To the end of his life Beaumarchais continued to insist that “I did more than any other Frenchmen, whoever they may be, for the freedom of America, that freedom that gave birth to ours, which I alone dared to conceive.” But the world had moved on, and few people would recall his role in the American Revolution as the old order of France was toppled.
BEAUMARCHAIS HAD NEARLY completed the palatial mansion he had designed in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in July 1789, when a mob stormed the Bastille Prison only blocks away. From the roof of his new home Beaumarchais watched the uprising and cheered the Revolution. Despite his loyal service to the king, he embraced the new democracy. At the request of the mayor of Paris, Beaumarchais took charge of removing the rubble left by the Bastille. It was the perfect metaphor for his contribution to clearing away the old order. But over the next several years, as terror gripped France, Beaumarchais came to doubt the revolutionary regime.
In 1792, France declared war on Austria and Prussia, and Austrian and Prussian troops streamed across the border, marching toward Paris. Wild crowds of Parisians frantically sought arms with which to defend their city from foreign invaders. A false rumor circulated that Beaumarchais was hoarding guns in his mansion, and the crowd stormed his home. Beaumarchais escaped just as tens of thousands of panicked citizens rushed inside the gates. The mob must have been amazed by what they found. There were no guns, of course, but the house and garden, which occupied about an acre of land in the center of Paris, was extravagant beyond imagination. Standing in front of the house was a statue of a gladiator surrounded by an immense courtyard. The façade of the house featured an arcade of columns forming a classical semicircle. There were at least two hundred windows gazing down on the excited masses pouring into the courtyard. The curious mob surged through the house, coursing up and down stairs, trampling the carpets, and tracking mud everywhere. The citizens searched vainly for weapons, all the while dazzled by the opulence. There was a tremendous circular salon with an intricate mosaic wood floor, exquisite murals, a cupola thirty feet high, mahogany doors, and a hulking mantelpiece made entirely of Carrara marble. Each room was lavishly furnished and decorated. Beaumarchais’s desk alone cost 30,000 livres (about $231,000 today). Outside was a terraced garden planted with tall trees and rare flowers, a small rounded temple to Bacchus, an ice house, a Chinese bridge, and a pond large enough to float several boats. It was no wonder that Beaumarchais was deeply in debt. This house had cost him 1.6 million livres (roughly $12 million today), far more than he could ever have afforded. Remarkably, though the mob left everything in disarray, nothing was stolen or destroyed.
That night Beaumarchais returned home, but days later he was arrested with hundreds of aristocrats on suspicion of conspiring with France’s enemies. They were tossed in l’Abbaye Saint-Germain, which had been transformed into a prison for the once high-and-mighty. On August 30, he was released for no apparent reason. He did not know that his young mistress, Amélie Houret, was sleeping with the procurator of the Paris Commune, Jacques Manuel. She had persuaded Manuel to intervene on Beaumarchais’s behalf. Her timing was exceptionally fortunate for Beaumarchais: three days later, mobs stormed the prisons holding the “enemies of the Revolution” and murdered more than a thousand, including those unfortunate prisoners at l’Abbaye. Beaumarchais had escaped narrowly.
Beaumarchais returned home from l’Abbaye profoundly shaken by his arrest and the continuing violence of the mob. His age, sixty, was already catching up with him. He was almost completely deaf without the aid of his ear trumpet. But it was no longer safe for him to remain at his home. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine was at the center of the storm. Terrified that he would be killed, he fled Paris on foot at two in the morning.
In his comedies, Beaumarchais had depicted the common man, Figaro, as triumphing over the stupid and cynical aristocrats. Now, as the Revolution descended into chaos, the masses did not distinguish one rich man from another. Figaro was turning on him. Alone in the darkness, he hurried toward Versailles, ten miles away. He hoped to find refuge in the home of friends, but fearing he might be recognized on the highway, he stole across planted wheat fields like a hunted animal. He would not have been able to hear the voices or the footsteps of the approaching mob. As he darted breathlessly between trees from shadow to shadow, he prayed that the moonlight would not betray him.
THOUGH ONCE MORE Beaumarchais evaded his enemies, it was clear that his notoriety made him a target for the revolutionaries. Over the next several years, Beaumarchais suffered many indignities and injustices. He was exiled from France and thrown in debtors’ prison in London. His business, home, personal property, and papers were ransacked, confiscated, or destroyed. His wife and daughter were imprisoned and sentenced to death until his wife agreed to renounce and divorce her husband. And when he finally returned to Paris in 1796, his beloved home had been ransacked and ruined, and he was utterly destitute. He spent the last three years of his life still trying to collect the debts that Congress owed to him while he was relentlessly pursued by his creditors.
Beaumarchais had exposed the foibles and corruption of the ancien régime. He had helped to unleash the revolutionary forces that destroyed the way of life he had enjoyed. His singular role in support of the American Revolution had fanned the flames of revolutionary spirit in France. French citizens were persuaded by the American Revolution that liberty and equality could be more than mere slogans. And by persuading Louis XVI to arm the Americans and fight Britain, Beaumarchais had unwittingly contributed to the insolvency of the French government. The American revolutionaries merely ignored Beaumarchais’s contribution to their revolution, but the French revolutionaries threatened, abused, and destroyed him. At least he was spared the fate of many of his friends who faced the guillotine. He died of a heart attack in bed in 1799 at age 67. By then, he had lived long enough to appreciate what must have struck him as the final irony of his colorful life: he was an author pursued by the characters of his own invention.
MADAME DE BEAUMONT, the Chevalière d’Eon, kept her secrets as tightly as her corset. Like that of her nemesis, Beaumarchais, her life was dramatically altered by the French Revolution.
After her appearance at Versailles in 1777, she spent some time visiting various convents, but concluded that the contemplative life was not for her. Once France declared war on Britain in 1778, d’Eon pleaded with Vergennes to allow her to return to military service, but it was out of the question. When d’Eon tried to leave for America on her own, she was arrested and tossed into prison for disobeying her sovereign. She was released after agreeing to retire to her mother’s home in Tonnerre. But the quiet provincial life made d’Eon restless, and when the war ended, in 1781, she returned to her home in London’s Golden Square, where her precious library and most of her belongings were still being stored.
For a while, d’Eon lived comfortably on her pension from the French government. Old friends like John Wilkes were unaccustomed to seeing the captain of the dragoons in wigs and dresses, but they welcomed her back into their circle. D’Eon celebrated the fall of the Bastille and the old regime she had served. She volunteered to return to France and fight for the new republic against Austria and Prussia. She did not realize that the Revolution swept away the foundations of her own financial security; her pension soon stopped. Just as Beaumarchais was denounced as an émigré, so d’Eon was blacklisted and could no longer return to revolutionary France. Friends in London took up contributions for her, but over time she had to put all of her silver, jewelry, and china up for auction at Christie’s. Nearly all she owned was eventually sold. At the age of sixty, d’Eon began to teach fencing to young men. Later, she performed in fencing competitions against men half her age. Her physical agility—despite wearing a dress and wig—so impressed English audiences that she was invited to perform at the Haymarket Theater in London before the Prince of Wales. The once dashing military hero had been reduced to a public attraction. She continued to fence publicly until age seventy, when
she suffered a nearly fatal wound. She then sold off her swords and retired from her athletic career.
For a time d’Eon held on to her own flat, but when she could no longer afford it, she moved into the modest home of an elderly French widow, Mary Cole, who lived west of Grey’s Inn in Blooms-bury. For more than a decade the two women were constant companions, supporting themselves as seamstresses. They were often in debt, and in her late seventies d’Eon was tossed into debtors’ prison for several months.
After her release she suffered a series of maladies that left her confined to bed under the care of Mrs. Cole and a retired French doctor from the Fathers of Charity at Grenoble, Father Elysée. As she neared the end of her life in May 1810, d’Eon was forced to sell off her last treasure, the Croix de Saint-Louis, to feed herself. A few days later, age eighty-two, she passed away peacefully in her bed in the presence of the priest and Mrs. Cole.
As Mrs. Cole was preparing d’Eon’s body for burial, she discovered something extraordinary and called to Father Elysée. The priest was so shocked he arranged an autopsy with several doctors and the Earl of Yarmouth attending. All the witnesses agreed that what Voltaire had called “a nice problem for history” was finally resolved: Madame d’Eon was, indeed, a man.
EPILOGUE
Thomas Copeland, a surgeon on Millman Street, was called to d’Eon’s house. “I hereby certify,” he wrote, “that I inspected and dissected the body of le chevalier d’Eon in the presence of M. Adair, M. Wilson, le père Elysée and found the male organs of generation in every respect perfectly formed.” He signed the death certificate on May 23, 1810, and it was cosigned by eleven other men who viewed d’Eon’s corpse—including the Earl of Yarmouth and two surgeons. D’Eon’s landlord also wrote that “I declare that the chevalier Déon has lodged in my house about three years, and I knew her as a female, and I also declare that upon seeing the body after death, she proves to be a man.” If there were any doubt that he knew what he was talking about, he added, “My wife makes the same declaration.”
THE CHEVALIER D’EON was not the only “cross-dresser” involved in the secret diplomacy of the American Revolution. Deane, a shopkeeper, disguised himself as a businessman while secretly engaging in diplomacy and espionage; he was later denounced by the Lees for being what he pretended to be, a merchant in the pursuit of profit. Beaumarchais, a playwright, masqueraded as a trader so he could smuggle arms for the Continental Congress; Congress, however, mistook him as Louis XVI’s agent and never paid him. Bancroft, a British spy, assumed the role of secretary to the commissioners; yet history remembered him as an American patriot. Arthur Lee presented himself in the ill-fitting disguise of a diplomat, all the while secretly undermining his colleagues and the alliance with the French; Lee was motivated as much by revenge and real estate speculation as he was by genuine patriotism. Even Franklin used his celebrity as a mask for his secret diplomacy.
Eighteenth-century Americans regarded Europeans as intrinsically deceitful. The English and French aristocracies judged people based on birth and squandered the public treasury on their own patronage and nepotism. Aristocrats did not respect talent and hard work. Such societies naturally bred hypocrisy and corruption. Deane and Franklin would have expected Vergennes and Stormont to practice duplicity. And it was precisely because Americans feared that British corruption was infecting American society that Americans like Richard Henry Lee called for independence to insulate the colonies from this moral pestilence. American revolutionaries frequently used the language of moral virtue as a rallying cry. They believed it was possible to have self-government, but only if self-interest and factionalism were constrained by civic virtue and informed by a sense of the common good.
But the Americans were not free from sin. Centuries of European influence had already infected the body politic with land grants and royal patents, patronage, monopolies, the slave trade, and titles. The Lees, for example, modeled themselves after the British aristocracy. They bore the same obnoxious sense of entitlement, and they wielded the same sort of patrimonial authority over the Northern Neck of Tidewater Virginia. The Lees and the Franklins both competed over land grants and bent the instruments of government to pursue their own financial interest; both Arthur Lee and Ben Franklin dispensed government jobs to family members without any sense that they were committing precisely the same offense as the British aristocracy they were rebelling against.
Deane was relatively virtuous insofar as he neither sought nor received for himself or his family any direct benefits from public service. Though Deane was often portrayed as hypocritical and avaricious, there was little to support that. Deane’s clandestine role was of a different nature. He fell from grace, after his return to Paris, when he could no longer tolerate the baseless charges of the Lees and their cronies. “Safety lies in silence,” he had written as a young Yale student. But instead of pursuing a quiet life, he chose public service and suffered terribly as a result. He was too thin-skinned for the rough-and-tumble of American politics. Deane’s loss of face led to his loss of faith in the Revolution; and once he became disillusioned, he was doomed.
When one considers all the duplicity and corruption that characterized the times, one might wonder whether this was the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Deception?
MUCH IS MADE of the fact that the revolutionary generation was singularly talented and comprised of so many brilliant men of great character. Were virtuous men like Washington and Adams truly indispensable to the Revolution? Or were the ideals of the Revolution just as often fought and won by men who were not as worthy as the principles they expounded? Principles of democracy, equality, and personal liberty were all realized by men who were far from perfect exemplars of their ideals. Should we denigrate their achievements merely because they were human and bound to err? The Calvinists thought that only bad people were made to suffer; the notion that only virtuous men could have won the Revolution is no more sophisticated.
By placing the founders of our nation on a pedestal, we risk setting up an impossible standard for future generations to follow. Perhaps we would be wiser to extract from our history the lesson that human frailty is part of our heritage. Just as virtuous men like Adams and Washington were capable of mean and spiteful acts, so too, hypocrites like Jefferson and the Lees were capable of statesmanship. Together, these men won a Revolution and built a nation.
The idea that history is not guided by great or virtuous individuals may be disconcerting, but our experience teaches us that sometimes history happens by accident. Chance casts people in extraordinary roles: a shopkeeper becomes a statesman; a playwright becomes a smuggler; a soldier-spy becomes a maiden. Gazing backward, we may think we discern some invisible hand that governs the outcome of wars and revolutions, but in the moment that history is being made, chance governs. A kingdom may be lost “for want of a nail”; Britain may have lost the American colonies in a wager over a dress.
There were good reasons for France to help the Americans, but Louis XVI thought there were better reasons for France to remain neutral. Beaumarchais helped to persuade Louis and to impress on Vergennes the urgency of acting quickly to safeguard the French sugar islands and weaken Britain. Why did the king and his minister care what a disgraced playwright thought about foreign affairs? Beaumarchais’s pivotal role in resolving the Chevalier d’Eon affair won him their attention. D’Eon’s threat to release Louis XV’s secret correspondence would have risked a disastrous war with Britain, and Louis XVI and Vergennes were determined to avoid such a war at all costs. Beaumarchais permanently neutralized the threat the chevalier posed to the king by coaxing d’Eon to turn over the correspondence and declare that he was female. But, ironically, by agreeing to support Beaumarchais’s arms smuggling, France was drawn into the very conflict that the king had employed Beaumarchais to avoid: war with Britain.
Beaumarchais’s role was critical for the American Revolution. At the very least, Beaumarchais accelerated the decision to arm the Americans b
y a few months, if not years, and that time proved decisive. The arms arrived only weeks before the Battle of Saratoga. Without those arms, the Continental Army would have been crushed. Instead, the Battle of Saratoga changed the course of the war and persuaded France to ally itself with the Americans.
Why, then, aren’t Deane and Beaumarchais remembered as heroes of the American Revolution? Deane and Beaumarchais risked their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to secure the arms that Washington desperately needed. In the process, they challenged authority, provoked jealousy, greed, and animosity, and refused to stay silent when they disagreed with the policies of their governments. Politics rewards those who sail with the popular current—not those who ride against the tide.
It is left to history to correct the popular judgment. Reading history teaches us to doubt, to question, and, if we’re lucky, to discover new heroes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is not the book I intended to write. I was writing a different book about the history of international law in the United States when I discovered Silas Deane. All that I knew about him was that a shopkeeper from Wethersfield, Connecticut, had shown up in Versailles to negotiate an alliance long before Benjamin Franklin or John Adams arrived in France. I was curious as to how that happened, but I could not find any serious books about Deane. I tried to find Deane’s personal papers, assuming they had survived. I had no idea how to find diaries or letters of an obscure figure from the eighteenth century, so I phoned a friend, David Kahn, who was then the executive director of the Connecticut Historical Society to ask his advice. To my surprise David replied: “We own his papers.” He had only just discovered that fact a few weeks before when he came across some boxes left by Deane’s descendants in the Connecticut Historical Society archives.
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