After Robespierre’s death, moderates moved into seats of powers and began releasing hundreds of thousands of imprisoned “suspects,” including political prisoners, aristocrats, and other alleged enemies of the state. Police released the Beaumarchais women on August 8 — with all charges against them expunged. In an ironic aftermath, however, Madame de Beaumarchais immediately divorced her beloved husband to conform with a new law that forced wives of émigrés to divorce their husbands or suffer the penalty of death in lieu of their husbands. “Your decrees,” shouted an indignant Madame de Beaumarchais to the court, “force me to demand a divorce. I obey, although my husband, charged with a commission, is not an émigré and never had the thought. I attest to it, and I know his heart. He will justify himself of this accusation as he has all the rest, and I shall have the satisfaction of marrying him a second time.”18
Early on October 4, 1784, a British frigate arrived in Terweren, Holland, to take possession of the 52,345 guns Beaumarchais had sought to purchase, and as the ship disappeared over the horizon it carried with it all Beaumarchais’s hopes of recovering his French citizenship and his once-enormous fortune. He had spent most of the 500,000 francs in government funds to try to purchase the guns, and he now stood to forfeit the 750,000-franc personal bond he had given the government to ensure his delivering the muskets to the French army. All but certain to face charges of treason if he returned to France, Beaumarchais had no choice but remain an émigré — perhaps for the rest of his life. But unlike most French émigrés, he was a French spy and risked arrest everywhere in Europe except the Free City of Hamburg, where it now appeared he would have to remain indefinitely.
Tout finit par des chansons /
Everything Ends in Song
BEAUMARCHAIS SPENT a total of two years in Hamburg — exiled from his native France and, sadly, from most of the many French émigrés in Hamburg. As they had when he first set foot in the palace of Versailles as a clockmaker’s son, exiled courtiers in Hamburg refused to include commoners in their elegant soirées, where they mingled with such notables as the comte d’Artois — the future Charles V. All but friendless and unable to tap his own financial resources in Switzerland, Beaumarchais faced poverty and hunger for the first time since his adventure as a runaway adolescent rebelling against his demanding father. He grew depressed and believed he was fast approaching his end. To anyone who would listen, he denied being an émigré: “After serving the cause of liberty in America,” he cried out, “I have served the true interests of France with all my powers and without personal ambition. I shall prove that I am still serving her — even though I am the butt of persecution that is both stupid politically and nefarious. It is absurd to believe that a man who had dedicated himself to the restoration of the Rights of Man in America would be reluctant to put the same principles into practice in France.”1
He spent much of his time writing letters to old friends and a few essays — memorials — addressing what he considered critical issues. One of the most critical had been America’s debt to him for the arms, ammunition, and goods he shipped to them at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. In 1793, Congress asked U.S. Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton to review the documents related to the Beaumarchais claim. Hamilton concluded that the American government owed Beaumarchais 2.28 million francs. But in 1794, Gouverneur Morris, the United States minister plenipotentiary to France, laid eyes on the receipt Beaumarchais had signed for the 1-million-livre loan as seed money from the French government to start his company Roderigue Hortalez. Reiterating the arguments of Franklin and Arthur Lee, Morris insisted the money had been an outright gift of the French government, for which Congress owed nothing. “We owe nothing, and will pay nothing.”2
The decision stunned Beaumarchais. Injustice at the hands of those he had believed to be just! He expected injustice from the despots who ruled France, but not from “the brave people” in the land of liberty, as he called the Americans. Rejected by the land of his birth, he now faced rejection by the land of his fantasies. It was all too much.
“Americans!” he appealed to the people of the United States in a final cri de coeur on April 10, 1795. “I have served you with indefatigable zeal and I have received … only bitterness as a reward. … I die your creditor. Allow me therefore, now that I am dying, to bequeath to you my daughter, that you may endow her with a portion of what you owe me. … Adopt her as a worthy child of the state.”3
As calm returned to Paris, one, then two, then more theater companies reopened with presentations of one sort or another. A revival of Tarare at the Opéra de Paris not only drew a standing-room-only audience and thunderous cheers, it revived popular sentiment for Beaumarchais. In October 1795, a new government — The Directory — seized power, crushed the remnants of radical revolution, and, by the end of the year, agreed to an armistice to end the war in Europe. In April 1796, it permitted Beaumarchais to return to France.
Old, deaf, his fortune depleted, he returned to find a derelict, uninhabitable structure where his palatial mansion had stood. Broken walls surrounded what had been his magnificent gardens — now a tangled jungle, crawling with rats, cats, and wild dogs. The glorious scenario of eternal gaiety he had so carefully created had vanished. The echoes of barbarism — cries for blood and shrieks of agony — replaced the spirit of song, love, laughter, and dance that had once resounded in his heart. And the terror — the ever-present terror …
The crumbling wall around Beaumarchais’s home in eastern Paris, near the ruins of the Bastille prison, at the end of the French Revolution. Beaumarchais rebuilt the structure and gardens to their former glory and lived there until his death in 1799. The French government bought the estate in 1818 and leveled it to permit street modernization. The boulevard Beaumarchais now spans the property, leading to the place de la Bastille.
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
Gathering up the vestiges of Figaro’s resilient spirit, Beaumarchais created a quick plot for ensuring his family’s safety. His first step was to bless Eugénie’s marriage to a young officer who had protected her and her mother from revolutionaries. Beaumarchais found André Delarue “a good young man who persisted in wishing to marry her when it was thought I possessed nothing; she, her mother, and I considered we ought to reward this generous attachment. Five days after my arrival I made him this handsome present.”4
Beaumarchais then remarried his own wife and took the entire family to his wife’s family home in Orléans while workmen began repairing the mansion near the spot where the Bastille had stood. Although deeply in debt to the government, he lived as quietly and unobtrusively as possible in Orléans, drawing little attention to himself as he slipped in and out of the city on the road to Basel, Switzerland, and the bank where he had wisely stored some gold and silver specie before the revolution. Little by little, trip after trip, often in disguise, he retrieved enough gold coins to pay for the restoration of his house in Paris and ensure his own and his family’s safety and security in the immediate future. He took Marie-Thérèse with him on one trip and Eugénie on another, to open a secret account for each of them and transfer enough cash to ensure them a modicum of comfort after his death.
In May 1797, the entire Beaumarchais family returned to their mansion in Paris — only to find the capital in the grips of a wave of poverty that left thousands sleeping on the streets. The Directory raised taxes of the rich, imposing a new property tax based on the number of doors and windows in each house. The Beaumarchais mansion had 200 windows, and Beaumarchais had to make a hurried trip back to Basel to recover enough money to pay his taxes. He made frequent appeals to the government for a review of his debts from the mission to Holland to buy muskets. After two years, a special commission ruled on January 8, 1798, that because of the continual turnover in key ministerial posts, the French government itself was responsible for the failure of the Beaumarchais mission. After a complex accounting, it found that rather than his owing the state any money, the state owed Beaumarch
ais nearly 1 million francs. Although high taxes and runaway inflation would reduce the purchasing power of this and other funds in his control, Beaumarchais would be able to live the rest of his life in relative comfort.
Despite the injustices he had suffered, Beaumarchais retained his benevolent instincts. He wrote to “My brother, my friend, my Gudin,” who was living in poverty in the country outside Paris and arranged for his longtime friend to come and live in the mansion. He even sent financial help to Mme. Goëzman, the judge’s wife who had demanded bribes during the La Blache trial and would have seen Beaumarchais jailed for life at the time. The guillotine had claimed her husband during the revolution and left her destitute. Without a thought of vengeance, Beaumarchais arranged for her to find adequate lodging and board for at least a year. Like the comte d’Almaviva, Beaumarchais recognized that “anger is good for nothing.”5
As some of the old Beaumarchais spirit flickered back to life, some song, laughter, and gaiety — albeit subdued — echoed through the house again. Although he could hear little through his ear trumpet, Marie-Thérèse followed the tempo with her hands, and he sang with fervor, seizing every last minute of life with rediscovered joy. He revived his beloved Figaro, revitalizing La Mère coupable — the third play in the Figaro trilogy, which had proved a failure at the Théâtre du Marais in 1792. Convinced that the mediocrity of the players was at least partly responsible, he asked the Théâtre Français to stage it. After the darkness of revolution, French audiences needed some light-hearted optimism, and critics gave La Mère good reviews. Although it eventually disappeared from the repertoire of the French theater, it revived Beaumarchais’s celebrity for a moment. Although he couldn’t hear a word they said, crowds of admirers surrounded him whenever he appeared outside his home, and French notables vied with each other to invite him to dine — among them French Foreign Minister Talleyrand and even the celebrated General Napoléon Bonaparte. “I shall be glad to meet the author of Le Mére coupable,” declared the military leader.6
Not long after his and Figaro’s triumph with La Mére, Beaumarchais sat with family and friends at the bedside of his last surviving sister as she lay dying. True to family tradition, she began to sing softly, a lovely folk song with comical last lines in each verse. She died much as she had lived, with the entire family in song, albeit subdued. A year later, on the night of May 17, 1799, Beaumarchais said good night to his family and friends and climbed the stairs to his room to go to sleep. He and Figaro died peacefully during the night — without either having the final word.
All of Which Proves That a Son of a Clod
Can Be Worth His Weight in Gold
AS MIGHT BE expected, Beaumarchais wrote his own epitaph, insisting that he lived his life with “gaiety and bonhommie”:
I have had enemies without number. … It was natural enough. I played every instrument, but was not a musician. I invented good machines, but was no engineer. I composed verses and songs, but was no poet. I wrote some pieces for the stage, but people said, “He is not an author. … He is the son of a watchmaker.”
I raised the art of printing in France by my superb editions of Voltaire, but I was not a printer. Unable to find lawyers to defend me, I wrote memorials, but people said, “These are not the work of a lawyer, and he cannot be allowed to prove he is in the right without a lawyer.”
I advised ministers on great issues of financial reform, but people said, “This man is not a financier.” I traded in the four quarters of the globe, but I was not a merchant. I had forty ships at sea but was not a shipowner.
Weary of seeing our uniform habitations and our gardens without poetry, I built a house which is spoken of, but I did not belong to architecture or the arts.
And of all Frenchmen, I am the one who did the most for the liberty of America, the begetter of our own liberty … for I was the only person who dared to form the plan and commence its execution, in spite of England, Spain, and even France. But I was not a minister.
What was I then?
I was nothing but myself, and myself I have remained, free in the midst of fetters … happy in my home, having never belonged to any coterie … having never paid court to any one, and yet repelled by all.1
His family buried Beaumarchais amid a shady cluster of trees in the magnificent gardens of his home. Like his birth, his death came in the same year as George Washington’s. With the family’s cash resources all but gone, Marie-Thérèse took in lodgers to maintain herself and property. In 1818, the state reconfigured the approaches to the city and bought the Beaumarchais house and property for 500,000 francs. After transferring Beaumarchais’s remains to a proper cemetery — he now lies in the Père Lachaise — it razed the house and gardens, paved over the entire property, and turned it into a major roadway. The boulevard Beaumarchais now covers most of what had been one of the most beautiful estates in Paris. Beaumarchais’s only known surviving descendant was his daughter Eugénie, who gave birth to two boys and a girl by her husband André-Toussaint Delarue. Having served as an aide to General Lafayette in 1789, Delarue went on to become a colonel in the National Guard and eventually a brigade marshal. Of his two sons, the older entered the army, rising to the post of brigade marshal, and the younger went into the government’s finance ministry. Beaumarchais descendants still survive.
Le Barbier de Seville and Le Mariage de Figaro remain two of the greatest plays in the history of French theater. Some critics insist they are the greatest. For whatever reasons, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro did not evoke universal enthusiasm until after the final defeat and fall of Napoléon in 1815, when it went on to become one of the world’s most popular operas. Gioacchino Rossini had been but four years old when Le Nozze di Figaro debuted in Vienna. By 1815, when Le Nozze finally caused a stir in the opera world, Rossini was twenty-three and had already composed more than a dozen operas, including the extraordinarily popular Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri. Drawing from the success of Le Nozze, Rossini decided to adapt Beaumarchais’s other great play, Le Barbier, and, with librettist Cesare Sterbini and the patronage of Rome’s Teatro Argentina opera company, Rossini created the great opera Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
Il Barbiere opened on February 20, 1816, with Figaro’s guitar out of tune as he sang beneath Rosina’s window. As the singer desperately tried tuning his instrument, a string snapped, his voice cracked, the audience hissed, a cat ran across the stage, the audiences in the balconies mewed, and, as the curtain fell on the first act, the crowd booed Rossini out of the theater. Then, in a startling and inexplicable turnabout on the second night, a new audience cheered the performances and hailed Il Barbiere as a masterpiece. In the weeks that followed, audiences across Europe agreed — as did an American audience when an English translation opened in New York in May 1819. Legend has it that when Rossini visited Beethoven in Vienna in 1822 and asked the aging master for guidance in furthering his musical career, Beethoven replied, “Compose another Barbiere di Siviglia.” There was, however, only one Barber of Seville, only one Figaro, only one Beaumarchais.
Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais wrote five full-length plays, several one-act plays or parades, and one opera (all listed in the appendix). A prolific poet and composer, he often combined his poetry and music to create popular songs and songs that turned his plays into precursors of modern musical comedies.
Beaumarchais wrote scores of poems, and composed an equally large number of songs for which he wrote the lyrics. Nearly forty are in print and included in Oeuvres complètes de Beaumarchais, listed in the bibliography. Among his most charming and best loved were his seguedillas, based on the music of a Spanish dance, for which poems of either four or seven verses were written. Here is an example, with too many French puns for any but those at ease in French to understand thoroughly, but the sounds of the words and the meter make them delightful to read aloud, and an inadequate translation alongside provides the broad meanings, if not the beauty, of the poem.
Je veux ici mettre au grand
jour
Le train don’t l’Amour tracasse la vie;
C’est comme une cavalerie
Don’t l’ordre et la marche varie;
[Refrain]
Quand la tête trotte, trotte, trotte, bientôt
La queue est au galop.
D’une mantille, deux beaux yeux
Ont lancé des feux sur une victime:
Le coeur s’embrase, l’on s’anime;
Mais n’oubliez pas la maxime
[Refrain]
L’on va, l’on vient, matin et soir
On voudrait se voir; On donne parole.
Tout en empêche, on se désole;
L’un est furieux, l’autre est folle
[Refrain]
Enfin on goûte au rendez-vous
Les biens les plus doux,
Mais on se dépêche:
L’un est épuisé, l’autre est fraiche;
Car, au Prado, sur l’herbe sèche,
Quand l’amoureux trotte, trotte, trotte,
Bientôt, la belle est au galop.
On peut tirer un sens moral
Du chant trivial
D’une séguedille;
Retenez ma leçon gentille:
Trop souvent auprès d’une fille
Quand la tête trotte, trotte, trotte, bientôt
La bourse est au galop.
— P.-A. C. de B.
I want to shine some light on the ways
Love can ruin one’s happiest days.
Like wild horses in full disarray,
Each out of step, going every which way.
Improbable Patriot Page 21