IMPROBABLE PATRIOT
The Secret History of Monsieur de Beaumarchais,
the French Playwright Who Saved
the American Revolution
HARLOW GILES UNGER
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND
HANOVER AND LONDON
University Press of New England
www.upne.com
© 2011 Harlow Giles Unger
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5 4 3 2 1
IN MEMORY OF MY FRIEND
Edward W. Knappman
Gold, by God! It’s the fuel of life. I shall by my wiles put vigilance to sleep, awaken love, seduce with songs —
mislead, intrigue, and overcome all obstacles.
FIGARO
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
1
We Must Help the Americans
2
Gold by God! The Fuel of Life!
3
Last Night Poor, Wealthy Today!
4
So You Mistreat Some Poor Devil …
Till He Trembles in Disgrace!
5
I’m the Busiest, Cleverest Fellow I Know
6
Plotting and Pocketing
7
I Wish to Serve Your Country as if It Were My Own
8
Figaro Here, Figaro There …
9
Bright People Are So Stupid
10
What Did You Do to Earn So Many Rewards?
11
Tout finit par des chansons / Everything Ends in Song
12
All of Which Proves That a Son of a Clod
Can Be Worth His Weight in Gold
Appendix
Works by Beaumarchais
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Maps
North America before the French and Indian War
The Saratoga Campaign
Illustrations
George Washington
Comte de Vergennes
Louis XV
Madame de Pompadour
Duc de Choiseul
Chateau de Versailles
A young Beaumarchais
Pâris-Duverney
École Militaire
Boston Massacre
Figaro
Music by Beaumarchais
Antoine Gabriel de Sartine d’Alby
Boston Tea Party
Marie-Thérèse Amélie de Willermaulaz
Madame du Barry
Queen Marie Antoinette
Le Théâtre Français
La Chevalière d’Eon
Arthur Lee
Louis XVI
Silas Deane
Benjamin Franklin
The port at Rochefort
Words and music to “Malbrough”
John Jay
Bust of Voltaire
Bibliothèque du Roi
Beaumarchais
The comte serenades the comtesse
Figaro and Dr. Bartolo
The Bastille prison
Beaumarchais’s garden
Storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789
Maximilien Robespierre
Mob overruns National Assembly
Execution of Louis XVI
House of Beaumarchais
PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IN 1853, Professor Louis de Loménie of the Collège de France on the Left Bank in Paris described following one of Beaumarchais’s grandsons up to the attic of a house on the rue du Pas-de-la-Mule, which runs into the boulevard Beaumarchais. Indeed, the corner of rue du Pas-de-la-Mule and the boulevard Beaumarchais marks the corner of what had been the sumptuous one-acre Paris estate and home of Beaumarchais. The French government appropriated the entire property in 1818 and leveled it to make room for the big boulevard that now bears the Beaumarchais name and runs into the place de la Bastille.
What Loménie says he found in that “uninhabited and silent cell — beneath a thick layer of dust — were … all the papers left fifty-four years ago by the author of Le Mariage de Figaro.” When the government razed the Beaumarchais property, Loménie explained, “his papers were removed to a neighboring house and stored in the room where I found them.” After the death of his wife and daughter, his son-in-law and grandchildren decided to leave the remaining Beaumarchais papers untouched — and so they did, for twenty years, until they granted Loménie access. Admitting that he felt “as if I was performing an exhumation,” Loménie spent the next four years studying the Beaumarchais papers and writing what remains the definitive biography of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. The Loménie biography runs two volumes in French (one volume in the English translation) and is a vital resource for all Beaumarchais biographers. Loménie was the only person to have had access to all the Beaumarchais papers during the fifty years after Beaumarchais’s death.
Although a trove of papers still exists, many of the papers that Loménie examined and cited have disappeared — either into private collections or into dust. No subsequent biographer (including me) has had access to as many original Beaumarchais papers as Loménie — which is the reason he is cited so often in the notes to this work. I have also drawn substantially from the work of Elizabeth S. Kite, an American studying in Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century. Deeply interested in rectifying the failure of Americans to recognize the role of Beaumarchais in securing our independence from England, she wrote a two-volume biography, drawing almost entirely from her translations of the Loménie papers at a time when more of them were intact than now.
Since then, two world wars have dispersed innumerable collections of French manuscripts, and today’s biographers and historians are heavily reliant on the work of these earlier researchers. What makes the ensuing work different from previous works on the subject has been my reliance on previously unpublished manuscripts and documents in the archives of the French Foreign Ministry in Paris and various collections in the United States, including those of the Library of Congress. In addition, my translations may vary considerably from previously published biographies of Beaumarchais, because I have tried to reflect the sense and intent of French quotations rather than simply providing a literal translation. This is especially important in translating the many double entendres — the jeux de mots — that are still such a basic element of everyday spoken French, and were especially so at the time of Beaumarchais. In addition, I have modernized spellings and syntax of French, English, and American manuscripts and documents to make reading easier and more pleasant.
Finally, a word of thanks to Pamela Madsen, at Harvard University’s Harvard Theatre Collection, and to Micah Hoggatt, at Harvard’s Houghton Library, for their assistance in finding and reproducing scenes from The Barber of Seville. My thanks as well to the many freelancers and staffers at the University Press of New England who worked long and hard behind the scenes to produce this work, including Peter Fong, production editor, and Christi Stanfort
h, copyeditor. And lastly, my deepest thanks to my editor, Stephen P. Hull of UPNE, for his support in this project, and to my late literary agent, Edward W. Knappman, whose dogged persistence and boundless faith gave Figaro new life.
IMPROBABLE PATRIOT
We Must Help the Americans
AS 1776 NEARED ITS END, the news from America sent British King George III into paroxysms of joy. His army had routed the heralded George Washington and his so-called Continental Army. The American Revolution was all but over. Once numbering more than 30,000, Washington’s ragtag rebels had turned tail and run after crack British and Hessian troops landed on the eastern shore of Manhattan Island in New York. Even Washington galloped away to safety, as British buglers sounded the foxhunting call instead of the standard military charge. As Redcoats roared with laughter, Pennsylvania General Joseph Reed confessed, “I never felt such a sensation before. It seemed to crown our disgrace.”1
Reduced by desertions to a pathetic band of 5,200, Washington’s Americans dragged their collective heels from New York across New Jersey and over the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, where they lay shivering on the ground, without tents, wrapped in rags, leaves, twigs — anything — their feet bleeding, fingers frozen, out of rum to keep them warm, their bodies thrust against each other for warmth, with no ammunition, awaiting the inevitable.
Annihilation.
“We are all of the opinion,” Reed confided to Washington, “that something must be attempted to revive our expiring credit. Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event.”2
To the north, British gunboats had sent “Admiral” Benedict Arnold’s fleet of comic “gundalows” — rowboats rigged with a single mounted gun on each — to the bottom of Lake Champlain. Meanwhile, three British forces on land prepared to converge on Albany and crush the American Northern Army, then sweep across the Northeast to extinguish the last embers of opposition to British rule.
“The Americans can no longer hold their ground,” wrote the French chargé d’affaires in London to French foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, at the palace in Versailles. “They have no choice but surrender.”3
In Philadelphia, America’s “Continental Congress,” the pitiful prattlers who had pompously proclaimed themselves “free and independent” the previous July, all but confirmed the dire French evaluation. Without authority to raise taxes, buy arms, or levy troops, Congress fled the national capital at Philadelphia and debated capitulation as it reached a temporary safe haven in Baltimore on December 12, only five months after its arrogant declaration of independence. To their astonishment, they — and the 30,000 volunteer “citizen-soldiers” who had rallied around Washington in New York — quickly discovered that all men were not created equal — that on the battlefield high-spirited untrained farmers and hunters with rusty flint-lock pistols and muzzle-loading muskets were no equal to mean-spirited, well-trained, and well-equipped professional British and Hessian troops.
The American disaster had started in early August, when an armada of 150 British ships bounded over the horizon into New York Bay and disgorged more than 30,000 troops, including 9,000 merciless German mercenaries, onto Staten Island. On August 22 — less than fifty days after Congress had issued the provocative Declaration of Independence — 20,000 English Redcoats and their German hirelings stormed ashore in Brooklyn, where Washington had mustered a mere 5,000 “men” — mostly wide-eyed farm boys without battlefield experience. Within a week, the British and Hessians had slaughtered 1,500 Americans and captured 1,000 more, including their two commanding generals. The British commanders — the brothers Admiral Lord Richard Howe and Major General Sir William Howe — sent one of the American generals back across the lines with a peace proposal, and Congress sent three signers of the Declaration of Independence — John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina — to Staten Island to meet the Howes. When the British insisted on revocation of the Declaration of Independence as a precondition for peace talks, the Americans stomped off, and the Howe brothers ordered their troops to resume the slaughter.
On September 15, the British and Hessians crossed the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where Washington had posted 8,000 Connecticut militiamen to repel British attempts to land. As British ships methodically pounded the amateurishly built American emplacements, British and Hessian troops streamed ashore, and, within hours, 6,000 of the Connecticut troops had fled. In disbelief, Washington galloped toward the front line to rally the troops, but found none. The slaughter on Long Island had so terrified them that officers and soldiers alike were sprinting to the rear — without firing a shot — when Washington and his aides arrived.
“Good God,” Washington cried out. “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”4 It was then that British buglers had sounded the humiliating calls to the fox hunt, and Washington galloped back to Harlem Heights in northern Manhattan, with the enemy “within stone’s throw of us.”
“If I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy,” he wrote in despair to his cousin Lund Washington, “I should put him in my stead. … I do not know what plan of conduct to pursue. … In confidence I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.”5
Worse was to follow.
British ships sailed up the Hudson and East Rivers on either side of Manhattan Island, expecting to encircle the northern tip, trap Washington’s force, and end the war by compelling him to surrender or face useless slaughter with his remaining troops. Alerted by lookouts, however, Washington ordered his army to evacuate Manhattan and regroup at White Plains, on the Westchester mainland to the north. He foolishly yielded to the bravado of several officers who insisted on remaining with a few thousand men at Fort Washington, which stood on what seemed an impregnable bluff in northern Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River.
Too late to trap the Americans on Manhattan, the British landed in Westchester and marched to White Plains, where Washington — his army now half its former strength — fought the British to a stalemate, with neither side suffering many casualties. Just as Washington began to hope that his Americans might be able to stand their ground against the British, a messenger galloped into camp with word that the British had overrun Fort Washington, capturing more than 2,600 American soldiers and 230 officers, together with a huge store of weapons, artillery, ammunition, and other military supplies. Three days later, 4,000 British troops crossed the Hudson and captured Fort Lee, directly opposite Fort Washington, thus gaining control of the lower Hudson River valley, as well as Manhattan. Threatened with attack from the east, south, and west, Washington sent two-thirds of his army northward to establish a defense line in the Hudson Highlands. He then led the remaining troops westward across the Hudson River and began a month-long forced march through sleet and freezing rain across northern New Jersey toward the Delaware River. On December 11, the remnants of his American army — a mere 5,200 — one-third of them too sick or too hungry to serve — barely escaped capture by crossing the Delaware into Pennsylvania. Washington had had the foresight to send an advance guard to commandeer all the boats along a thirty-mile stretch on the east bank to carry the men across the river’s swift currents and deprive the pursuing enemy of any means of following.
George Washington, commander in chief of the American Continental Army, received a mysterious letter from “A Friend to America,” offering secret French military aid.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
With southern New York and most of New Jersey in British hands, however, British marines prepared to storm ashore to seize the rebel capital of Philadelphia, and on December 12, Congress fled to Baltimore to resume the incessant, often infantile backbiting that they euphemistically called congressional debate. Many members seemed more at odds with each other than with their British overlords. South and North argued over the presidency of Congress, over command of the army, and over the status of sla
ves. Virginia and Connecticut each claimed lands in the Ohio Valley; Massachusetts claimed all of New York’s western territory along Lakes Ontario and Erie; and New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire all claimed Vermont. Adding to the conflicts were bitter confrontations within each region between radicals favoring independence and moderates who sought only political autonomy from Parliament — without renouncing their loyalty to the king or their status as British subjects.
“Congress is divided,” a French army officer reported back to French foreign minister Vergennes, “in spite of the watchwords … England, Country, Liberty, with which members cover up their mutual animosities. … The secret motive of their cabals, intrigues and everlasting bark is hatred between individuals or between states.” The Frenchman said he found Pennsylvania “infested with Royalists” and Maryland refusing to join the Revolution “in order to preserve its territorial rights.” He described North Carolina as “feeble” and South Carolina as having “neither moral nor physical energy.”6
In stark contrast, another letter from a most unlikely source lay on the French foreign minister’s desk and held his noble eyes in thrall: “The Americans will triumph, but they must be assisted in their struggle. We must … send secret assistance in a prudent manner to the Americans.”7
Comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s minister of foreign affairs, with whom Beaumarchais plotted to provide surreptitious French financial and military aid during the first years of the American Revolution.
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