The failure of his second play marked the beginning of an avalanche of woes for Beaumarchais. In midsummer, his patron Pâris-Duverney died; four months later, his wife died in childbirth, losing Beaumarchais’s second child; then his little son fell ill and followed his mother to the grave. Adding to family losses was the death of his father’s second wife. Pierre Caron moved back into his son’s rue de Condé mansion, but with only Beaumarchais and his sister Julie still in residence, a dismal silence crushed all semblance of life in every room.
The death of Pâris-Duverney had dire consequences for Beaumarchais. While the budding playwright was earning his way into the old man’s heart, a ne’er-do-well great-nephew of the great industrialist had seethed with bitterness watching his great-uncle lavish affection and investment opportunities on the low-born Beaumarchais.
“I hate that man like a lover loves his mistress,” the comte de La Blache growled about Beaumarchais.13
Although La Blache had not worked a day in his great-uncle’s industrial empire, he nonetheless inherited every penny, and when Beaumarchais presented two promissory notes from the old man for 90,000 pounds (about $360,000 today), La Blache declared them forgeries and claimed that Beaumarchais actually owed the estate 139,000 livres (more than $50,000). He filed suit against Beaumarchais in October 1771, winning a judgment of 56,000 livres, and began a relentless vendetta to destroy him. La Blache fed rumors to the press that Beaumarchais had poisoned both his wives and lost his post as Versailles music master for making unwanted overtures to one of the king’s daughters. Already despised by many noblemen at Versailles as an unscrupulous arriviste, Beaumarchais saw his name smeared in scandal sheets.
Despondent over the accumulation of crushing setbacks — and with nothing else to occupy his time — Beaumarchais turned to his favorite pastime: writing plays — and even expanding them to include music. He usurped a ubiquitous plot dating back to theater in ancient Rome: that of a lecherous old man determined to thwart the marriage of two angelic young lovers and ravish the young lady himself — only to have his quick-witted servant thwart his ambitions by helping the young lovers disguise themselves and elope. Beaumarchais added more than a touch of originality to the tired tale by turning it into political satire, replacing the servant with a barber named Figaro whose biting wit and ingenious schemes “shave” onstage aristocrats, while mocking their offstage counterparts — including the royal family. Beaumarchais peopled the rest of his play with hilarious caricatures of men and women he knew intimately — commoners as well as aristocrats. Although political satire was a dangerous art form under the absolute French monarchy, news of political unrest in America had combined with the writings of enlightened French philosophes — Rousseau and others — to provoke widespread dissent and criticism of the social order in France. Beaumarchais laced Figaro’s words and actions with biting wit and intelligent defiance of the ruling class that made the barber one of the most beloved characters in theater history. His arrival onstage could not have come at a more appropriate time.
Early in 1770, an ugly confrontation between British soldiers and the Sons of Liberty in New York City had left both sides with cuts and bruises, but no fatalities. Boston was the scene of far uglier incidents: when a small mob broke down the door of a Tory shopkeeper, a friend came to his help and fired his musket at the mob, wounding a nineteen-year-old and killing an eleven-year-old. “Young as he was,” the Boston Gazette proclaimed, “he died in his country’s cause.”14
Rabble-rouser Samuel Adams turned the boy’s funeral into the largest ever held in America — an enormous mass mourning of a martyr that stretched more than half a mile, with more than 400 carefully groomed, angelic children leading the coffin and 2,000 mourners walking behind, followed by thirty chariots and chaises.
“Mine eyes have never beheld such a funeral,” Massachusetts attorney John Adams all but sobbed. “This shows there are more lives to spend if wanted in the service of their country. It shows too that the faction is not yet expiring — that the ardor of people is not to be quelled by the slaughter of one child and wounding of another.”15 The news shocked French philosophistes such as Beaumarchais, who had long believed the British had created an Edenic society in America.
Worse was to come in Boston, of course, when a squad of seven Redcoats fired into a mob of thuggish demonstrators at the customhouse, leaving five dead and eight wounded. Elevated to near sainthood by silversmith/engraver Paul Revere, their deaths elicited outrage against the ruling classes among English and French intellectuals, especially after copies of Revere’s incendiary engraving reached Europe, showing British soldiers, muskets drawn, slaughtering helpless, unarmed townsmen.
Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre inflamed anti-aristocratic passions in Europe as well as America by portraying British Redcoats slaughtering innocent civilians in Boston on March 5, 1770. In fact, hired thugs incited the British to fire by pelting them with stones. (This is a copy of a drawing by John Singleton Copley’s half-brother, Henry Pelham.)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Horrified by the slaughter in Boston, Beaumarchais increased his assault on the ruling class. Calling his play Le Barbier de Séville — “The Barber of Seville” — he set the action in Spain to make it more difficult for Versailles noblemen to recognize themselves in the characters onstage — and possibly retaliate against him in court or on the dueling pitch. To the mix of melodrama and hilarity, he added music — seguedillas that he had embraced while visiting Spain and for which he wrote words. The result was a brilliant precursor of the nineteenth-century operetta and twentieth-century musical comedy that evoked uneasy laughter among some aristocrats — and undisguised outrage among others for its insulting treatment of the nobility:
COUNT: I think this rascal must be Figaro.
FIGARO: The very same my lord.
COUNT: I hardly recognized you, you good-for-nothing. Don’t come near me!
FIGARO: That’s strange. I recognized you immediately — by the kind words with which you have always honored me.
But Beaumarchais did not protect Figaro from equally sharp barbs:
COUNT: What have you done since I last dismissed you?
FIGARO: On my return to Madrid … I tried the theater. … They hissed me, but if I could only try again …
COUNT [interrupting]: You would take your revenge by boring them to death.
Recognizing his need for Figaro’s help in wooing the beautiful Rosine, the count calls him “my friend” and tells him, “You shall be my savior and my guardian angel.”
FIGARO: How quickly my usefulness has closed the distance between us.
COUNT: Your merry anger delights me. … What gave you such an optimistic philosophy?
FIGARO: Continual misfortune. I always laugh at everything for fear I might cry.16
Figaro, of course, was a caricature of Beaumarchais himself — indeed, his alter ego. The origin of his name remains uncertain. It may have been a contraction of Fils Caron (son of Caron) at a time when the s in fils was silent, but an equally plausible origin is the Spanish colloquialism picaro, or ficaro, meaning “rascal.” As the comedy unfolds, the barber Figaro helps his former master, the handsome young Count d’Almaviva, gain entrance to the house of the elderly lecher Doctor Bartolo (modeled after Beaumarchais’s father) so the count can woo Bartolo’s beautiful young ward Rosine. Mocking Romeo and Juliet, Beaumarchais lets the count woo Rosine from the street beneath her balcony — as he clumsily strums a guitar and sings “Je suis Lindor” — one of several beautiful songs Beaumarchais created for the play — a first in the history of French theater:
A contemporary drawing of the beloved barber, Figaro, the revolutionary hero of Beaumarchais’s popular play, Le Barbier de Séville.
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
Music composed by Beaumarchais for “Je suis Lindor” — one of several beautiful songs he created for Le Barbier de Séville. The combination of music and song in a play was a first i
n the history of French theater.
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
Je suis Lindor, ma naissance est commune;
Mes voeux sont ceux d’un simple bachelier;
Que n’ai-je hélas! d’un brilliant chevalier,
À vous offrir le rang et la fortune.
Tous les matins ici, d’une voix tendre,
Je chanterais mon amour sans espoir;
Je bornerai mes plaisirs à vous voir,
Et puissiez vous en trouver à m’entendre.
My name is Lindor — of common birth;
With but a young man’s hopes to offer.
Alas, I’ve no great knight’s exalted name
Nor rank or fame or wealth to proffer.
In tender tones to thee each morn,
I’ll sing of my love, my hopeless love.
I’ll turn from every joy to see your face,
To know you’ve heard me from above.
Although Bartolo schemes to keep Rosine for himself, she falls in love with the handsome young count. In the end, Figaro’s complex but witty strategies overcome the parries of Bartolo and ensure a happy ending with the marriage of the count and Rosine — all while skewering the aristocracy with hilarious dialogue, replete with insulting or lewd double entendres, or both. As a reward, the count rescues Figaro from the tedium of barbering and gives him a sinecure as his valet and steward of the castle, with relatively luxurious quarters in the count’s castle outside Seville. Beaumarchais offered his comic opera to the Théâtre Français (later, the Comédie Française), which agreed to stage the play the following year.
A torrent of misfortunes would prevent its opening, however.
In February 1772, while Beaumarchais was still writing The Barber of Seville, the court appointed a state’s attorney, or rapporteur, to meet with litigants in the La Blache lawsuit and summarize their positions for the judges — a common practice in France to save time hearing testimony in court. Under normal circumstances the litigant who paid the state’s attorney the largest bribe inevitably won the most flattering presentation of his case to the court. As Beaumarchais prepared his case for the rapporteur, police suddenly trooped down his street, pounded on his door and, when he showed himself, arrested him by order of the Captain General of the Court for the Conservation of the King’s Pleasures — Beaumarchais’s superior on the court where he served as lieutenant general. As he howled in protest at the impossibility of such an order, police clamped him in irons and carted him off to prison and an unlit dungeon packed with half-starved thieves, cutthroats, and political prisoners.
Inexplicably locked away in filth and darkness, with no prospects of release, Beaumarchais faced financial and personal ruin. Not only would he be unable to present his case to the rapporteur or the judges, but the Théâtre Français also canceled the opening of The Barber of Seville. As he searched his mind for an explanation for his fate, he grew convinced that La Blache was responsible for his imprisonment and he wrote in desperation to his friend Gudin. He thought back to his father’s observation when the king’s clockmaker Lepaute had stolen his invention for making wrist watches: “C’est normal,” his father had declared. It’s normal for the upper classes to step on those beneath them. “C’est comme ça” — that’s life and the way things are.
“In all totalitarian countries,” an older and wiser Beaumarchais now wrote to his friend Gudin, “dukes and peers with whom I can never associate … punish those they cannot inculpate with justice. Those in power always prefer to punish rather than judge; in their eyes, being right is always a crime?”17 Like others with sympathies for the oppressed, Beaumarchais was beginning to think and talk like an American revolutionary.
Ironically, it was not La Blache who was responsible for Beaumarchais’s ill fortune. More curious than any plot he would ever conceive, the events that provoked his imprisonment began with an invitation he received from a theater devotee, the duc de Chaulnes, to the salon of his mistress, the actress Mademoiselle Ménard. Ménard had abandoned the theater because of the duc’s jealous rages and physical assaults on her and her co-stars — sometimes leaping onstage in a mad, jealous rage to attack them whenever their roles called for mutual embraces. As the beautiful Ménard and handsome Beaumarchais exchanged pleasantries, smiles, and laughter, Chaulnes’s paranoia reached explosive levels, and, a few days later, he brutally assaulted Ménard before rushing out to find Beaumarchais at the courthouse. Along the way, the powerfully built duc pounced on Beaumarchais’s fat little friend Gudin like a “bird of prey,” and threw him bodily into his coach. As a crowd formed, Gudin shrieked and leaped out the other side. The duc reached for his head, grabbed a fistful of hair, but was left with only a wig that set off roars of laughter from onlookers.
Driven to even more rage, the duc flew up the courthouse steps, raced into the courtroom, and, according to Beaumarchais, threatened “to kill me, tear out my heart and drink my blood.” Faced with arrest, the duc relented but challenged Beaumarchais to a duel. Later, after Beaumarchais had returned home, the duc broke into the house, seized Beaumarchais’s ceremonial sword, and rushed at him. As they fought, servants rushed to their master’s aid. “Disarm this madman,” cried Beaumarchais, blood streaming from his face, where Chaulnes had scratched him. As they pulled the duc off his victim, the most powerful of them — a gargantuan cook with a log in hand — prepared a final blow, but Beaumarchais shouted, “Don’t hurt him; he’ll say I tried to assassinate him in my house.”18 The servants loosened their grip — only to have the crazed noblemen leap at Beaumarchais once again. This time, the servants seized Chaulnes and locked him in a study, where, after devouring a meal prepared for Beaumarchais, he flew into a rage, breaking glass and howling vows to kill Beaumarchais. Police arrived and led the duc back to his own home. Gudin describes the aftermath:
That evening, Beaumarchais was as cheerful and assured as if he had passed a tranquil day. He visited old friends … recounted the day’s adventures … assured the ladies that he would not allow a madman’s conduct to spoil the evening’s pleasures. … He was as calm, gay, and brilliant as usual during supper, and spent part of the evening playing the harp and singing Spanish seguedillas. He was always like that — throwing himself entirely into things at hand without thought of what had happened or might follow. … He never spoke ill of his enemies, even of those he knew to be the most intent on ruining him.19
Beaumarchais had a simple explanation for his friend: “Why should I lose the time I have with you, my friend, reliving things which will only make us miserable. I try to forget the folly of those about me, and think only of the good and useful; we have so many things to say to each other that these other topics should never find a place in our conversation.”20
But the duc de La Vrillière, who so resented Beaumarchais’s appointment to the bench, would not allow Beaumarchais to forget the folly of those about him. Although a tribunal that handled disputes between noblemen sentenced Chaulnes to prison and cleared Beaumarchais of all blame, de La Vrillière seethed with outrage that a duke had been sent to prison while a commoner — the low-born son of a clockmaker — was free. On February 24, 1773, he ordered Beaumarchais arrested and imprisoned, explaining to the chief of police, “The man is too insolent.”21 Beaumarchais refused at first to believe such pettiness could propagate such outrageous injustice, but as days turned into weeks, his resentment turned into rage as he looked around his dungeon and saw the cruelties inflicted on commoners by the privileged. Within a few months, he would transfer that rage onto the French stage and, ultimately, to the battlefields of America.
So You Mistreat Some Poor Devil …
Till He Trembles in Disgrace!
BEAUMARCHAIS LANGUISHED in prison for a month, scratching out letters to de La Vrillière protesting his arbitrary and unjust incarceration. The Captain General ignored the letters, insisting that Beaumarchais was “too insolent” for a commoner and deserved a lesson in humility. Beaumarchais appealed to his friend Antoine Ga
briel de Sartine d’Alby, the Spanish-born chief of police — who was also born a commoner, with the added burden of the name Sardine. After escaping the tortures of adolescence, he changed his piscine surname to Sartine, moved to the French cathedral city of Albi, and began a new life as a French government official. After transfer to Paris, he organized the cleaning and illumination of the dirty and dangerous Paris streets and won promotion to police chief. Sartine d’Alby asked the Captain General to rescind the arrest order — only to meet with a stern rejection, without even an attempt at a justification.
“I have been denied justice because my adversary is a nobleman,” Beaumarchais lamented.
I have been imprisoned because I was insulted by a nobleman. Soon they will say that it was very insolent of me to have been assaulted by a nobleman. What do they mean by saying, “He has boasted too much in this affair?” Could I do less than demand justice and prove, by the conduct of my adversary, that I was in no way wrong? What a pretext to ruin an offended man to say, “He has talked too much about his case.”1
Antoine Gabriel de Sartine d’Alby, the Spanish-born chief of police in Paris and a close friend of Beaumarchais, tried without success to arrange the playwright’s release from prison.
CABINET DES ESTAMPES, BIBLIOTHÈQUE
NATIONALE, PARIS
After signing his letter, Beaumarchais grew despondent. For the first time in his life — and he vowed it would be the last — he found his ascent in life blocked by forces too powerful to manipulate or defy. For the first time, he was unable to call on his once-inexhaustible good humor to laugh at his troubles. Then, a note arrived — in a child’s hand:
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