Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  With the onset of war between France and England, Vergennes and the other ministers had little choice but to put military policy in the hands of the military men who would have to direct the war. They continued consulting Beaumarchais on other matters, however, including economic policy — until his ideas crossed an unspecified politico-philosophical line that was too radical for their thinking. After war costs had all but emptied government coffers, he proposed a return to le plan de Sully — an economic plan the duc de Sully had proposed as director of Protestant king Henry IV’s Council of Finance in 1596. Sully infuriated government officials by calling for all officeholders to pay an annual tax to retain their positions — a tax equal to one-sixteenth of the amount they had paid to buy their offices. Beaumarchais’s proposal to revive le plan de Sully shocked Vergennes and other ministers no less than its proposal by Sully himself had shocked the French aristocracy two centuries earlier. As Sully had done, Beaumarchais outraged the ministry still further by urging restoration of civil liberties to Protestants, which would allow them to buy sinecures and further add to revenues flowing into the national treasury.

  The enormous Bibliothèque du Roi, or King’s Library, suffered an epidemic of theft until the government commissioned Beaumarchais to recover lost and stolen manuscripts and establish a system of controls that ended the thievery.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  Suddenly, the ministers at Versailles concluded that Beaumarchais’s motives for supporting American rebels were less attuned to the interests of the French government than the interests of radical social reform espoused by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other philosophes. So instead of replying to his economic proposals, they stopped inviting him to the palace for advice. The ministers no longer needed Beaumarchais, nor did they want to hear what he had to say.

  Silas Deane returned to France in June 1780 to pore through receipts and orders placed with Beaumarchais during his years in Paris and to disprove insinuations that he had embezzled French government funds designated for United States military aid. He found that Congress owed Beaumarchais 3.6 million livres. Although Beaumarchais demanded immediate payment, Congress rejected the Deane figures and ignored the Beaumarchais demands.

  Although the failure of Congress to repay him distressed Beaumarchais, he refused to “disgrace the greatest act of my life … with a vile lawsuit.”2 Deane, however, was appalled, and bitterly denounced members of Congress — even calling the American Revolution an error and advocating reunion with Britain. Accused of treason for his remarks, he remained in exile for most of the remainder of his life — first in Flanders, then in London.3

  In 1780, French General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur comte de Rochambeau sailed to the United States with an army of 5,500 troops. The following year they joined with Washington’s Continental Army and a French fleet under Admiral de Grasse to surround a British army under General Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, and force Cornwallis to surrender. It was the last battle of the American Revolution. Two years later, the British recognized American independence, and the war between France and England came to an end — along with Roderigue Hortalez et Cie. In his naive belief that Americans were creating a utopian society, Beaumarchais had shipped more than $210 million (today’s dollars) worth of arms, ammunition, and military supplies to the United States on credit — including more than 80 percent of the Continental Army’s entire supply of gunpowder for the war. To his astonishment and deep disappointment, Congress refused to pay a penny of what it owed him.

  “A people become sovereign and powerful may be permitted, perhaps, to consider gratitude as a virtue of individuals which is beneath politics,” Beaumarchais complained to the president of Congress,

  but nothing can dispense a state from being just, and especially from paying its debts. I dare hope, Monsieur, that touched by the importance of the affair and by the force of my reasons, you will be good enough to honor me with … the decision of the honorable Congress either to arrange promptly to liquefy my accounts, or else choose arbiters … to decide the points debated … or else write me candidly that the sovereign states of America, forgetting my past services, refuse me all justice.4

  Congress responded by naming Arthur Lee, of all people, to review the Beaumarchais accounts, and he concluded that Congress owed Beaumarchais nothing. Indeed, he charged Beaumarchais with owing Congress 1.8 million livres — that is, most of the moneys the French and Spanish kings had given him to start Hortalez et Cie.

  With both his arms-trade venture and his Voltaire project at an end, Beaumarchais found himself with time to spare for the first time since the outbreak of the American Revolution, and he returned to his old love — writing. He wrote poetry, of course, and became a prolific composer of popular songs. In addition, as he explained, “I began again to amuse myself with frivolous theatrical plays.” In doing so, he revisited his old friend Figaro. Like the nearly fifty-year-old Beaumarchais himself, Figaro had aged somewhat since his exploits as Le Barbier de Séville, but his lot had improved. No longer a common barber, he was now steward of the castle of the comte d’Almaviva, whose eyes had been wandering of late, from the face and physique of his aging wife Rosine to his wife’s beautiful young maid Suzanne, to whom Figaro was affianced.

  Beaumarchais in his later years, after reaching the pinnacle of success in the worlds of finance, international trade, and theater.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  As the curtain rises on Figaro’s second life onstage, the count has given Figaro and Suzanne a wedding gift — a large bed, which he has placed in a suite they are to inhabit in the main part of the castle, between the bedrooms of the count and countess. Still set in Spain to shield Beaumarchais from persecution for mocking French aristocracy, the play opens with Suzanne in a fury over the proposed accommodations.

  “If Madame needs help at night,” the optimistic Figaro tries to calm Suzanne, “she has only to ring — and zing! — you’ll be in her room in two seconds. And if Monseigneur needs something at night, he’ll ring — and zing! — I’ll be there in three seconds.”

  “That’s wonderful!” Suzanne exclaims. “But when he rings in the morning and sends you out on an errand — then zing! — in two seconds he’ll be at my door and — zing! — in three he’ll be in my …”

  In a scene that satirizes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the comte d’Almaviva, disguised as “Lindor,” serenades Rosine beneath her window in act 1 of Beaumarchais’s Barbier de Séville.

  HARVARD THEATER COLLECTION, HOUGHTON LIBRARY,

  HARVARD UNIVERSITY (PRINTS SCENES, BARBER OF SEVILLE)

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that the comte d’Almaviva has no intention of sleeping with his own wife. He intends sleeping with yours!”

  “So,” Figaro now understands, “while I work for his family, he will work to increase mine. What sweet reciprocity! That is too much by half. Now, Figaro, concentrate.”5

  To prepare to exercise his droit du seigneur — the questionable right of a nobleman to sleep with a vassal’s bride on her wedding night — the count arranges a tryst with Suzanne in the castle garden on the eve of her wedding with Figaro. Suzanne confides in the countess, however, and the two switch clothes, with the countess taking Suzanne’s place in the garden. In the dark, the count slips beside the woman he believes to be Suzanne and makes passionate overtures, accompanied by warm and satisfying caresses and kisses — only to have Figaro and the other characters pour into the garden with lanterns to expose the truth. Shamed and humbled, the count returns to his wife’s forgiving arms and lets Figaro and Suzanne marry without fear of further harassment, as the curtain falls to general rejoicing onstage — and off. For in outwitting his master — metaphorically overthrowing him — Figaro staged a revolution whose drumbeat resonated far beyond the confines of the French theater — so clearly and menacingly that the king banned its performance.

  “It is detestable!” he protested. “It
will never be played. … The man mocks everything that ought to be respected in government.”6 When Beaumarchais learned of the king’s response, Figaro got the best of him and he confided flippantly to his friends, “The king does not want Le Mariage de Figaro to be played. Therefore, it shall be played.”7

  The plot itself did not disturb the king as much as Figaro’s flippant responses. “Because you are a great lord,” Figaro rails at the count, “you think you are a genius. Nobility, wealth, rank, position — it all makes you so proud. And what did you do to earn so many rewards? You took the time to be born — nothing else. Apart from that, you’re quite an ordinary man! while I, by God, lost in the faceless crowd, had to apply more knowledge and skills merely to survive than it took to govern the entire Spanish Empire for the last one hundred years; and you want to duel with me?”8

  Figaro literally and figuratively shaves the lecherous Dr. Bartolo, as the comte d’Almaviva woos Bartolo’s ward, the beautiful Rosine, in Beaumarchais’s Barbier de Séville.

  HARVARD THEATER COLLECTION, HOUGHTON LIBRARY,

  HARVARD UNIVERSITY (TS 939.5.3 F, VOL. II, PART II)

  The speech was more than insolent. It bordered on revolution and, indeed, would echo through the streets of Paris for decades thereafter.

  Although insolence toward the nobility had cost Beaumarchais his freedom five years earlier, Figaro’s words now knew no bounds: “The courts,” he cries out at one point, “please the powerful and punish the poor.”

  “I’m told,” Figaro complains later, “that Madrid has established a system of liberty that includes freedom to write what I want. As long as I do not write anything about the government, religion, politics, morality, the aristocracy, the economy, the opera, theater, or anyone’s beliefs, I am free to write and publish anything — under the supervision of two or three censors. To profit from such sweet liberties, I shall start a new periodical that will insult no one. I shall call it The Useless Journal!”9

  In comparison to the cheeky remarks in The Barber of Seville, the dialogue in The Marriage of Figaro was heretical, treasonous. Figaro is merely flippant when he remarks in Le Barbier that “the greatest benefit a nobleman can bestow upon me is to leave me alone and do me no harm.”10 In Le Mariage de Figaro, Figaro is a revolutionary, demanding top-to-bottom social reform, justice for all, merit rewarded, injustice punished, individual liberties protected. “Part le sort de la naissance …, ” he sings,

  By the accident of birth

  One is born shepherd, another born king.

  Chance alone has set them apart,

  But their spirits carry no titles or names,

  And death treats them both exactly the same.

  Only Voltaire is immortal;

  Only Voltaire is immortal.11

  The reference to Voltaire at the end of the play proved particularly galling. Twice imprisoned in the Bastille, Voltaire had spent several decades in exile because of his relentless attacks on royal tyranny, religion, and intolerance. In contrast to the response of the deeply religious king, his fun-loving queen, Marie Antoinette, found The Marriage of Figaro hilarious, as did her playboy brother-in-law and sometimes lover the comte d’Artois, youngest of the king’s two younger brothers and the future Charles X. The somber middle brother — the future Louis XVIII — considered the play treasonous, but public pressures — inside and outside the palace — made the king relent, and orders came from Versailles for the first performance of Le Mariage de Figaro to be staged at the royal theater. An overflow crowd of elegantly dressed lords and ladies filled every seat and fell silent as what appeared to be a character from the play appeared from behind the curtain center stage. He was, however, a king’s messenger: “The king has forbidden the performance!”

  “I really do not know which court intriguers solicited and obtained the prohibition of the king against acting the piece,” said the astonished playwright. “I can only put the script back in my briefcase and wait patiently until the next opportunity calls on me to bring it out.”12

  After the king’s rebellious younger brother the comte d’Artois staged a private performance of the play at a friend’s château, every nobleman of rank invited Beaumarchais to his château to read excerpts from Le Mariage. The longer the king maintained his ban on public performances, the greater the demand of the nobility for Beaumarchais to read it to them privately.

  Many were French officers who had fought to help Americans win independence from England, thus witnessing and experiencing individual liberty — and its benefits — for the first time. As the English parliamentarian Edmund Burke put it, “They imbibed a love of freedom nearly incompatible with royalty. It seemed a grand stroke … [to] humble the pride of a great and haughty [monarch].”13

  Figaro invariably evoked gales of laughter from aristocrats in the audience who were convinced he was mocking their rivals, when in fact he was mocking them. As demand built for an end to the ban, Louis XVI yielded on condition that censors examine the entire script. After the first censor had examined the play and Beaumarchais had made the appropriate changes, the king demanded that a second censor examine the play, then a third, a fourth and even a fifth. The process was on its way to becoming an endless and impenetrable bureaucratic tangle when Beaumarchais himself met with the censors and lured them into his camp. The fourth censor made no changes, and the fifth actually lauded the play. As in Figaro’s verbal swordplay with the comte d’Almaviva, Beaumarchais had finally exhausted both the censors and the king — outmaneuvering the latter at every encounter. As d’Almaviva had put it — and as the king himself might well have said — “That good-for-nothing is embarrassing me. Whenever he argues he gets the best of me, pressing in, squeezing and finally cornering me, wrapping me up and tying me in knots.”14

  In March 1784, the king gave his official permission to perform Le Mariage de Figaro, but his earlier prohibitions turned what might have been simply another opening of another play into the most extraordinary — indeed, legendary — presentation in French theater history, staged by the most celebrated actors and actresses in France. According to witnesses at the scene, “Even in early morning, all Paris rushed to the Théâtre Français; ladies of the highest rank dined in the actresses’ dressing areas to ensure their gaining admission.” As the time for the opening curtain drew near, the crowds reached uncontrollable proportions, “doors broke down, iron railings gave way.”

  It was a historic moment in the French theater.

  “When the curtain rose, the finest combination of talent which the Théâtre-Français had ever assembled … brought out to best advantage a comedy flashing with esprit, shocking some, enchanting others, stirring, inflaming, and electrifying.”15 Citing the denouement, in which a valet and chambermaid outwit their master and strip him of his droit du seigneur, the critic declared, “Right here lies the Revolution.”16

  For Beaumarchais, the comte d’Almaviva symbolized the old regime; Figaro, a new society, where all men were entitled to equal dignity, regardless of the social rank in which the accident of birth had placed them. “In this piece,” Gudin wrote, “the parterre applauded … the courageous man who dared to combat by ridicule the libertinage of the great lords, the ignorance of magistrates, and venality of officers and the unbecoming pleas of lawyers. … More than anyone else, Beaumarchais had first-hand knowledge of what he described, for he had been calumniated so outrageously by great lords, and injured by the insolent pleadings of lawyers and blamé by bad judges. … no author has better understood the human heart or understood the manners of his time.”17

  Le Mariage played an unprecedented sixty-eight consecutive times to sellout crowds, earning nearly 650,000 livres ($2.6 million today), of which nearly 300,000 ($1.2 million) went to the actors and about 42,000 ($168,000) to Beaumarchais — a record in the French theater that would stand up for a century. It met with equal success in theaters across Europe, with the twenty-eight-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart enthralled by the juxtaposition of drama and come
dy — and indeed by the ease with which Beaumarchais had himself woven singing into the dialogue. A year earlier, the composer had met the thirty-four-year-old Venetian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, and at Mozart’s behest, he set to work converting Le Mariage de Figaro into an opera. With Mozart insisting that they “present faithfully and in full colors the diverse passions that are aroused,” the two men created what they called “a new type of spectacle” — the world’s first commedia per musica, or musical comedy. For the first time in opera history, music and text were fully integrated rather than standing apart, with the music either a drab ornament for the recitative or a separate stand-alone sonata-like interlude without words. Every note, every beat, every word in Mozart’s music for Le Nozze di Figaro reflected the emotional shades of every breath, syllable, and gesture of the characters.

  Written and composed at the end of 1785 and the beginning of 1786, Le Nozze di Figaro — with its Italian title and libretto — opened with great fanfare in Vienna on May 1, 1786 — and immediately flopped. Although Prague audiences and critics subsequently hailed it as a masterpiece, Italy’s operagoers booed it, and Parisians, who embraced the Beaumarchais play with thunderous applause and cheers, sniffed in contempt at the young foreigner Mozart for having dared to stage a musical interpretation of so perfect a French stage production that already had its own music — and to do so in Italian, no less!