Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Discouraged by his failure to integrate into day-to-day palace life, but unwilling to return to the tedium of watch repairs, he moved in with a friend in Paris and frequented the city’s literary haunts, meeting journalists, poets, writers, and philosophers. Within a few days, their erudition, eloquence, and wit — and snide responses to his comments — made him feel as inferior intellectually as palace courtiers had made him feel socially. Motivated by both anger and ardor, he devoured books by the bundle — literature, grammar, geography, history, mathematics, geometry, and philosophy. He all but absorbed in his soul Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origin et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men), which condemned the state as the cause of inequality and oppression.

  “The first man who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of class society,” Rousseau declared in Discours.12 Like Beaumarchais’s father, Rousseau had converted to Catholicism to avoid state and institutional discrimination against Protestants. During the writing of Discours, he returned to his birthplace in Geneva to become a Protestant again before returning to Paris to resume his writing. In 1762, his Le contrat social (The Social Contract) stunned French thinkers with its opening proposal: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. He who believes himself the master of others does not escape being more of a slave than they.”13

  Le contrat social fed the fantasies of poets, playwrights, composers, and dreamers who pictured primitive man — especially the American Indian in his primeval forest — living in Edenic splendor and mutual beneficence. Beaumarchais embraced Rousseau’s vision as his own — and extended it to include not only American Indians, but also the colonists living in what he imagined was complete freedom and harmony with man and nature in the North American wilderness.

  To break the routine of reading, Beaumarchais played his wife’s old harp, often growing so frustrated with its complexities that he ripped it apart and rebuilt its pedal mechanisms to make it easier to play.14 Then, on a visit to the palace at Versailles, he stumbled into a chance conversation about his reinvented harp — and music generally — with Charles Lenormant d’Étioles, the abstinent spouse of Madame de Pompadour. Knowing his wife had stretched out in the king’s bedroom suite behind the long, glittering wall of the great Hall of Mirrors, Lenormant was usually too embarrassed to appear at the palace. He compensated for his humiliating celibacy, however, by staging banquets, galas, and masquerade balls at his own Château d’Étioles, where he converted one of the largest rooms into a concert hall and theater, with a fully equipped stage for popular lewd comedies. Beaumarchais had honed his skills in the genre as a youth, and Lenormant invited the watchmaker to the château to perform and present original plays of his own. At Lenormant’s behest, Beaumarchais wrote a series of short plays that won the nobleman’s admiration and friendship — both for the scripts and for Beaumarchais’s incredible ability to sit at his harp and improvise short, witty songs. Often rude or lewd or both, they evoked gales of laughter — especially when they portrayed outrageous behavior by the aristocracy. In one of his airs, he invited the audience to let themselves go, in the modern sense, saying and doing anything they pleased. The time was right for such behavior, he said, and he was not there judge them.

  Oser tout dire, oser tout faire,

  C’est le bon siècle d’à présent;

  Mais blâmer n’est pas mon affaire;

  Rions; moi, je suis né plaisant.

  Dare to say anything, dare to do anything;

  Now, right now, is the best time for you;

  I won’t judge you — that’s not my affair;

  Let us laugh; it’s what I was born to do.15

  Beaumarchais’s reinvented harp drew so much attention from other musicians and instrument makers that it became the rage of court society — and a new source of income for the former watchmaker. The sounds of Beaumarchais songs and compositions resounded across Paris and Versailles and reached the ears of the king’s reclusive daughters. Inevitably, they summoned the inventor of the new harp to their private apartments to teach them its intricacies, and, as his new watch mechanism had done, his new harp catapulted him farther along the path to fame and fortune.

  Beaumarchais suppressed his shock when he entered the private apartments at Versailles, where the reverential portraits of the king’s daughters he’d seen along the palace’s public halls metamorphosed into the grotesque genetic realities of Bourbon family beaks and bottoms. Even their father the king gave them vulgar nicknames: he called Madame Louise, the youngest at twenty-two, Chiffe (spineless); Madame Sophie, twenty-five, Graille (a fat glutton); Madame Victoire, the fattest of the lot at twenty-six, Coche (a beamy boat); and Madame Adelaide, by far the prettiest at twenty-seven, Loque (a wreck). Although each was addressed as “Madame,” Mesdames were all unmarried demoiselles. Louise was impossibly shy, kept her head bowed, eyes darting from side to side; Sophie was “slow-witted and dull”; Victoire was fat. Only Adelaide claimed a modicum of charm and good looks — but her explosive temper unnerved every potential suitor.

  It was into this den of hapless harridans that twenty-seven-year-old sieur de Beaumarchais brought his disinterest, charm, smile, wit, and musicianship in 1759 — along with a touch of melancholy to befit his status as a forlorn young widower — and, indeed, an orphan. Still mourning the loss of his mother, he was not entirely disingenuous in finding solace and comfort in the presence of the four matronlike princesses. His demeanor combined with his soft, seductive songs to send the four maidens into swoons of rapture. They invited him to be their music master; he accepted, but humbly refused all compensation and, over the next four years, taught them to play the harp and guitar, composed scores of melodies easy enough for them to perform, and, when they were troubled, simply played, sang, or read to them — or listened to their woes. They adored him; he became a great friend of their brother, the heir-apparent to the throne; and, each evening, when the king invaded their apartment for his ritual visit, he too grew enchanted by the young man’s amazing skills, erudition, and evident affection for his otherwise repulsive daughters.

  As Beaumarchais was playing the harp one evening, the king terrified his daughters by bursting into the apartment unexpectedly, without being announced. As others snapped to their feet, the eyes of the music master were closed, his mind focused on his music, and he failed to stand — an error punishable by imprisonment or worse. The king had ordered one royal attendant drawn and quartered by horses before the palace gates for far less a misstep. Realizing his potentially fatal error, Beaumarchais sprang to attention amid the clatter of his falling chair and harp. In an unprecedented response that left attendants gasping, the usually fierce-faced king smiled, put his hand on the young man’s shoulder — actually touching a commoner with his divine digits — and begged him to continue playing.

  A wave of envy and rage surged through palace halls and antechambers, with infuriated courtiers turning their backs on Beaumarchais as he passed. Some sneered aloud of needing their watches and clocks repaired. One courtier actually stopped Beaumarchais to ask that he rewind a watch.

  Embarrassed by the snickers and smiles that surrounded him, Beaumarchais first tried excusing himself, saying “I no longer practice the art, Monsieur.”

  “Please, Monsieur,” the taunter retorted, “do not refuse me this one favor.”

  As onlookers all but doubled over in laughter, Beaumarchais smiled, took the watch, turned it over in his hands, and let it fall to the marble floor and shatter.

  “I’m so sorry,” he cried. “I’m afraid I’ve become clumsy. Please excuse me, Monsieur.”16

  The insults did not cease. One envious courtier planted a rumor that reached the ears of the princesses, contending that Beaumarchais and his father were bitter enemies. Warned by one of the princess’s attendants, Beaumarchais rushed to P
aris and fetched his father, promising a private tour of the palace. When the princesses saw their young instructor walking the corridors with an old man in tow and determined his identity, they confronted their music master.

  “We were told you had quarreled,” said Princess Adelaide.

  “I, Madame?” he responded. “I pass my life with him. … If you will deign to see him he will testify to the attachment which I have never ceased to have for him.”17

  The malignant rumors kept surfacing, however, until Beaumarchais had no choice but to challenge a young nobleman to a duel — an illegal exercise he had only read about in adventure tales.

  “They mounted their horses and rode to the walls of Meudon, beneath which they fought,” wrote the contemporary historian Paul Philippe Gudin de La Brenellerie, whom Beaumarchais had met at the Étioles château. Also born to a Protestant watchmaker, Gudin was short, fat, slow — and tied tightly to the apron strings of his mother, who envisioned her son as the next Voltaire. Gudin eventually produced an unreadable thirty-volume history of France, along with innumerable dramas and poems, which drew nothing but ridicule when he tried reading them at literary salons. Only Beaumarchais had had the kindness to compliment the little man at a reading one evening. In doing so, he won a close, loyal, and trusted friend for life. Gudin attached himself to Beaumarchais for the next thirty years, becoming his first biographer, his “Boswell,” and, most importantly on this particular day, his second at the duel at Meudon. Still the deft juggler with acrobatic quickness, Beaumarchais hopped aside to dodge the first thrust, the second, the third — then, on instinct, without realizing it, “he had the good fortune,” according to Gudin, “to plunge his sword into the bosom of his adversary”:

  but when he withdrew it, he saw the blood stream out and his enemy fall to the ground and, evidently seized by remorse, he thought only of the best way to help him. He put his handkerchief on the wound to stop the flow of blood and keep his adversary from fainting.

  “Fly,” said the latter, “fly, Monsieur Beaumarchais. You are lost if you are seen — if it becomes known that you have killed me.”

  “You must have help,” Beaumarchais insisted, “I’ll get you some help.”

  He mounted his horse, galloped into the village of Meudon, found a surgeon and galloped back with him to the spot where the wounded man lay. During the eight days through which he lingered, the young knight refused to reveal the name of the man who had wounded him so severely. “I have what I deserve,” he insisted. “To please persons for whom I had no esteem, I insulted an honest man who had never offended me in any way.” He carried with him to the tomb the name of the person who had deprived him of life.18

  Before the young nobleman died, the guilt-stricken Beaumarchais confessed to the princesses, who immediately appealed to their father to protect the music master from criminal prosecution, “and his paternal goodness,” according to Gudin, “made him reply, ‘Arrange it in such a way, my children, that I may not hear of it.’ The princesses took all the necessary precautions to bury the story of the duel with its victim.”19

  The knight’s untimely death did little to ease the mistreatment of the music master by envious courtiers. While attending a ball in Versailles ten days after the duel, he stopped to watch a group of noblemen gambling at cards in an anteroom. One of them casually asked Beaumarchais to lend him thirty-five louis (about $1,000 in modern currency). To appear gracious, Beaumarchais agreed, anticipating repayment by evening’s end. After three weeks, he wrote to the man, and received a written promise of repayment the next day. None came. A second letter three weeks later went unanswered for three more weeks, and Beaumarchais again wrote: “Inasmuch as you broke your written promise to repay me, Monsieur, I am not surprised by your failure to reply to my last letter. … You owe me neither civility nor respect, but you do owe me thirty-five louis.”20

  A few days later, Beaumarchais received an indignant reply with what amounted to a virtual challenge to another duel: “I know that I am unfortunate enough to owe you thirty-five louis, Monsieur, but I deny that this in any way dishonors me so long as I intend eventually to repay you. You shall have your thirty-five louis on Saturday; I give you my word. But I don’t know whether I shall be able to close this matter with moderation.”21

  Astonished by the man’s gall, Beaumarchais snapped back, “I shall await the result of your third promise at my house all Saturday morning; you say you cannot vouch for your moderation, but I can assure you I do not want to aggravate an already unfortunate situation for which I am not responsible. If, after this assurance, you intend to exceed the limits of civilized behavior — a situation I do not at all desire — you will find me, Monsieur, ready to respond appropriately to any insult.” The money arrived two days later by messenger — without further correspondence.22

  “The envy toward him resulted in strengthening his character,” Gudin recalled. “He learned to control himself, master his impetuosity and passions and retain a coolness and presence of mind. He turned everything that seemed about to destroy him to his advantage and used every threat against him to rise to superior circumstances.”23

  Last Night Poor, Wealthy Today!

  NOT EVERYONE AT Versailles turned their envy of Beaumarchais into insults or injury.

  The great financier Joseph Pâris-Duverney had made a fortune with his two brothers as arms merchants to the French army during King George’s War between France and England from 1740 to 1748. He doubled the size of his fortune supplying arms to the French army in the great Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, the world conflict which, as noted, began in the American wilderness when Lieutenant Colonel George Washington ambushed a squadron of French troops and killed its commander.

  As a price for a near-monopoly supplying arms to the French military, Pâris-Duverney agreed to finance building the École Militaire, an elaborate and ornate training school for officers on the Champs de Mars, a huge stretch of flatland on the river Seine in what was then the countryside between Paris and Versailles but now lies behind the Eiffel Tower. Construction began in 1751, but with the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, the king lost interest. His generals needed officers on battlefields around the world immediately; there was no time to lose sending them to school; they could hone their skills under fire. Without royal sponsorship, Pâris-Duverney faced a halt to construction and loss of his investment — until he learned of the ambitious young Beaumarchais and his curious ties to the royal family.

  “He wished to make my acquaintance,” Beaumarchais noted. “He offered me his friendship, assistance and influence to see if I had enough influence to succeed in doing what … he had tried in vain.”1

  Joseph Pâris-Duverney, the legendary French financier who opened the way for Beaumarchais’s successful entry into the world of international trade.

  CABINET DES ESTAMPES, BIBLIOTHÈQUE

  NATIONALE, PARIS

  Unlike other retainers, Beaumarchais’s disinterested relationship with the princesses allowed him to be frank, and when he explained that he could make his own fortune if they accompanied him on a visit to the École Militaire, they happily agreed. On the first pleasant day that followed, they asked Beaumarchais to accompany them to the school and enjoyed the excursion so much they convinced their father to visit it with them and renew his official sponsorship. Pâris-Duverney, in turn, all but adopted Beaumarchais as a son and pledged to help him reap riches. “He initiated me into the secrets of finance, of which he was a consummate master. Under his guidance … I invested in a number of ventures in which he helped me with money, influence and advice. … I started making my fortune.”2 Beaumarchais would later put what he learned from Pâris-Duverney to good use in the American Revolution.

  The completion of the École Militaire, the French training school for army officers, resulted from Beaumarchais’s influence with King Louis XV’s daughters.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  As Beaumarchais’s fortune flowered, he used
his money to buy a more substantial footing in the nobility, spending 85,000 francs (about $300,000 in today’s currency) for a more prestigious sinecure as a secretary to the king, which paid him a token salary for doing nothing, but gave him unlimited access to the palace and all royal functions. It was what manor-born aristocrats snidely called une savonette à vilain — a soap to lubricate entry of the low-born into the highest levels of society. Pâris-Duverney loaned Beaumarchais 500,000 francs ($1,750,000) to buy an even more prestigious post as Lieutenant-général des chasses aux baillage et capitainerie de la Varenne du Louvre, which put him in a judge’s prestigious robes. His judicial powers were somewhat less grand than his robes, though, limited as they were to fining poachers who trespassed in the king’s hunting preserves in the forests surrounding Paris. He nonetheless carried the intimidating title of Lieutenant-General of the Court, and he took his work, if not his title, seriously, carefully studying Montesquieu’s massive — and classic — work on French laws, political science, and social philosophy, De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws). The French political philosopher classed government into three categories: despotism, based on fear; monarchy, based on honor; and the republic, based on virtue, with individual liberty most likely to survive in small republics in which governors remain close to the governed and aware of their needs.3 Having seen the French monarch abandon all sense of honor and turn despot, Beaumarchais grew enchanted with Montesquieu’s descriptions of republican government, and he displayed Montesquieu’s influence from the bench.