Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence Volume I Part 10

Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence Volume I Part 10

??Since you admit that you have lost your temper with me, it would be out of place for me to reproach you with it. It is sufficient that you accuse yourself, for me not to hold any resentment.

??I do not know why you have underlined the words, ?your sister,? in recalling to me that I said that it was in this way that I loved Mlle. Le B----. Does this irony fall back on her, on me, or on your brother? Just as you please, for that matter. Although the fate of Mlle. Le B---- interests me no longer, it would be out of place for me, in speaking of her, to use other terms than those which I have employed. It is not her that I blame; she is as you have said, young and without experience and although she has very little fortune, your brother has used well his experience and has made a good affair in marrying her.

??Remember, I beg you, Monsieur l?abb?, that all which is addressed to him has nothing to do with you. It would be too humiliating for a man of your station to be suspected of having had any part in the perfidy of your brother in my regard; let him bear the blame, and do not take up those things which do not deserve to have a defender as honest as yourself.

??I have the honor to be, etc.

??Beaumarchais.??

The matter finally was adjusted and the account reduced to 24,441 livres, 4 sous, 4 deniers.

One would almost think that after making such important reductions the sum might have been rounded off by the omission of the 4 sous, 4 deniers. Not so Beaumarchais--the whole debt might go unpaid for he was not a man to make much trouble about that, but in any case, the matter must stand in its absolute exact.i.tude. M. de Lom?nie terminates this interesting chapter of the life of Beaumarchais in the following manner: ?And now I demand pardon of the shade of the charming Pauline, but it seems certain that this debt, recognized and accepted by her, was never paid. Not only do I find it amongst papers of a later date cla.s.sed as almost hopeless debts, but the touching solicitude of the cashier Gudin, after the death of his master, for the least letter of Pauline, is sufficient to demonstrate that this too must be ranged amongst those debts recognized but not dissolved, where so many amiable women, poets, and great lords have left their traces in the papers of Beaumarchais. It is true that Pauline was left a widow a year after her marriage, and this misfortune no doubt spoiled the arrangement of her affairs--and I conclude that if the young and beautiful Creole left her debt unpaid, it must have been because the habitation of Santo Domingo was seized by the other creditors, or plundered by the blacks or swallowed up by an earthquake.?

For our part let us hasten to add that we are very grateful to the Chevalier du S---- for carrying off Pauline. Charming as she was, she did not possess those sterling qualities which alone could have enabled her to be a real helpmeet to him in the terrible trials, which were preparing for him. Overwhelmed as we shall presently see him, a nature like hers would have been as a millstone about his neck, and he inevitably must have succ.u.mbed. As we shall see, the woman who eventually comes to share his life was of a very different mould. Misfortune and all the terrors of the Revolution only served to bring into more striking relief the vigor of a character already p.r.o.nounced in its strength and womanliness.

Our grat.i.tude to the Chevalier du S---- is no less great, in that by abstracting Pauline, he left to Beaumarchais the truest support of his life, the woman who better than any one else understood the inmost recesses of his nature, and who at no moment of his career failed in giving him the affection, the encouragement, which he needed, and that served as the solid basis upon which he could build. In leaving to Beaumarchais the undisputed possession of his sister Julie, the Chevalier du S---- has won our undying grat.i.tude, and so in all sincerity we say, _requiescat in pace_.

CHAPTER VI

_?Je laisserai sans r?ponse tout ce qu?on a dit contre l?ouvrage, persuad?

que le plus grand honneur qu?on ait pu lui faire, apr?s celui de s?en amuser au th??tre, a ?t? de ne pas le juger indigne de toute critique.?_

_Beaumarchais in ?Essai sur le genre dramatique s?rieux,? prefixed to the edition of ?Eug?nie.?_

?_Eug?nie_?--?_Les deux Amis_?--Second Marriage of Beaumarchais--The Forest of Chinon--Death of Madame de Beaumarchais.

The immediate effect of Pauline?s desertion of Beaumarchais was to turn his thoughts from the gay world in which he was so brilliant and so striking a figure, to the more sober realms of literature. His talent as an author already had manifested itself by several farces and charades written for his colleague, M. Lenormant d??tioles, the husband of Madame de Pompadour, at whose ch?teau d??tioles they were produced.

The very spicy charade, ?_John B?te ? la Foire_,? was written in 1762 for a special festival given at this ch?teau in the forest of Senart. On this occasion and on all similar occasions the farces of Beaumarchais found no more spirited interpreters than his own sisters. Fournier says, ?The youngest played comedies with a surprising _verve de gaillardise_, and it would seem, was not frightened by the most highly seasoned of her brother?s productions. She and the Countess of Turpin played the leading parts. Comedies and charades were also played enchantingly by Julie who frequently arranged them in her own style; several scenes and not the least spicy, according to family tradition, pa.s.sing as her own production.?

But this vein of true Gallic wit which was later to carry its possessor to almost unprecedented heights of fame was not in keeping with the spirit in which Beaumarchais found himself during the winter of 1766.

The entire family as we have seen possessed in an unusual degree a warm life blood which burst spontaneously into joyful expression, but it showed itself also in sentimental sallies. The English novelist, Richardson, was a favorite with them all and we find Julie writing in her diary, about this time, ?I see in Beaumarchais a second Grandison; it is his genius, his goodness, his n.o.ble and superior soul, equally sweet and honest. Never a bitter sentiment for his enemies arises in his heart. He is the friend of man. Grandison is the glory of all who surround him, and Beaumarchais is their honor.?

The father writing to his son during an illness said: ?In the intervals when I suffer less I read Grandison and in how many things I have found a just and n.o.ble resemblance between him and my son. Father of thy sisters, friend and benefactor of thy father, ?if England,? I said to myself, ?has her Grandison; France has her Beaumarchais; with this difference, that the English Grandison is the fiction of an amiable writer, while the French Beaumarchais really exists to be the consolation of my days.??

It was, therefore, Beaumarchais, as Grandison, whom we now find seriously occupying himself with the thought of literature. Nor shall we be surprised later to find those of the literary profession preparing to meet him in very much the same spirit as did in the beginning M. Lepaute, watchmaker, and a little later, _Messieurs les Courtisans_ at Versailles.

So long as his literary ambition limited itself to charades, farces, and comic songs the antagonism of men of letters was not aroused; but that he who had received no regular training in the schools should presume, _de se m?ler_, with serious literary productions was quite another matter.

Lintilhac says: ?But our immature author, shaking his _t?te carr?e_ braved this danger like all the rest, arming himself with patience and _esprit_; let us see him at his work.

?A literary instinct had from the beginning led him straight to those Gallic writers whose race he was destined to continue. We find him studying Montaigne; he extracts notes and imitates Marot, translates in verse and sets to music one of the hundred and twenty romances of the Cid going against the Moors in the eleventh century.

?But his taste for the ancestor of the _esprit fran?ais_ is not exclusive; he is happy to find it among their direct descendants: Regnier, whom he quotes abundantly, La Fontaine, of whom he is a disciple, Moli?re and Pascal, who furnish the models of his chefs-d?oeuvre. More than that, he goes back to their antique masters. The rudiments of Latin which he learned at school serve to help him to read Lucrece, Catulle, Tibulle, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca, and to take from them that salt of _citation_ with which he heightens so effectively the sallies of his Gallic wit.?

Among the ma.n.u.scripts of the Com?die-Fran?aise are a number of pages covered with Latin citations, elegantly translated, which Beaumarchais adapted to the circ.u.mstances of his life and works, with a precision which could not have been the result of chance.

?This is the serious side of his education, but it was not all; the unfolding and development of his talents must have been deeply influenced by that society of which he was the _bout-en-train_, and where the Prince de Conti and the Countess de Boufflers, _la divine Comtesse_, restored the ancient traditions of epicurean esprit. What did he not owe to conversation, often free, always piquant, of the aristocratic and bourgeois salons, to the foyers of the theaters and caf?s which he frequented, and in which he was past-master, fencing with such skilled champions as Chamfort, as Sophie Arnould, those little kings _de l?esprit_! We must therefore give to these brilliant contemporaries of our author the honor of having shaped his genius.? (M. de Lom?nie.)

We have spoken already of Beaumarchais?s natural aversion to the heroic in literature, all his instincts led him toward the new dramatic school which was then appearing in France, and whose master was Diderot. In this school the old heroic tragedy was replaced by a domestic tragedy in which the ordinary events of daily life formed the theme. By the side of this, there was to be a serious comedy, not clearly defined from the tragic element, but which was to take the place of the ?gay comedy? of the past.

More than a century of democratic ideas has so far removed the present generation from the ideas of the past, that it is difficult for us to appreciate the magnitude of the innovation made by this new style of literature when it first appeared in France. It was, however, but the natural outgrowth of that new order of things which was year by year becoming more p.r.o.nounced, in which the bourgeoisie of France rises to a state of self-consciousness which demands expression. The splendor of the monarchy as upheld by Louis XIV had faded from men?s minds. The people were beginning to realize that they themselves, with their joys and sorrows, their loves and hates, belonged to the realm of art.

Beaumarchais forcibly expresses the new ideas when in his essay ?_Sur le Genre S?rieux_,? he says, ?If our heart enters into the interest taken in tragic personages, it is less because they are heroes and kings than because they are human beings and miserable. Is it the Queen of Messina that touches me in M?rop?? No, it is the mother of ?giste. Nature alone has right over our hearts.--The true relation of the heart is, therefore, always from man to man, and never from man to king. The brilliancy of rank far from augmenting the interest which we feel in a tragic personage, on the contrary destroys it. The nearer to mine the condition of him who suffers, the more touched am I by his woes. It belongs to the essence of the serious drama to offer a more pressing interest, a more direct morality than that of the heroic tragedy, and there should be something more serious than mere gay comedy.? After developing this theme for a considerable length he terminates thus, ?The morality of comedy is nil, the reverse of what should be in the theater.?

Beaumarchais, a few years later, yielding with his usual suppleness to the inevitable, when he found the public refusing to be interested in his serious mediocrities, abandoned the _genre s?rieux_, which in the beginning he so warmly defended. He did not leave it, however, without a last thrust at his critics.

In his preface to the ?_Barbier de Seville_,? which he published eight years later, he thus alludes to these earlier productions: ?I had the weakness, Monsieur, to present to you at different times two poor dramas, monstrous productions as is very well known, because between tragedy and comedy no one is any longer ignorant that nothing exists, that is a point settled.... As for myself, I am so completely convinced of the truth of this that if I wished again to bring on the scene, a mother in tears, a betrayed wife, a forlorn sister, a son disinherited, in order to present them decently to the public, I should begin by placing them in a beautiful kingdom where they had done their best to reign, and I should situate it near one of the archipelagoes, or in some remote corner of the world....

The spectacle of men of medium condition, crushed and suffering, how absurd! Ridiculous citizens and unhappy kings, there is nothing else the theatre will permit.?

For those of Beaumarchais?s admirers who consider the creation of _Figaro_ as his highest t.i.tle to fame, it is no matter of regret that after imperfect success with his first drama, and almost failure with his second, he should have made the transition to gay comedy. _Figaro_, however, as we shall see, did not come before the public simply for its amus.e.m.e.nt, he came as the announcement of that complete change which already was taking place in the social inst.i.tutions of modern Europe, first breaking out in France, so that his apparition, therefore, was no mere accident, but a momentous event.

At the present moment in 1766, no one could be farther than Beaumarchais from the possibility of such a creation, for although he had brought with him from Spain the crude outline of the ?_Barbier_,? he lacked as yet all that experience which was to give political significance to the play, and which was destined to enable him to voice for all time the right of the individual to be heard in his own cause. In 1766 he not only imagined himself to be, but was, one of the most loyal, one of the most respectful subjects of the king. His life of adventure apparently was over. He asked for nothing better than the fortune and position he had acquired already.

At heart he was above everything else domestic and was therefore warmly attracted toward the new literary school. Lom?nie says, ?He precipitated himself with his ordinary fervor into the _drame domestique et bourgeois_, which seemed to him an unknown world of which Diderot was the Christopher Columbus, and of which he hoped to be the Vespucius.?

In speaking of Beaumarchais?s attraction for this school Gudin says: ?Struck with the new beauties which the French stage displayed from day to day, drawn on by his own talent he descended into the arena, to mix with the combatants who disputed the palms of the scenic plays.

?Never before had been seen such an a.s.semblage of excellent actors; the theater was not simply a place of amus.e.m.e.nt, it was a course in public instruction; here were displayed the customs of all nations and the princ.i.p.al events of history; all the interests of humanity were there developed with that truth which convinces, and arouses thought in every mind.

?Diderot proposed to paint upon the scene the different duties of the social condition, the father of the family, the magistrate, the merchant, in order to show the virtues which each requires. It was certainly a new point of view which he offered to the public. Beaumarchais felt his heart deeply touched, and yielding to the impulse which he felt, he composed, almost in spite of himself, his touching _Eug?nie_.

?This is the picture of a virtuous girl infamously seduced by a great lord. No piece ever offered a more severe morality, or more direct instruction to fathers of vain women, who allow themselves to be blinded by t.i.tles and great names. It is the duty of every author to attack the vices of his own century. This duty the Greeks first understood. But in France a thousand voices were raised against the innovation. Beaumarchais, whom nothing intimidated, dared in his first play to attack the vice so common among great lords, especially under Louis XV.

?Certainly this ought to have made him applauded by every friend of virtue. The opposite occurred. The friends kept silence. Those who were guilty of similar vice cried out against the play, their flatterers cried still louder, journalists and the envious authors hissed and cried out that it was detestable, scandalous, badly conceived and executed, immoral.

Not one applauded the energetic audacity of the author who dared to raise his voice against the luxurious vice permitted by the monarchy and even by the magistrates. Beaumarchais, however, had the public on his side, the piece remained upon the stage and was constantly applauded.?

Although the fastidious French taste, apart from all the enmity aroused by the many-sided success of its author, found much to criticise in the production, _Eug?nie_, or _la Vertu malheureuse_, the piece retains its place upon the repertoire of the Th??tre-Fran?ais and is still occasionally given.

Outside France it met with a much warmer reception. The German writer, Bettleheim, a.s.sures us that it was at once translated into most of the Kultur-Sprachen of Europe and was produced in the princ.i.p.al theatres everywhere. In England, through the support of Garrick, then director of the Drury Lane theater, and in Austria, through that of Sonnenfels, it met with an astounding success.

In Germany the translation was very soon followed by an imitation called ?_Aurelie, oder Triumph der Tugend_.?

Of the English play Garrick writes to Beaumarchais: ?_The School for Rakes_, which is rather an imitation than a translation of your _Eug?nie_, has been written by a lady to whom I recommended your drama, which has given me the greatest pleasure and from which I thought she could make a play which would singularly please an English audience; I have not been deceived, because with my help, as stated in the advertis.e.m.e.nt, which precedes the piece, our _Eug?nie_ has received the continual applause of the most numerous audiences.?

In Italy the success of _Eug?nie_ was scarcely less p.r.o.nounced. It was first produced in Venice in 1767, and in the criticism which follows the publication of the translation we read: ?The whole city was in great expectancy when it was known that this drama was to appear upon the scene.

The impressions made upon the hearts of the spectators corresponded with the fame which had preceded it and instead of diminishing this constantly continued to increase in such a manner that the whole of Italy, although rich in her own productions, has not grown weary of praising the piece.?

But for Beaumarchais the important thing was to win recognition from his own country. This was no easy matter; he, however, did not despair, and set about it with his usual tenacity of purpose, infinitude of resource and versatility of genius.

M. de Lom?nie says: ?Beaumarchais worked with all his energy to prepare a success for his play; we are indeed, far from 1784, at which time the author of the _Mariage de Figaro_ only had to hold back the feverish impatience of a public that awaited the performance of the piece as one of the most extraordinary events. We are in 1767, Beaumarchais is completely unknown as an author. He is a man of business, a man of pleasure who has been able to push himself somewhat at court, about whom people talk very differently, and whom men of letters are disposed to consider, as did the courtiers, an intruder. From this arose the necessity for him to push ahead, to arouse curiosity and to secure from all ranks supporters for his play. This is what he does with that apt.i.tude which distinguishes him.

?When, for instance, it is a question of obtaining the privilege of reading his drama before Mesdames, he poses as a courtier who has condescended to occupy himself with literature in the interest of virtue and good manners. He a.s.sumes a celebrity which he has not yet acquired and on the whole seems endowed with a rare presumption; here is the letter:

??Mesdames: