husband, there was
no one whom their troubles inspired with greater eagerness to serve them
than Gustavus, whose last projects, before he fell by the hand of an
assassin, were directed to their deliverance from the dangers which,
though neither he nor they were as yet fully alive to their magnitude,
were on the point of overwhelming them.