In his new post, Beaumarchais was subordinate to but one man — the Captain General, who, at the time, was the duc de La Vrillière, a pompous minister at Versailles who loathed riding to Paris to deal with peasant poachers and routinely left court business to his lieutenant general. Aware of the duc’s disdain for the court, the minister of justice did not bother consulting the duc when he acceded to the request of Pâris-Duverney to appoint Beaumarchais. The duc, however, grew furious at what he perceived as both a discourtesy and the degradation of being on the same bench with the son of a commoner — a clockmaker at that. From the first, the duc de La Vrillière despised Beaumarchais, who nonetheless dutifully appeared on the bench in his judicial robes every Thursday. Although charged with fining poachers according to the value of the rabbits, birds, deer, or other animals they killed in the king’s woods, Beaumarchais routinely dismissed cases against poor or hungry peasants — politely wishing them bon appetit and incurring even more of the duc’s wrath. Montesquieu was taking hold of his mind as well as his heart.
Beaumarchais’s newfound wealth permitted him to buy a magnificent 60,000-livre (about $250,000) mansion that still stands on the tree-lined rue de Condé, down the gentle slope from Queen Marie de Medici’s seventeenth-century Palais du Luxembourg, and only a few steps from the Place de l’Odéon. From his window he gazed at the palace and its magnificent woods, gardens, fountains, and statues — an ensemble that was not as grand as Versailles, but then he was not a king. Not yet! At his insistence, his widowed father abandoned the clock-repair business and retired to a life of leisure and luxury in his son’s new home, with the Caron daughters who had yet to find husbands.
“I bless heaven in my old age,” his father wrote, “for giving me a son with such an excellent heart. … My soul leaps with joy at owing my happiness, after God, to him alone.”4 Shortly after he had moved to his son’s elegant mansion, however, Père Caron found another source of happiness in a neighboring mansion, where the lovely widow Madame Henry lured him into her arms.
In 1764, Caron’s two older sisters left for Madrid after the older of the two married an architect, and he agreed to the younger girl’s coming along as her sister’s companion. Within weeks of their arrival, a young writer, Don José Clavijo y Fajardo, wooed and won the younger sister’s heart and signed a marriage contract to wed her immediately after his appointment as Keeper of the Crown Archives. Once in his new post, however, he abandoned the young lady, who wrote to her father in shame and despair. Irate over his sister’s mistreatment, Beaumarchais prepared to go to Spain to avenge her disgrace. After disclosing his plans to Pâris-Duverney, the wily old financier gave his protégé a second, more profitable incentive for going. France had ceded Louisiana to Spain as part of the peace settlement after the Seven Years’ War, and, with the cession, French merchants lost trading rights in New Orleans. Pâris-Duverney and a group of French bankers wanted to establish a Spanish company to allow French négriers — slave traders — and other French merchants to continue their commerce under the Spanish flag and profit from the growing need for African labor and European supplies to develop resources in the Spanish Americas. To bribe the right officials and obtain the concession, he gave Beaumarchais letters of credit totaling 200,000 livres (about $800,000 in modern currency).
On May 1, 1764, Beaumarchais left for Madrid, and eighteen days later he pounded at the door of his sister’s suitor demanding satisfaction, either in the field at sword point or at the altar. The young man chose the safety of the altar, apologized to Beaumarchais’s sister, and reaffirmed his marriage proposal — even signing a document admitting his caddishness and declaring his affianced “pure and without blemish.” Once rid of his irrational French tormentor, however, the young Spaniard slipped away again. Beaumarchais scoured the city, found him, and again extracted a pledge that he would marry the poor girl — but he again disappeared. After the resourceful Beaumarchais found him the third time, the Spaniard claimed he had previously offered to marry a chambermaid and, by law, could not marry Beaumarchais’s sister until the chambermaid renounced her claim or died.
By now, however, the Frenchman’s farcical daily chase and the Spaniard’s clever escapes had become targets of sustained laughter in salons across Madrid, with newspapers turning the drama into serial cartoons. When Beaumarchais called Clavijo’s bluff and demanded that the Spaniard marry the chambermaid, Clavijo ran to the police and accused his would-be brother-in-law of plotting against Spain. Facing arrest and deportation, Beaumarchais rode off to the palace with his letters of introduction from the French king’s daughters to their cousin Spanish king Carlos III. After listening to the sumptuously attired Beaumarchais’s entertaining description of his sister’s dishonor, the king ordered the false fiancé fired and banned from government employment for life. Fearing arrest, the would-be archivist fled to a monastery outside the Madrid city walls.
“The coxcomb,” Beaumarchais wrote in triumph to this father, “is completely crushed. His post is given away. He is now left with the choice of turning capuchin monk or leaving the country.”5
With his sister’s honor restored, Beaumarchais used his newfound friendship with the king to insinuate himself into Spanish court society. His chivalry in protecting his sister’s honor combined with his good looks, wit, and musical talents to make him one of the most admired figures in Madrid. “If an inhabitant of Madrid sent you any news of me,” he wrote his father,
you would learn that your son was amusing himself here like a king; he spends all his evenings at the house of the Russian ambassador’s wife and at milady Rochford’s, the British ambassador’s wife; he dines four times a week with the commander of engineers, and drives about Madrid in a coach and six; he goes to the royal palace to see ministers … and takes one of his meals every day at the French ambassador’s. … Lord Rochford dotes upon me, goes to the Prado with me, sups with me, sings duets with me, and laughs aloud with me in the most astonishing fashion for an English diplomat.6
Women doted on him as well. “I have this afternoon been to the French ambassador’s in the carriage of Mme. la Marquise de La Croix, who has the goodness to drive me everywhere,” he boasted to his father. “She is a charming lady with great standing here because of her intelligence and grace as well as rank. I would die in this dull city if it were not for her delicious company.” The marquise was a niece of the Bishop of Orléans and wife of a lieutenant general in the Spanish king’s artillery. Her beauty and musical gifts had made her a centerpiece of Madrid’s diplomatic set; her attraction to her handsome and talented compatriot Beaumarchais was instant.
“In the room where I am writing,” he announced to his father a few weeks after meeting the marquise, “is a great and beautiful lady … who overwhelms me with kindness. I admit that without the charm of such delightful company, my business in Spain would not be enjoyable. But you must not conclude that I am neglecting my business.”7
Indeed, he was not. After submitting a plan to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies, he proposed establishing a French trading company in Madrid to handle all imports and exports of the Louisiana Territory. He then proposed that the Pâris-Duverney interests develop agricultural and manufacturing facilities in undeveloped areas of Spain … and on and on.
“The most comprehensive and lofty projects,” he told his father,
are no strangers to my mind: My mind conceives and comprehends with ease that which would immediately check ordinary, indolent minds. … I have now managed to make myself absolute master of the enterprise for supplying the entire provisions for the whole of the troops of Spain, Majorca, and the garrisons on the coast of Africa; and those of all persons living at the king’s expense. It amounts to more than twenty millions a year. My company is organized, my officials are appointed. I have four cargoes of corn on the way from both New England and from the south. … I have signed the celebrated agreement which entitles me to treat with the … Minister of War and Finance. Every one in Madrid is talk
ing about it. …
Good night dear father; believe me, you must not be astonished at either my success, nor the opposite if it should befall me. … I shall soon be thirty-three. At twenty-four, I still worked in a shop. I am now at the prime of my life; my mind and body will never have greater vigor. … I have made up my mind that, over the next twenty years, my long labors will produce great success and permit retirement in tranquillity. In the meanwhile, I laugh; my inexhaustible good humor does not leave me for a moment. I do not tell you all now, but you may rely on my never forgetting your welfare. It is my part to work, yours to rest. The time will come when you will enjoy your old age as you deserve, free of care, among your loving children.8
In an afterthought, Beaumarchais told his father of the “delightful suppers” he had attended with the highest levels of Madrid society and the verses he had been writing for Spanish seguedillas. “I chose the most popular air, a soft, touching, charming melody, and wrote words to it. … My last seguedilla is in the hands of every one who speaks French in Madrid.”9 (The seguedilla is a Spanish dance to whose music poets often added four or seven short verses. The most famous Beaumarchais seguedilla appears near the end of chapter 12, just before the section titled “Coda.”)
His songwriting success provoked an interest in theater, which he attended regularly. He began writing to great literary figures, including Voltaire, to whom he sent original work for criticism. In his reply, Voltaire diplomatically sidestepped any criticisms of Beaumarchais’s writing, but he “compliments me, playfully, on my thirty-two teeth, my lively philosophy, and my age.”10
After a year in Madrid, Beaumarchais returned to France in March 1765, traveling across the Pyrenées Mountains through the worst storms of the year. By early April, he arrived back in Paris to find both his house and the palace at Versailles in a state of utter turmoil. At home, his father had married the widow Madame Henry and moved out of the rue de Condé to new quarters, which the old man blithely charged to his son’s account. Beaumarchais had no sooner adjusted to the departure of his father than his youngest sister, “Tonton,” the liveliest, most lovable of his lovely bevy of sisters, left the rue de Condé to marry her own longtime beau, leaving Beaumarchais with but one sister to join him in song at the harpsichord.
When Beaumarchais went to Versailles, he learned that Madame de Pompadour had died and that his good friend, the prince and heir apparent, was ill and apparently approaching the same fate. Adding to the somber mood, his long absence from their salon had cost him the patronage, if not the friendship, of the princesses, who had found new distractions that left them little time for the songs and patter of the clockmaker’s son. Beaumarchais was wealthy enough by then, however, to pursue a life of leisure, and he decided to quit palace life, sell his palace sinecures, and pursue a writing career. He retained his judgeship in Paris and resumed his Thursday appearances on the bench, but spent the rest of his time writing a variety of plays, ranging from what were called parades — one-act comedies with carefully constructed plots — and scènes, which were short pieces, usually involving a domestic dispute filled with off-color jokes using puns that were at one and the same time appropriate for the situation, but had obscene double meanings. Injecting his own original wit to refresh age-old plots and characters, he soon found his little comedies in demand in scores of manors and châteaus, where noblemen and their ladies, families, and friends enjoyed rehearsing and staging parades and scènes for their own amusement.
Confident he had learned his skill well enough to write a full-length presentation, he convinced the king’s daughters to sponsor his first play, Eugénie. It opened on January 29, 1767, to a chorus of hisses, whistles, and jeers. A long, tedious, melodrama, its five acts and sixty-two scenes depicted Lord Clarendon’s tiresome attempts to lure the innocent virgin Eugénie into bed by staging a fake marriage ceremony. Along the way, His Lordship and Eugénie’s brother take turns saving each other’s lives and become close friends — until the brother discovers all and challenges Clarendon to a duel to salvage his sister’s honor. Ah, but no need! His Lordship trips over his own devices and falls in love with the tender lass he tried to deceive. Rather than risk the life of her brother, who is now his friend, he repents and marries Eugénie — and they all skip happily offstage together. On opening night, a chorus of audience catcalls accompanied their departure.
Intent on purging himself of the critical humiliation, Beaumarchais followed the advice of a critic, cut the play by one-third, and rewrote the rest. The result drew audience cheers and new, revised reviews by critics for what was then considered a long run of twenty-three performances. England’s legendary David Garrick — author of twenty plays, as well as his nation’s greatest actor — commissioned a translation of Eugénie, renamed it The School for Rakes, and acted in it himself. Unfortunately, a number of French noblemen who saw Eugénie in both its original and revised formats thought they recognized themselves in the character of Lord Clarendon; they left the theater determined to wreak revenge on Beaumarchais.
Even the most successful playwright did not earn enough from the theater to cover costs of daily life in Paris, let alone live in the style of Beaumarchais. After his triumph in the theater, Beaumarchais sought new opportunities in finance and, as ever, in romance. After seeing the original presentation of Eugénie, a wealthy Paris silk merchant and his wife who were friends of Beaumarchais blamed the play’s initial failure on Beaumarchais’s having lived alone too long without a wife. An inveterate busybody who dabbled in matchmaking, the merchant’s wife told Beaumarchais she planned to ride with a friend in an open carriage the following day under the shade of the chestnut trees along the Allée des Veuves — the Widows’ Alley — near the Champs Elysées. Her friend, she said, was a beautiful and charming young widow whom she would introduce to Beaumarchais if he happened to ride by at the same time.
Poised majestically atop his magnificent horse and dressed in his most elegant horseman’s gear, Beaumarchais high-trotted to his friend’s carriage the next day and all but bounded off his mount to take the hand of Mme. Geneviève-Madeleine Lévêque. Née Watebled, Madame Lévêque was the beautiful blond widow of a judge — in her early thirties, wealthy, merry, and bright. The last two traits were as important as the others, if not more so in a house filled with as much merriment and wit as the Beaumarchais mansion. Song and laughter reigned every moment of the day, as Beaumarchais, his father, his sisters, or friends gathered regularly to regale each other singing in harmony or in boisterous rounds at the dining room table. Standing apart discreetly were the smiling domestics he continually rescued from hardships and untold cruelties in and about the theater neighborhoods and nursed back to health.
When the family wasn’t singing, Beaumarchais and the others fell into the grip of what had become the latest Parisian after-dinner pastime — the charade, a word game in which players figured out the “punny” definition of a word from two interrelated clues, as in “Mon premier, c’est … Mon deuxième … Mon tout …” (My first can weigh a lot … my second is a lot of weight … my sum is a great American general. Answer: Washington = Washing + ton.) Laughter and song inevitably led to love and, in April 1768, Beaumarchais married Geneviève. Eight months later, she bore him his first child, a son, Pierre-Augustin-Eugène.
As Beaumarchais reveled in the joys of fatherhood, the French government launched a program to rebuild its navy and replace ships that the British had destroyed in the Seven Years’ War. In desperate need of lumber for shipbuilders, it offered eight-year concessions to entrepreneurs to harvest trees in the king’s forests. Never one to miss an opportunity to profit from government enterprises, Pâris-Duverney sent for his protégé Beaumarchais, and they established a jointly owned company to exploit 2,400 acres of prime forest at Chinon, near the confluence of the Loire, Indre, and Vienne Rivers just south of Tours. They agreed it would be best for Beaumarchais to take personal command of the enterprise to ensure maximum profits. Several days after ar
riving at his new job, he wrote to his wife:
You asked me to write you, my dear love, about my work. I have to resolve misunderstandings between directors, managers, clerks; handle a budget of more than 100,000 crowns [more than $1.2 million], visit harbors, oversee 200 lumberjacks in the forest, arrange transport of wood from 280 acres, supervise building of new roads from the forest to the river and repair of old ones, order three or four thousand tons of hay and oats for thirty dray horses, oversee construction of gates and sluices on the River Indre to give us waterways on which to ship wood during the entire year, supervise loading of 50 barges that are waiting to carry their cargoes to Tours, Saumur, Angers and Nantes, sign leases for seven or eight farms to supply food and other provisions for our workers, oversee the bookkeeping for receipts and disbursements. That, my dear wife, is a brief description of my labors. …
You see, my dear love, we do not sleep here as much as in Pantin [his wife’s country home just north of Paris], but the work I do is far from disagreeable. This retreat is not for the pretentious. … If I were mean enough to wish you the misfortune of living in a desolate country in want of all pleasures, I would beg you to come to me. … Adieu, my love; good-night; I am going to bed. And my son, my son. How is he? I have to laugh to myself when I think that I am working here for him.11
Besides writing to his wife, Beaumarchais, now thirty-eight, spent his free time writing a second full-length play — Les deux amis (The Two Friends) — which opened in Paris on January 13, 1770 … and closed ten nights later. Beneath the poster outside the theater someone scrawled beneath the title: “By an author who has none.” It was the story of a tax collector who tries to save a friend from bankruptcy by borrowing from the public till. One critic called it “an absurd story of loans — without interest.”12
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