impossibilities even, of his position, resolved to do what he could.
Within a few hours of his appointment he wrote a long letter to the
King, urging the absolute necessity of economy in every department,
denouncing bribes, privileges, exemptions, and pleading--daring to
plead--equality in the imposition of taxes. No bankruptcy, no increase
of taxation, no loans--this was to be the motto of his Controllership.
‘I feel all the perils to which I expose myself,’ he wrote. He was not
even religious in the sense--what a sense!--that officials were expected
to be religious. ‘You have given me a Controller who never goes to
Mass,’ grumbled Louis to Maurepas. ‘Sire,’ answered the Minister, very
happily, ‘Terrai always went.’
The new Controllership was still a nine days’ wonder when Turgot
restored throughout France what he had restored in Limoges--free trade
in grain. In 1770 he had written on the subject some famous ‘Letters’ in
answer to Terrai’s revocation of the edict and the witty ‘Dialogues’ of
Galiani which supported that revocation. Then, bolder still, he
suppressed an abominable piece of official jobbery, the _Pot de Vin_, or
bribe of 100,000 crowns which the Farmers-General had always presented
to the Controller when he signed a new edict. If the Farmers turned away
sulkily, angry with a generosity they were by no means prepared to
imitate, from the country came a long burst of passionate applause.
‘It is only M. Turgot and I who love the people,’ said the King. Well,
this poor Louis did love them, but his was not the love that could stand
firm by the man sent to save them. ‘Everything for the people, nothing
by them,’ was Turgot’s motto, and, perhaps, his mistake. The King was to
be the lever to raise his kingdom; and the weak tool broke in the
Minister’s hand.
The first disaster of Turgot’s Controllership was the disaster that
spoiled his Intendancy. In 1774-5 scarcity of bread made many distrust
his edict restoring to them free trade in grain. With his firm hand over
Louis’s shaking one he suppressed the bread riots of that winter, as it
was never given to a Bourbon to suppress anything. But he would not in
justice suppress, though he might have suppressed, Necker’s adverse
pamphlet on the question, called ‘The Legislation and Commerce of
Grain;’ though half the Encyclopædists, and many of Turgot’s personal
friends, were led thereby to adopt the opinions of the solid Genevan
banker.
In the January of 1775, Turgot presented his Budget. The deficit left by
Terrai was enormous. Let us pay then, said Turgot’s sound common-sense,
the legitimate contracts of Government, not by your dear old remedy,
taxation, for the ruined country can yield no more, but by limiting the
expenses of that Government and of the Court. Officials and courtiers
alike took as a judgment from Heaven the fact, that very shortly after
this monstrous proposal, the audacious proposer was sharply attacked by
the gout.
Turgot’s Controllership lasted in all twenty months, and for seven of
them he was very ill. When he was blamed once for overworking himself
and trying to force everybody’s hand, ‘Why, do you not know,’ he
answered simply, ‘in my family we die of gout at fifty?’ His present
illness kept him in his room many weeks, but did not prevent him from
dictating an enormous correspondence, and trying urgently to persuade
his master to begin his economical reforms by having his coming
coronation ceremonies performed cheaply at Paris, instead of expensively
at Rheims; and to make good his professions of tolerance by omitting
from the service the oath binding him to extirpate heretics. Of course
Louis was too weak for these drastic measures; he characteristically
contented himself by mumbling the oath, and the senseless expenses of
the coronation were as large as ever.
But Turgot, undaunted, went on working. In January 1776 he presented to
the King what have been justly called the Six Fatal Edicts--the first
for the suppression of _corvée_, four for the suppression of the offices
interfering with the provisioning of Paris, and the sixth for the
suppression of _jurandes_ or the government of privileged corporations.
The first and sixth were the real cause of battle, and embodied one of
the great aims of Turgot’s administration--to make the nobility and
clergy contribute to the taxes.
A shrill outcry of indignation rang through Versailles. Make us pay!
_Us!_ The Court had always scorned Turgot with his shy, quiet manner,
his gentle aloofness, and the reflection cast, in the most odious taste,
by the purity of his life on its own manner of living. But now it hated
him. Tax _us_! Curtail _our_ extravagances! Reduce _our_ expenditure!
What next? He has already abolished a number of our very best sinecures
and lessened the salaries attached to several enticing little offices
where we were enormously paid for doing nothing gracefully! He has given
posts to persons fitted for them instead of to our noble and incompetent
relations! If one of _us_ (even when one of us is the Duc d’Orléans
himself) wants to do something--well--illegal, he will not allow it! As
though the makers of law could not be its breakers if they chose! And
Versailles rustled indignantly in its unpaid-for silks, whispered,
murmured, connived at the fall of this quiet, strong person who had not
a thought in common with them--nor a thought of himself.
But he had a more dangerous enemy than the Court--the Queen.
Quick-witted, wilful, impetuous, with a husband whose slow, hesitating
intellect she must needs despise, clever enough to love to meddle with
great things, but not wise enough to meddle well--Marie Antoinette took
her first deep step down the stairway of ruin when she chose to be
Turgot’s enemy instead of Turgot’s friend. Could he have saved her too,
if she would have let him, as, but for her, men thought he might have
saved France? God knows. Marie Antoinette wanted to be amused, and her
particular amusement, gambling, was very expensive; she was infinitely
good-natured and impetuously in love at the moment with Madame de
Lamballe, and wanted for her the revival of the old post of
Superintendent of the Household, with its enormous emoluments. And at
her side stood Turgot, saying, ‘No.’ Maurepas had long since deserted
him. It was much easier, and safer for one’s own interest, to give the
Queen what she wanted and have done with it. As for Louis, he was, as
usual, weak with the weakness that brought him to the guillotine and
ended the French monarchy.
Turgot so far controlled him that the six Edicts were registered by the
unwilling Parliament of Paris. Then Monsieur, afterwards Louis the
Eighteenth, expressed in a pamphlet of very feeble wit the feelings of
the upper classes against this terrible reformer. That paltry skit had
already turned the King against his Minister, when Maurepas showed him a
sharp financial criticism on Turgot’s calculations as
Controller-General, and some forged letters purporting to come from
Turgot and containing expressions offensive to the Royal Family. Not man
enough to take them to Turgot and demand explanation, the wretched King
went on distrusting him and giving him feeble hints to resign.
But until there was a better man to occupy his place, Turgot would take
no hints. For the sake of France he would push those Edicts through, and
gain his principles before he lost his power.
Then another friend failed him. Malesherbes, the brave old hero, who was
hereafter to defend and to die for his King, but who, as Condorcet said,
found on every subject ‘many fors and againsts but never one to make
him decide,’ resigned his post in Turgot’s government. ‘You are
fortunate,’ says hapless Louis gloomily, ‘to be able to resign. I wish I
could.’ The storm was coming up fast. But the first man on whom it was
to fall remained calm and staunch.
On April 30, 1776, Turgot wrote to his King a note begging him not to
appoint Amelot as Malesherbes’ successor, and containing these ominous
words: ‘Do not forget, Sire, that it was weakness that brought the head
of Charles the First to the block.’ Louis made no answer. Finally, the
match was put to the tinder of the Queen’s wrath by Turgot’s dismissal
from office of her worthless protégé, de Guines; and the Minister, it
was whispered, had also declined to pay a debt she had incurred for
jewellery, as against the new rules he had himself made. Rules for a
Queen! This must certainly be the end of Queens or of Ministers! In this
case, it was the end of both; only Turgot’s fall came first.
As he was sitting writing, on May 12, 1776, Bertin arrived to announce
to him that he was no longer Controller-General. He had been drawing up
an edict; laying down his pen he observed quietly, ‘My successor will
finish it.’ His successor, it has been well said, was the National
Assembly.
Two days later, Marie Antoinette wrote exultantly to her mother of his
dismissal. What did she care for the just reproaches of the King and of
the whole nation, which that old kill-joy, Mercy Argenteau, declared
that this deed would bring on her head? She would have liked her enemy
turned out of office and sent to the Bastille the very day that de
Guines was made a Duke. Poor Queen! Her little triumph was so short, and
her bitter punishment so long!
On May 18, Turgot took farewell of his master in language nobly
dignified and touching. ‘My one desire,’ he said, ‘is that you may find
I have judged wrongly, that I have warned you of imaginary dangers.’
Clugny was appointed Controller-General; _corvée_ and _jurandes_ were
re-established; the edict establishing free trade in grain was revoked.
The Court rejoiced aloud; the Paris Parliament was delighted. Old
Voltaire at Ferney, indeed, wept and said that this was death before
death, that a thunderbolt had fallen on his head and his heart; and the
wise knew that nothing could save France now.
Turgot retired quietly into private life. That he was disappointed, not
for himself, but for his country, is very true. True, too, he was
angered at the backstairs policy which had dismissed him. But far
beyond this, there was so much he could have done, which now he could
never do! Faithful to his life-long principle of gathering up the
fragments that remain, he read and studied much, corresponded with Hume
and Adam Smith, often met and talked with Franklin, went to see Voltaire
when he came to Paris in 1778, made experiments in chemistry and
physics, and was active in private benevolence.
Was the brief evening of his life solitary? The one human affection
which, in its perfection, makes loneliness impossible, was not his; or
at best was his only as a dream or a memory. But in the great family of
earth’s toiling children he must have known there were many to love and
bless him, many he had saved from wrong or from sorrow, some whom he had
made from beasts into men. Another blessing was his--he did not long
survive his active labours. He died March 21, 1781, aged fifty-four.
A failure, this life? It may be so; but a failure beside which many a
success is paltry.
Turgot could not save France from her Revolution, but he gave her, and
all countries, practical, working theories on government, on the liberty
of the press, on the best means of helping the poor, on the use of
riches, on civil, political, and religious liberty, which are still
invaluable.
He has been justly said to have founded modern political economy; to
have bequeathed to future generations ‘the idea of the freedom of
industry;’ and to have made ready the way for the reforms which are the
glory of our own day.
Among Voltaire’s fellow-workers there are far more dazzling
personalities. But from their fiery words, exalted visions, and too
glorious hopes one turns with a certain sense of relief to this quiet,
strong, practical man, and understands why the people, whose instinct in
judging the character of their rulers seldom betrays them in the long
run, specially acclaimed Turgot as a friend.
IX
_BEAUMARCHAIS: THE PLAYWRIGHT_
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
[Illustration: PIERRE-AUGUSTIN-CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS.
_From an Engraving, after Michon, in the Bibliothèque Nationale,
Paris._]
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.