Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Monsieur,

  I am sending you my purse because one is always unhappy in prison. I am very sorry that you are in prison. Every morning and every evening I say an Ave Maria for you. I have the honor to be, Monsieur, your very humble and very obedient servant.

  Constant.2

  With tears streaming down his cheeks, Beaumarchais found paper and pen to reply:

  Mon cher petit ami Constant [My dear little friend Constant],

  I received your letter with deepest gratitude. I have divided its contents with my fellow prisoners, according to their needs. I kept the best part of your gift for your friend Beaumarchais — by that I mean the prayers, the Ave Marias, which I need most — and I distributed the money in your purse to the poor sufferers around me. So, while intending to help but one man, you have earned the gratitude of many. That is the usual fruit of good deeds such as yours. Good day, my little friend Constant.

  Beaumarchais.3

  Beaumarchais sent his thanks to the boy’s parents — his old friend Charles Lenormant d’Étioles, who had remarried after the death of his first wife Mme. de Pompadour and sired the little boy Constant. “My thanks and compliments,” Beaumarchais wrote:

  Your care instilled and developed his beneficence in an age when morality consists of protecting one’s own interests. L’Abbé Leroux [the boy’s teacher] has not been satisfied to teach his pupils to define the word virtue; he has taught them to love it. … Happy parents! to have a son six years of age capable of such a deed. I also had a son; but he is no more.4

  On March 20, Sartine sent Beaumarchais a note warning that no one could survive tilting against authority or the aristocracy in an absolute monarchy. Beaumarchais would almost certainly languish in prison indefinitely if he did not replot the course of his life. Consciously or unconsciously, Beaumarchais realized the truth of his friend’s warning. As one of his own onstage characters in Le Barbier warns Figaro, “A wise man does not start a quarrel with the great and powerful.”5 So Beaumarchais began revising the plot for his — and Figaro’s — life with a letter to the duc de La Vrillière:

  Monseigneur:

  The dreadful affair of the duc de Chaulnes has produced a series of misfortunes for me, of which the greatest is having incurred your displeasure. … If in my grief, any of the steps I have taken have displeased you, I disavow them at your feet, Monseigneur, and beg you to grant me your generous pardon. … My entire family tearfully joins their prayers to mine. Every one, Monseigneur, praises your indulgence and goodness of heart. By a single word, you can fill the hearts of a multitude of honest people with joy and add their gratitude to the deep respect with which we — and especially I — are all your very humble and obedient servants.

  Beaumarchais.6

  It was Figaro redefined. Instead of demanding a pardon, Beaumarchais appealed to the duc’s pompous self-depiction as a defender of justice. He asked the duc to consider releasing him for but a few hours each day to give his side of the La Blache lawsuit to the rapporteur for presentation to the judges. Satisfied by Beaumarchais’s apparent contrition, the duc ordered the playwright released from prison during the day to attend to the La Blache case, but he was to return to his cell at night.

  The duc’s decision came too late, however. La Blache had already fed the rapporteur the “facts” — and funds — to win his case . The rapporteur — a short, fat, bearded brute of an Alsatian named Louis Valentin Goëzman — refused to see Beaumarchais. After combing a list of contacts, Beaumarchais found one with access to the rapporteur’s wife, who offered to open Goëzman’s door for 100 louis (about $3,600). The bribe did indeed open Goëzman’s door — but not his mind. After a few gruff questions, the Alsatian ended the interview abruptly and walked out, leaving Beaumarchais to choke on his words. With only days to go before trial, Beaumarchais asked for a second interview, but, without more cash, he could only offer Madam Goëzman a diamond-studded watch he had made. She accepted it, but demanded an extra fifteen louis (about $500) “for Goëzman’s secretary.” When Beaumarchais arrived for his second interview, however, Goëzman refused to see him. La Blache had offered more. On Goëzman’s recommendation, the court declared the Pâris-Duverney promissory notes to Beaumarchais void and affirmed Beaumarchais to be 56,000 livres (more than $200,000 modern) in debt to La Blache.

  The decision ended Beaumarchais’s daily sorties and left him incarcerated full time, unable to raise cash to pay the court’s award to La Blache. The latter obtained court orders to seize all the playwright’s assets, including his home and everything in it. Beaumarchais’s family fled — one of his sisters to a nearby Paris convent and two other sisters to a convent in Picardy, seventy miles north of Paris. A fourth, widowed sister died while her brother was in prison, leaving him the guardian of her little girl and of her husband’s two sons by his first marriage. A fifth Beaumarchais sister and her husband took the orphaned children into their crowded home temporarily. With his son’s funds seized, old Père Caron and Beaumarchais’s stepmother moved to a rented room.

  As creditors sank their teeth into Beaumarchais’s other assets, courtiers who despised Beaumarchais for his rapid penetration of their aristocratic sancta joined the feeding frenzy, swooping in like vultures to salvage whatever flesh remained on the skeletal remains of Beaumarchais’s vast enterprises.

  “My courage is exhausted,” he wrote to police chief Sartine.

  Public opinion has turned against me: My credit has fallen to less than nothing, my business is ruined, my family, of which I am the patriarch and sole support is in despair. I have done good all my life, Monsieur, but those disposed to evil have done nothing but tear me apart … and calumniate me from a distance. … I have enough courage to withstand my own misfortunes, but not enough to stem the tears of my father, a respectable man of seventy-five who is dying of grief over the abject state to which I have fallen. I do not have enough courage to ease the anguish of my sisters and nieces, who feel the horror of my detention and know how it has devastated my affairs.7

  Beaumarchais remained in prison another month. On May 8, 1773, with the duc de La Vrillière satisfied that financial ruin had suitably humbled the insolent playwright, he ordered Beaumarchais released, an object of disdain by the vast majority of titled society, with only a handful of acquaintances able to conjure up a modicum of pity. Rather than risk scandal, the rapporteur Goëzman and his wife returned the watch and the 100 louis Beaumarchais had paid to obtain a fair hearing. His wife, however, pocketed the fifteen louis she had collected, and, after he left prison, the bankrupt Beaumarchais wrote to Madame Goëzman asking that she return them (more than $500 at a time when laborers earned about $1 a day). Assuming that Beaumarchais would not risk a public admission that he had bribed a judge’s wife, she simply ignored his request. It was a bad decision that pushed Beaumarchais beyond the limits of his patience and provoked him to unsheathe his only weapon — his pen — a weapon he had used successfully as a youth to expose the king’s clockmaker Lepaute as a thief. Motivated by even greater despair and desperation, Beaumarchais invested his last sou to publish a series of five pamphlets, or mémoires, one after the other, detailing events leading to his imprisonment and exposing the corruption that pervaded the French judiciary.

  “The questions before us,” he began simply in his first tract, “are whether it is necessary to bribe a judge with gold to get a fair trial and whether bribing judges is a punishable crime or simply an unfortunate fact of life in France.”8 Laced with Figaroan humor, dialogue, and biting sarcasm, his answers proved an enormous literary, social, and political success, selling by the thousands, in every café, salon, and château — reaching the hands (and eyes) of virtually every literate man and woman in France, including the king. His thirty-eight-page first pamphlet read like a play, at times evoking tears, at times disgust, at times gales of laughter. It also evoked additional charges against Beaumarchais for attempting to corrupt a judge, for which he could be sentenced to life behind a galley oar. Li
ke Figaro, Beaumarchais remained undeterred:

  When my sister tried to protect our family savings by offering Goëzman’s secretary fifty, instead of 100 louis, he refused indignantly: “When you offer a bribe, Madame, you must do so honestly.”9

  Unlike his maudlin letters of self-pity from prison, Beaumarchais allowed facts and events in the case to evoke sympathy for his plight and expose corruption — often lampooning himself:

  Unlike many other aristocrats, my nobility is not uncertain; you don’t have to accept my word for it. My nobility is my legitimate property, for which I have a fine parchment with a large, yellow wax seal. No one can challenge its authenticity, because I still have the receipt for its purchase twenty years ago.10

  The first pamphlet laid out his case; the subsequent ones described appearances at court, where each party could examine and cross-examine his adversary. When the court clerk asked whether Madame Goëzman and Beaumarchais knew each other, she snapped that she neither knew nor wished to know him. Beaumarchais, in turn, agreed in part: “I do not have the honor of knowing Madame, but after looking her over, I can’t help conjuring a wish that differs from hers.”11

  When the laughter subsided, the examination began.

  Beaumarchais asked whether he had not given her 100 louis. “That is false,” she cried out. “No one ever mentioned anything about 100 louis!”

  “Did you not hide the 100 louis in a vase?”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Did you not promise to arrange an audience for me with your husband in exchange for the 100 louis?”

  “Filthy lie!”

  He asked her about the 100 louis sixteen times, and sixteen times she denied any knowledge of them. Finally, he asked about the fifteen louis.

  “I insist, Monsieur, that no one ever said a word to me or offered me fifteen louis. What point would there be to offer me fifteen louis after I refused 100 the day before?”

  “The day before what, Madame?”

  “My dear Sir: the day before … of course … the day before the day …” She stopped suddenly and bit her lips. Beaumarchais finished her sentence for her: “The day before the day that no one spoke to you of fifteen louis?”

  “Stop this, Monsieur! Leave me alone,” she stood and shouted, “or I’ll slap your face. What do I care about fifteen louis. You’re trying to confuse me and make me contradict myself with all your nasty, twisted questions. Well now I swear I will not answer anything anymore!”12

  The publication of Beaumarchais’s real-life trial transfixed Paris and Versailles for seven months, from August 1773 to February 1774. His pamphlets — and the dull, boorish responses by Goëzman and his wife — restored Beaumarchais’s reputation and popularity. More than 4,000 copies circulated across Europe, making his name among the best known in Europe and inspiring Hessian poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe to write a popular drama based on Beaumarchais’s improbable adventures. They enthralled Voltaire, who himself had been imprisoned, exiled, and eventually forced to flee France to Ferney, Switzerland, to avoid prosecution for his writings. “No comedy was ever more amusing, no tragedy more touching,” he commented on the Beaumarchais pamphlets. “What a man! He unites everything — humor, seriousness, argument, gaiety, force, pathos, every kind of eloquence … and he confounds all his adversaries, and he gives lessons to his judges.”13 And in England, Horace Walpole reacted with “horror” over the French “mode of administering justice. … Is there a country in the world in which this Madame Goëzman would not have been severely punished?”14

  In January 1774, the Théâtre Français took advantage of the publicity surrounding the Beaumarchais trial to revive his first play, Eugénie. As crowds fought their way into the theater each night, critics who had demeaned Beaumarchais for not belonging to the Poet’s Society restored his literary reputation with glowing reviews. The Théâtre Français announced it would produce The Barber of Seville the following month. Celebrities across Europe joined Voltaire, Goethe, and Walpole in supporting Beaumarchais — among them, the French philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, coeditor with Diderot of the monumental Encyclopédie.

  The trial reached a climax when one of the judges withdrew from the case and all but admitted that Goëzman had shared bribes with him. He sent Beaumarchais a six-page plea for help in salvaging his reputation: “I have read your last memorial [pamphlet], Monsieur,” the judge wrote. “I yield to your prayers by resigning as your judge.” Admitting that he feared “the public will condemn me,” the judge pleaded to Beaumarchais “to mention my resignation in your next pamphlet as an honorable act.”15

  With the court itself tarred by the same brush as one of the parties before it, the remaining judges retired to consider the case, despising Beaumarchais for having exposed the corruption that pervaded their institution. With angry crowds repeatedly chanting “Beau-mar-chais!” outside the courthouse, the judges deliberated for twelve hours before deciding to strip Goëzman of his judicial robes, expel him from the judiciary, and disbar him. They imposed token fines on Madame Goëzman and three intermediaries in the bribery schemes and ordered Madame Goëzman to return the fifteen louis. Although the court restored Beaumarchais’s property and assets, it fined him for publishing his four pamphlets and bringing dishonor on the courts. Calling them an illegal attempt to influence a court decision, the judges ordered them burned by the public executioner. Finally, they stripped all participants of their civil rights and citizenship for an indefinite period — the Goëzmans for soliciting and accepting bribes, and Beaumarchais for giving them.

  As word of Beaumarchais’s sentence reached the crowds outside, a roar of outrage enveloped the courthouse, forcing the judges to slip out the back door to escape retribution. The crowds cheered as the playwright emerged; they followed his carriage to his sister’s home and were still cheering there the next morning when he emerged. Two days after the trial, the prince de Conti, a Bourbon relative of the king, joined with one of the king’s grandsons, the comte d’Artois — the future King Charles X — in inviting Beaumarchais to the prince-royal’s festival the next day. “We are of a sufficiently illustrious house,” Conti proclaimed, “to show the nation what is her duty toward one who has deserved so well of his country.”16

  Despite restoration of his popularity — and property — Beaumarchais remained in legal limbo, in so-called civil degradation — in effect, a “nonperson,” without the rights of a citizen, and therefore unable to prevent La Blache from returning to court to collect the judgment awarded earlier. Only a “letter of relief” from the king could delay collection of the judgment until Beaumarchais could appeal to a higher court for a reversal. Although the king had always liked Beaumarchais and was himself amused by the Beaumarchais pamphlets, he was annoyed by the music master’s having brought discredit to the court system. And after reading The Barber of Seville, the king grew irate at Figaro’s insolent barbs at the aristocracy. He ordered censors to ban the play and told Police Chief Sartine to silence the playwright’s voice. He wanted none of the so-called tea parties and other popular stirrings of England and America to spread to France. Although American Patriots had held their Boston Tea Party in mid-December 1773, the news did not arrive in France until the end of January, just as the Beaumarchais trial reached its tumultuous end. Although Beaumarchais appreciated the humor of Patriots disguising themselves as Indians to dispose of British tea, Sartine told the playwright that his only hope for a “letter of relief” was not humor, but a grand gesture of obeisance. “I counsel you not to show yourself in public anymore. Above all, do not write anything, because the king wishes that you publish nothing more about this affair.”17

  Boston patriots, disguised as Indians, dump British tea overboard on December 16, 1773. News of the Boston Tea Party stimulated French support for the American Revolution. The scene in this engraving — created in 1846, more than seven decades after the actual event — was largely the product of Nathaniel Currier’s imagination.

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OF CONGRESS

  Beaumarchais responded appropriately, recognizing that “royal power was a rock,” as Gudin put it, “against which prudence might well fear to throw herself. He therefore adopted a wise policy of submitting … to the king, obeying him and keeping silent.”18 Walking away from the adoring throngs of Paris, he went into self-imposed exile in a forgotten hamlet across the northern French border in Flanders and sent a letter of contrition to a close friend who was a banker and counselor to the king.

  “What has pierced my heart more than anything else,” Beaumarchais wrote to his friend, knowing that the letter would reach the king,

  has been the unfavorable impression recent events may have given the king about me. Some have told him that I was seditious and intent on notoriety, but no one told him that I was merely defending myself. … You know, my friend, that I always led a quiet life and never would have written about public matters if powerful enemies had not united to ruin me. Should I have allowed myself to be crushed without trying to defend myself? Is it a reason to dishonor me and my family if I did so vigorously? Is it a reason to sever the ties from society of an honest subject who might well have been employed usefully in the service of king and country? I have the strength to support undeserved misfortune, but my father is dying of sorrow after seventy-five years of honor and hard work; my sisters are weak and helpless.19

  His letter was enough to sway the king — especially Beaumarchais’s stated willingness to serve his monarch. The king had not read idly of Figaro’s machinations on behalf of his liege, the comte d’Almaviva, in The Barber. Nor was he unaware of Beaumarchais’s (and Figaro’s) talent for undermining the credibility of those in authority. Beaumarchais’s friend at court replied that the king felt he could use that talent and promised a letter of relief to allow Beaumarchais to recover his estate if he undertook a difficult secret mission with zeal — and succeeded.