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:
Par le sort de la naissance,
L’un est roi, l’autre est berger;
Le hasard fit leur distance;
L’esprit seul peut tout changer.
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.