Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Choiseul instructed Kalb to “learn the intentions of the inhabitants … ascertain whether they are in need of good engineers and artillery officers … find out what quantities of munitions of war and provisions they are able to procure … examine their resources in troops, fortified places, and forts … discover their plan of revolt, and the leaders who are expected to direct and control it … and determine the strength of their purpose to withdraw from the English government.”18

  A few months later, Kalb sent back an even more discouraging report than Pontleroy’s, saying he found Americans “little inclined to shake off English supremacy with the aid of foreign powers. Such an alliance would appear to them to be fraught with dangers to their liberties.” Although resentment against British rule was rising, he said, too many Americans remembered the savagery of French and Indian raiders during the Seven Years’ War and despised the French more than the British. “In spite of their restive spirit,” he concluded, “they all seem to be imbued with a heartfelt love of the mother country, from the leaders on down to the humblest citizen.”19

  Kalb predicted, however, that the colonies were “growing too powerful to remain governed from so far away much longer” and that “an independent state will certainly come forth in time. … the opening of actual hostilities … cannot be far distant.”20

  Gold by God! The Fuel of Life!

  MA JEUNESSE ÉTAIT si gaie, si folle, si heureuse, Beaumarchais recalled, describing his youth as a mixture of gaiety, craziness, and happiness.1 Born a genius, he easily transformed his natural gifts into wealth, becoming one of France’s youngest men of money — and certainly its happiest. A respected merchant and judge — and the nation’s most celebrated playwright — he lived in a palatial mansion on the Left Bank of Paris, surrounded by a large family of adoring relatives and countless friends, who filled his house with music, song, dance, gaiety, and — France being France — exquisite foods and fine wines.

  Beaumarchais had been born in a Paris clockmaker’s shop forty-two years earlier, on January 24, 1732 — a month before George Washington’s birth in Virginia. Like Washington, Beaumarchais was a commoner — the son of decidedly uncommon parents who had planted the seeds of genius in their son at the moment of his conception. The future savior of the American Revolution was their only surviving boy — four others had died in infancy — and he grew up at the center of the family’s collective attentions and affections in a household that resounded with the music, singing, and laughter of ever-joyful women — his two older sisters, three younger ones, and his mother. His mother was a talented musician who taught all the children to sing, compose music and lyrics, and play a variety of instruments. Together, she and the children wrote scores of poems, playlets, musical skits, and chamber works, which they performed for each other and the throngs of friends and relatives who regularly filled their salon.

  Madame Caron and her husband enrolled their son in a local school, but grew dissatisfied with its stagnant pace and schooled him at home, where he read and studied eighteen books a month and mastered violin, cello, flute, piano, and harp by the time he was twelve. Adept at focusing on several activities at once, he learned to dismantle, repair, and rebuild clocks — while composing and singing melodies or reciting his own poetry. His smile, humor, and lightning wit left others, including his family, gasping to keep up with him. His deft hands, quick tongue, and even quicker mind turned him into a consummate performer, whose acting, singing, dancing, clowning, and juggling seldom failed to evoke a storm of laughter or tears, along with occasional awe at his precocity:

  Que souvent il me prend envie

  D’aller au bout de l’univers;

  Passer le reste de ma vie

  Eloigné des hommes pervers2

  How I wish I could spend my life

  in the far reaches of the universe,

  far from man’s deceit.

  With a boy of so many evident talents, the Carons taught young Pierre as many skills as they could. Caron père was a gifted clockmaker who had extended his knowledge of mechanics into a variety of other fields. Descended from Swiss Huguenot clockmakers, he abjured Calvinism and embraced Catholicism to bypass the religious discrimination that blocked entry by Protestants into the Watchmakers’ Guild of Paris as a master craftsman. He set up shop on the rue de la Ferronnerie, near the right bank of the Seine River, just off the rue St. Denis, the teeming north–south axis of Paris along the ancient Roman road. The number of clockmakers, however, was greater than the demand for their services, and few could boast incomes large enough to support a family of nine. André-Charles Caron, therefore, pored over engineering texts and honed other mechanical skills to earn renown as a master engineer and attract commissions in fields unrelated to clocks. From far-off Spain, for example, the governor of Madrid commissioned Caron to design machinery for dredging harbors and rivers.

  His son Pierre-Augustin proved even more gifted, and his entry into his father’s shop dramatically increased the productivity of the family business — until the boy reached adolescence. He fell in with a group of youths who followed him about the neighborhood looking for — and finding — mischief, sometimes singing young Caron’s lewd lyrics con brio into the night to taunt sleeping neighbors. Unsatisfied with the allowance his father gave him, young Beaumarchais pocketed some of the money he received from customers for repairs he had made to their timepieces — money that should have gone into the store’s general receipts. After an outburst of noisy recriminations, his father ordered the boy out of the house — into the streets to live with his loutish friends.

  After a few days amid the terrifying dregs of humanity that slept on Paris streets at night, young Pierre sought refuge with relatives and family friends. Instructed in advance by his father, the friends offered the boy safe harbor — “one night or two, but no more” — and warned him he had best make amends with his father or face a life in the gutters. The boy wrote begging his father for forgiveness. After waiting for what he thought was a long enough time to frighten the boy to his core, Père Caron relented and invited the boy back into the family household — but under strict new rules:

  You shall make nothing, sell nothing, and cause nothing to be made or sold … except on my account. … You must get up at six in summertime and seven in winter; you must work until supper … at whatever I give you to do and at anything I give you to do, without showing any distaste for your work, using the talents which heaven has bestowed on you to become celebrated in your profession. …

  You must no longer go out at night, except on Saturdays and holidays, when you may dine with your friends, but must be home by nine. You must give up your party music and the company of young men. They have been your ruin. In view of your weakness for music, however, I will let you play the violin and flute on condition that you only play them on working days after supper. … I will allow you your room and board and eighteen francs [about $60 today] a month pocket money. … If you devote yourself, as you ought, to the interests of my business, and you manage to obtain any orders independently, I will give you a one-quarter share of the profits of whatever work you bring in.3

  Desperately lonely for the love and gaiety of his home — and determined to accept his father’s challenge to become “celebrated in your profession” — he replied in the humblest terms:

  Monsieur and honored father,

  I agree to all your conditions with every intention of meeting them, with the help of the Lord; I am sorry I had to learn to fulfill my family obligations in so unfortunate a way. I deserve the humiliation you have imposed. I can only hope that my future good conduct will induce you to restore your love and kindness on your son,

  A. Caron, fils.4

  Beaumarchais returned home, and, choked by his own tears — and his adoring mother’s embraces — immediately went to work in his father’s shop with newfound determination. With the help of his ever-ebullient sisters, he set the Caron house ablaze again with song and laughter but, in accordance
with his father’s new rules, only after supper and only with proper folk songs and airs. He abandoned thoughts of street life and devoted himself to learning his father’s craft. By the time he was nineteen, he had not only joined his father as a master craftsman, he had made several startling improvements in watch and clock mechanisms, learning advanced watch mechanics and design from books he borrowed from the king’s own celebrated watchmaker — Monsieur Lepaute. Encouraged by Lepaute, the boy invented a revolutionary new inner mechanism — an “escapement” — that allowed him to make the first watch small enough and light enough to wear on the wrist and replace the bulky watches that men carried in their pockets and women wore attached to brooches.

  Grateful to Lepaute for his tutelage, the boy rushed to show his invention to the great clockmaker, who pledged utter secrecy — but proceeded to incorporate it into a clock he was making for the king. Two weeks later, Caron sat in shock as he read the September 1753 issue of Le Mercure de France, the leading scientific periodical of the day. In it was an extensive report on the new Système Lepaute, which described in detail Caron’s own invention.

  As he raged about the house in tears, his father tried to calm the boy, explaining, “C’est normal” for the upper classes to step on those beneath them — “C’est comme ça,” he said. “That’s life.”

  But the boy was having none of it. Infuriated by his first confrontation with injustice, he sent his original designs to the Royal Academy of Sciences asking it to prevent the rival clockmaker from “taking from me the honor of a discovery which the Academy would have crowned with recognition!”5 He then wrote to the editor of Le Mercure: “I have read with the greatest astonishment that Monsieur Lepaute announces as his invention a new escapement for watches and clocks.”

  It is too important to me and my reputation to permit him to claim this invention by remaining silent about his breach of faith. … In the joy of my discovery last July 23, 1753, I had the weakness to confide this escapement to Monsieur Lepaute … under the promise of secrecy, but how could I imagine he would appropriate it. … In congratulating himself about his discovery of my invention, he neglected to mention the letter he sent to my father — and signed — admitting that I had shared the details of my new escapement with him two months earlier. … I earnestly beg that no additional credence be given to Monsieur Lepaute’s claim until the Royal Academy decides who is the author of the new escapement … to expose the plagiarism.6

  Three months later, the academy concluded that it would “regard Monsieur Caron as the true inventor of the new escapement and that Monsieur Lepaute has only imitated the invention.” The academy called Caron’s invention “the most perfect yet invented … for watches”7 and set off a wave of publicity that reached the Palace of Versailles, where King Louis XV translated his passion for unusual timepieces into orders for Caron’s miniature watches for himself, his daughters, and Madame de Pompadour. Four months later, Caron wrote to his cousin, a watchmaker in London:

  I have at last delivered the watch to the king, who gave me the joy of immediately recognizing me and calling me by name. His Majesty ordered me to show the watch to all the noblemen. … His Majesty wanted to know the minutest details of my invention. The watch in a ring for Madame de Pompadour is … very much admired although it is not entirely finished. The king asked me to make another for him. … Each of the noblemen followed the king’s example. … I have also made a curious little clock the king wants to give Mademoiselle Victoire [one of the king’s daughters]. It has two dials so the time can be read on either side.8

  Caron gasped as he walked through the palace for the first time, choked by aromas of perfume and talc, blinded by kaleidoscopic flashes of gold, silver, and crystal, and marble walls, ceilings, and floors. When he left, he all but floated across the Marble Courtyard beneath the royal apartments, exhilarated by faeried visions of ermine, silk, and velvet robes that few commoners ever saw, let alone wore or even touched. But it was the gold that captured his heart — the leaves of gold that lapped the cornices, frames, and furnishings. He tried to make sense of it all — that such a palace could be one man’s house — a king’s house.

  Back in Paris, amid the smothering smells of slop and street sewerage, he applied his improving skills for swaying public opinion by writing to newspapers to proclaim himself “a young artist” whose new invention “the Academy has crowned with its approbation”:

  The main gate of the Palace of Versailles, which Louis XIV transformed into the seat of government. It was here that Beaumarchais, then a young Paris clockmaker, showed his amazing new miniature watches to King Louis XV and began the climb to fame and fortune.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  With this invention I can make watches as thin and small as may be desired, thinner than any ever made before, without the slightest modification of their fine quality. The first of these is already in the hands of the king; his majesty has worn it a year, and is very pleased with it. I had the honor to present to Madame de Pompadour … a watch built into a ring, only four and one-half lines in diameter [three-quarters of an inch] and two-thirds of a line thick [about one-tenth of an inch] … the smallest watch ever made.9

  Caron signed his press notices Caron, fils, Horloger du Roi — Caron, the Younger, Clockmaker to the King.

  Demand for Caron’s revolutionary watches brought a torrent of orders to his and his father’s shop and took him with increasing frequency to Versailles to deliver them to his noble customers. One of them — the beautiful Madeleine-Catherine Francquet — had married a palace sinecure twenty years her elder, whose work as Controller of the Pantry bored him as much as he bored his twenty-eight-year-old wife. Both, therefore, drew enormous pleasure from the sudden appearance of the ingenuously charming, handsome, and entertaining twenty-two-year-old Caron, who illuminated their gloomy salon with witty chatter and cheerful serenades of his own composition on the guitar, viola, flute, or harpsichord:

  Donne au plaisir le printemps de ta vie:

  Un âge vient où l’ont se sent vieillir;

  La fleur d’amour alors peut faire envie,

  Les sens glacés ne peuvent la ceuillir.

  Surrender to joy in the springtime of life

  Before you’re too old and start to tire;

  Love’s flower may still arouse desire,

  But frozen senses can’t thaw in its fire.10

  While Monsieur dozed, Madame slipped over to sit by Caron at the instrument, drawing ever closer, fingers glancing, meeting, caressing …

  Within a few weeks, Madeleine convinced her husband to transfer his sinecure to Caron, and in November 1755, two years after Caron had invented his watch mechanism, a royal warrant appointed him contrôleur clerc d’Office de la Maison du Roi — a position that opened the palace gates and allowed him to begin a new life as a courtier.

  Great Stewards of France, high stewards and ordinary stewards of our household, masters and controllers of our pantry and account room, greetings! Upon good and praiseworthy report to us of Monsieur Pierre-August Caron and his zeal in our service, we have this day appointed him … one of our clerc-contrôleurs of our household … that he may have and exercise, enjoy and use, the honors, authorities, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, salary, rights, et cet.

  Given at Versailles under the seal of our trust, November 9, 1755.

  Louis11

  The young Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, only twenty-three, was already a famed watchmaker and on his way to becoming the greatest playwright of his time, while pursuing a second career as a government secret agent. Portrait and engraving by Jean-Marc Nattier, 1865.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  Two months later, old Francquet died, and, after an appropriate mourning period, Madeleine-Catherine married her handsome young lover and gave him the new, aristocratic name of her small country estate — De Boismarché — which he quickly corrupted into the more mellifluous de Beaumarchais.

  Although his st
riking good looks drew sighs from women at court, his new veneer of nobility did little to disguise his commoner origins, which drew nothing but sneers and snubs when he insinuated himself into clusters of courtiers along the gilded halls and mirrored rooms of the palace. His mechanical inventiveness had won grudging admiration, but his common clothes, manners, and bearing — and his swift insinuation into palace society — provoked only scorn. Over the ensuing months, Madeleine taught him court demeanor and helped him purchase an appropriate wardrobe, but after only nine months, she died without registering her will and left him without friends at court, a home, or any of her other assets to call his own. The manoir de Boismarché and the rest of her fortune reverted to her blood relatives — except for her beloved old harp, which he secreted from the house. To add to his grief — for he did, indeed, love his wife — he suffered the loss of his mother soon after.

  Although his sinecure took him to the palace regularly, almost everyone he met rebuffed his social overtures. There were, of course, hundreds of courtiers with similar low-level sinecures clustered along the interminable palace corridors. Exchanging witty inanities, they gorged themselves at the king’s tables in the innumerable reception rooms, where palace functionaries held endless receptions for a parade of visiting dignitaries, whose rank and importance determined the size and splendor of their receptions. Most courtiers at Versailles had backgrounds as ignoble as that of Beaumarchais, but they repeated their claims to noble blood so often that they came to believe their own inventions. As a result, they routinely snubbed newly arrived interlopers like Beaumarchais who tried to intrude into their midst. Regardless of how he embellished his dress or polished his manners, he only managed to infuriate them. In comparison to their often slovenly demeanor, he was tall, handsome, fit, and straight as a soldier, and he quickly learned to display the manners of a peer of the realm. When combined with his quick wit, brilliant conversation, and gift for repartee, his demeanor set all the king’s courtiers agog — the ladies with love and the men with hatred born of envy and fear.