Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence Volume II Part 27

Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence Volume II Part 27

"Paris, _vendemiaire_ An IX.

"Madame:

"I have received your letter. I will bring into this matter all the interest which the memory of a justly celebrated man merits, and that yourself inspires.

"Bonaparte."

In one of the _mauvais vers_ (from a literary viewpoint) with which Beaumarchais in his old age commented upon the career of the great general, is one which, says Lomenie, "honors his sensibility." It was written in 1797, and runs thus:

"Young Bonaparte, from victory to victory, Thou givest us peace, and our hearts are moved; But dost thou wish to conquer every form of glory?

Then think of our prisoners of l'Olmutz."

The allusion in the verse was to Lafayette and his fellow-prisoners, who for five years had been detained, first in a prison in Prussia, and later in the Austrian fortress of Olmutz. In 1792, Lafayette had been declared a traitor by the National a.s.sembly after the fateful tenth of August, and been forced to cross the frontier and give himself up to the Austrians, who were then fighting against France. He was held as a prisoner of State. His wife and family, having been unable to secure his release, were permitted to share his captivity with him. Napoleon, who never had entertained a very high opinion of the military capacity of Lafayette, nevertheless stipulated for his release and for that of his fellow-prisoners in the treaty of Campo Formio, which was signed during the year 1797.

But to return to the private life of Beaumarchais. Gudin, after visiting his friend, had not consented to remain under his roof, feeling that now he would be a burden and so had returned to his country retreat to await events. It was there that he learned of the joy that was about to crown the old age of his friend. He wrote to Beaumarchais:

"I remember the songs you made for Eugenie, when you cradled her on your knees, and it seems to me that I can hear you sing others for her child.

Kiss her for me, my dear friend, compliment her for me, and all of you rejoice over your domestic happiness; it is the sweetest of all, the most real perhaps."

For Beaumarchais, this was indeed the crowning blessing of this life. On January 5th, 1798, Madame Delarue gave birth to a daughter, Palmyr, as they called her. This event caused her grandfather to give way to "transports of joy," though at first his only thought was "for his beloved Eugenie."

With the reestablishment of Beaumarchais's fortune, Gudin, who had in the meantime settled his own affairs, returned to live with his friend.

"I came again," he says, "to my native city, delighted to see my friend, and to find his family augmented. We tasted the sweetness of friendship the most intimate. I saw him abandon himself in our conversations to the most vivid hope for the prosperity of the state and of our arms.

"Beaumarchais, at this time, was full of force and of health. Never were his days devoured by so many plans, projects, labors and enterprises....

His age allowed us to hope that we might retain him a long while.

"We had spent the day together in the midst of his family, with one of his oldest friends. He had been very gay and had recalled in the conversation several events of his youth, which he recounted with a charming complacency.... I did not leave him until ten o'clock; he retired at eleven, after embracing his wife. She was slightly indisposed; he recommended her to take some precautions for her health,-his own seemed perfect. He went to bed as usual, and wakened early. He went to sleep again and wakened no more. He was found next morning in the same att.i.tude in which he placed himself on going to bed."

An attack of _apoplexie foudroyante_ had carried him off at the age of sixty-seven years and three months. This was on the 18th of May, 1799.

The suddenness of the death of Beaumarchais caused, as may be imagined, the most profound sorrow to his family and friends.

Madame de Beaumarchais wrote a few days after his death:

"Our loss is irreparable. The companion of twenty-five years of my life has disappeared, leaving me only useless regrets, a frightful solicitude and memories that nothing can efface.... He forgave easily, he willingly forgot injuries.... He was a good father, zealous friend, defender of the absent who were attacked before him. Superior to petty jealousies, so common among men of letters, he counselled, encouraged all, and aided them with his purse and his advice.

"To the philosophic eye, his end should be regarded as a favor. He left this life, or rather, it left him, without struggle, without pain, or any of those rendings inevitable in the frightful separation from all those dear to him. He went out of life as unconsciously as he entered it."

"The inventory," says Gudin in his narrative, "which is made at a man's death, often reveals the secrets of his life. That of Beaumarchais showed us that to succor families in distress, artists, men of letters, men of quality, he had advanced more than 900,000 francs without hope that these sums ever should be repaid. If one adds to these, sums that he had lavished without leaving the least trace, one would be convinced that he had expended more than 2,000,000 in benevolences."

The mortal remains of Beaumarchais were laid to rest in a sombre avenue of his garden which he himself had prepared. "In planting his garden,"

says Gudin, "he had consecrated a spot for his eternal rest.... It was there that we placed him. It was there that his son-in-law, his relatives, his friends, a few men of letters, paid him their last respects, and that Colin d'Harleville read a discourse which I had composed in the overflowing of my sorrow, but which I was not in a condition to p.r.o.nounce."

"A beautiful copy of the Fighting Gladiator," says Lintilhac, "decorated the entrance to the ostentatious mansion where camped _la vieillesse militante_ of Beaumarchais. The posture of the combat, like the face of the gladiator, betrayed a manly agony. What expressive symbol of his life and work!"

In pausing now to cast a backward glance over the achievements of this one man, we scarcely can fail to admit with Lintilhac that Beaumarchais was not boasting when he wrote toward the end of his life: "I am the only Frenchman, perhaps, who never has demanded anything of anyone, and nevertheless, among my great labors, I count with pride, to have contributed more than any other European towards rendering America free."

That he ever looked upon his work in the cause of American Independence, as his strongest claim to immortality among men, can be judged from his constant return to the subject and especially from what he says in his memoir of self-justification delivered before the Commune of Paris in September, 1789. (Given in Chapter XI.) It may be said that the very persistence of his reclamations in this regard was responsible for the indifference with which they were universally received. A man so rich, so happy, so prosperous, so gay, so universally successful in all his undertakings, could not expect to be taken seriously when he loudly decried the universal ingrat.i.tude of mankind, even though his accusations might be just. What Beaumarchais essentially lacked, as La Harpe has pointed out, was above everything else, _measure_ and _good taste_. He was too ostentatious, too expansive, talked too much of himself, pushed himself forward with too much noise, was too brilliant, too daring, too successful; and yet, as M. de Lomenie has said in the remarkable resume of the character of Beaumarchais given at the end of his work: "It does not seem to us possible to contest the fact that Beaumarchais is one of those men who gains the most by being seen at close range and that he is worth infinitely more than his reputation."

And the same author continues:

"Beaumarchais had implacable enemies; but one very important point is to be noted, namely that all those who attacked him with fury either knew him very little, or did not know him at all; while those who lived intimately with him loved him pa.s.sionately. All the literary men who knew him in life, and who spoke of him after his death, have spoken with affection and esteem. Two minds as different as those of La Harpe and Arnault meet, in regard to him, with the same expressions of sympathy, and I have not found a trace in all the papers left after his death of a single man who, after knowing him intimately, became his enemy. On the contrary, I constantly have found testimonials of attachment that are far from common. I have found that friendships, begun in his youth, when he was a simple watchmaker, or _controleur_ of the house of the king, follow him for thirty or forty years without ever changing or weakening, but on the contrary, redouble in intensity and manifest themselves in the greatest tenderness, and in the most disinterested ways....

"The goodness of the author of the _Mariage de Figaro_, extended not only to those about him. Gudin affirms that M. Goezman fallen into misery was succored by him; that Baculard was on his register for 3,600 frs. which were never returned.

"A charming trait of his character often has been remarked, in relation to the inscription engraved upon the collar of his little dog, which was as follows:-'I am Mlle. Follette; Beaumarchais belongs to me. We live on the Boulevard.'

"We can therefore say with La Harpe and Arnault who knew him, that although the author of the _Mariage de Figaro_, was followed all his life by black calumnies, he resembled in nothing the portrait which his enemies have left us of him. It is true that his good qualities are often somewhat veiled by _legerete d'esprit_ and _defaut de tenue_. His friend d'Atilly painted him to nature, when he said, '_he has the heart of an honest man_, but he often has _the tone of a bohemian_.' The frivolity of the century in which he lived had too much colored his ideas ... and indeed equitably to judge the character of the man in its entirety, one must not forget either the situation in which he found himself, or the century in which he lived."

Louis de Lomenie wrote in 1854, more than half a century after the death of Beaumarchais. Since the appearance of his work, many others have taken up the pen to discuss the pros and cons of this many-sided character. The last of these, M. Eugene Lintilhac, calls attention to the crowd of obliges from the scepter to the shepherd's crook. "What man in need," he says, "great lord or modest author, ever came and knocked at his door, without carrying away consolation in words and species? To how many oppressed, mulattos, slaves, Jews, protestants has he not held the hand?"

Sainte-Beuve says somewhere, that the Society of Dramatic Authors should never a.s.semble without saluting the bust of Beaumarchais. It can do so henceforward because they have placed in the hall where their meetings are held, a marble bust of its founder.

On the one hundredth anniversary of the first production of the _Mariage de Figaro_, on April 27, 1884, the play was performed again at the Theatre Francais. At the close of the performance the bust of Beaumarchais was brought forward, and crowned while Coquelin recited verses to his praise written for the occasion by M. Paul Delair.

Thus to have survived a veritable death from oblivion, and to have come after a century of neglect into a resurrection of honor and fame, is sufficient proof of the real greatness of the literary genius of Beaumarchais to convince all unbelievers. This has been the act of reparation accorded him by France. The debt of grat.i.tude owed him by America is still unpaid. It remains to be seen whether the same resurrection of honor awaits him among us.

This book is a first attempt to state fully the facts of the life of Beaumarchais for the American people, so that they may know the man who was their friend, even before they came into existence as a nation, and it is put out in the hope that they may share the sentiment renewed in M. Eugene Lintilhac and so forcibly expressed by Gudin-"I soon found that I could not love him moderately when I came to know him in his home."

And so with this expression of a friend's esteem, let us leave Beaumarchais in company with his faithful Gudin, Gudin, "whose great work," says Lintilhac, "_the History of France_, still sleeps in the _Biblioteque Nationale_, ... but whose author has found a surer path to glory in taking the first place in the cortege of his ill.u.s.trious friend,-Beaumarchais."

Although America has been slow to recognize the claims of Beaumarchais to her grat.i.tude, yet Time, the great leveler, is restoring all things to their place; and to-day, if our "friend" is cognizant of what history is doing, he realizes that this same United States, which his services did so much to found, is repaying this debt with interest so far as money goes, but still more with warm affection and heartiest friendship cemented by the life blood of both nations-and to-day he repeats what he wrote in December, 1779-

"As for me, whose interests lose themselves before such grand interests; I, private individual, but good Frenchman, and sincere friend of the brave people who have just conquered their liberty; if one is astonished that my feeble voice should have mingled with the mouths of thunder which plead this great cause, I will reply that one is always strong enough when one has right on his side....

"I have had great losses. They have rendered my labors less fruitful than I hoped for my independent friends, but as it is less by my success than by my efforts that I should be judged, I still dare to pretend to the n.o.ble reward which I promised myself; the esteem of three great nations; France, America, and even England.

"Caron de Beaumarchais."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

_Beaumarchais et son Temps par Louis de Lomenie_, Paris, 1850.

Translated by H. S. Edwards. N. Y. 1857

_Histoire de Beaumarchais, Gudin de la Brenellerie._ Edited by Maurice Tourneux, 1888

_uvres Completes, precedees d'une notice sur sa vie et ses ouvrages par Saint Marc Gerardin_, 1828, 6 tomes

_Nouvelle Edition Augmentee de quatre pieces de Theatre et des doc.u.ments divers inedits avec une introduction par M. E.

Fournier, ornee de vingt portraits, etc._ 1876

H. Doniol-_Histoire de la Partic.i.p.ation de la France dans l'etabliss.e.m.e.nt des Etats-Unis_, 5 tomes. Paris, 1886-1892

E. Lintilhac-_Beaumarchais et ses uvres; precis de sa vie et histoire de son esprit, etc._ Paris, 1887