Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  The failure of the opera version of Le Mariage had little effect on the popularity of spoken presentations. But even as he rode the tide of his greatest literary and stage success, Beaumarchais could not escape the nasty carping of those who so resented his escape from his original social class to fame and fortune. After one critic attacked Le Mariage as “a villainous rhapsody” written solely to enrich its author, Beaumarchais immediately proposed using his earnings to found and maintain the Institut de Bienfaisance Maternelle in Lyon to care for impoverished nursing mothers. He turned over all his earnings from Le Mariage to the institute in perpetuity, and within six years, the directors of the institute wrote him that his continuing generosity had saved “more than two hundred children who owe their lives to you. … From this feeble stream of money will flow rivers of milk and crowds of vigorous infants.”18 One newspaper published a cartoon with Figaro helping mothers, another with him opening the doors of a debtor’s prison.

  As he reached the pinnacle of his literary career, however, Beaumarchais’s unfortunate inability to ignore criticism brought him face to face with more misfortune. In replying angrily to one newspaper critic, he began his letter, “After having fought lions and tigers to get my comedy onto the stage …”19

  The normally benevolent Louis XVI interpreted the reference to “lions and tigers” as meaning the king and the queen, and in an uncharacteristic fit of pique, he ordered the clever playwright’s immediate arrest and summary imprisonment — not, however, in a conventional prison like the Bastille. Deciding to outwit the wit, Louis ordered Beaumarchais dragged from his home to the St. Lazare prison for juvenile offenders, where guards threw the fifty-three-year-old playwright across a punishment bench, stripped his bottom bare, and whipped his buttocks before a throng of howling adolescent miscreants.

  The press and public also responded with laughter at first — until they learned that the reason for the playwright’s humiliating imprisonment had been his comparing the king to a tiger. “Everyone felt in danger,” said an aide to the comte de Provence, the king’s younger brother, “not only as regarded his liberty, but also as regarded his personal dignity.” After four days, mobs demonstrated near the theater and in front of the St. Lazare prison, and the aide warned the comte that “people are inquiring whether anyone can be sure of sleeping tonight in his own bed.”20 On the fifth day, Beaumarchais’s imprisonment in a juvenile jail began to embarrass the king almost as much as it had embarrassed the playwright. The king relented and ordered Beaumarchais released, but to the king’s astonishment, Beaumarchais refused to leave the prison, issuing instead a memorial demanding to know the specific crime for which he had been arrested and insisting on a full trial. The leaflet denied any connection between the phrase “lions and tigers” and the nation’s monarchs. “I took two extremes in the scale of comparison,” he explained. “I might have said, ‘After having fought with giants.’ ” He called it “madness” for “any being in France … to wish to offend the king,” and he thoroughly denied having given “any signs of such madness.”21

  King Louis apparently recognized his own madness and sent aides with an unprecedented, albeit unwritten, apology to Beaumarchais. Eager not to turn the playwright into a martyr, he all but begged Beaumarchais to leave prison, called the detention “shameful,” and promised generous compensation. Beaumarchais was wise enough not to trifle any further with the king and left prison.

  All the king’s ministers attended Le Mariage on the evening of Beaumarchais’s release from prison, even standing to cheer the performances — and the playwright — at the end of each act and applauding in exaggerated fashion after Figaro tweaked their sensitivities by declaring, “Not being able to degrade intellect, they avenge themselves by persecuting it.” The king further rewarded Beaumarchais by sponsoring a performance of The Barber of Seville in the theater of the Trianon at Versailles, at which Beaumarchais was guest of honor — with the queen taking the part of Rosine and her brother-in-law the comte d’Artois playing Figaro. Nor was that enough to ease the king’s conscience. The king sought to wipe the Beaumarchais slate clean by fully covering all the playwright’s losses from the destruction of his fleet and damages to the Fier Roderigue when Admiral Comte d’Estaing forced that vessel into battle against the English in the Caribbean. Although the government had offered Beaumarchais a compromise settlement of 1.5 million livres, the king ordered the government to pay the entire Beaumarchais claim of 2.5 million livres. Beaumarchais asked for more, however, reminding the king that he had spent more than 100,000 livres over the previous five years, recovering stolen parchment deeds for the Bibliotheque du Roi at the behest of Vergennes and Maurepas. The king immediately ordered his treasury to reimburse the playwright.

  Louis’s arbitrary, mean-spirited order to arrest and humiliate Beaumarchais destroyed the public perception of Louis XVI as a wise and benevolent monarch. In a moment of childish outrage he had, for the first time, proved himself a Bourbon — as capable and willing to use his autocratic powers on a whim as his ancestral predecessors. With as little concern as a boy swatting a mosquito, he had all but crushed a man of towering genius in the arts and sciences, the head of one of the nation’s richest and most important enterprises, and a man to whom the French Crown had entrusted some of the most important missions in its history. Although the oldest members of the court retained their obsequious reverence for the king, the younger nobility — and the growing French bourgeoisie of well-educated lawyers, doctors, engineers, and other professionals — questioned the legitimacy of his continued powers. Many of them were veterans of the American Revolution and converts to the egalitarian principles that underlay that conflict. They had studied John Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other Age of Enlightenment philosophes, and they knew that the injustices that drew laughter onstage in Le Mariage de Figaro were no laughing matter offstage and, indeed, were a danger to them all.

  As for Beaumarchais, the humiliating injustice he suffered at St. Lazare proved one injustice too many. Despite the king’s abject apologies and compensations, Beaumarchais emerged from St. Lazare a different man — as bitter and angry as ever, but without the defiant laughter. He seemed unable any longer “to laugh at … continual misfortune,” as Figaro had done in Le Barbier, “for fear that I may be obliged to weep.” For the first time in his life, Beaumarchais wept at his continual misfortune and, worse, he faced an emotion he had never before encountered: fear. Beaumarchais was afraid.

  Without any business affairs to manage or government policies to plan, Beaumarchais pursued his favorite avocation, and wrote the next chapter in the adventures of his alter ego Figaro. In his sequel to Le Barbier and Le Mariage de Figaro, however, Figaro — like Beaumarchais — had aged. La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother), the third play in the Figaro trilogy, finds the hero both wiser and older — scarred by misfortune and rather sad, without the sparkling wit that had made him so original. Instead of the playful pest and symbol of revolt, Figaro is now a virtual member of the court and trusted counselor to the comte d’Almaviva. The plot revolves around the comte, who has sired an illegitimate daughter, whom he adores — much as Beaumarchais adored his own illegitimate daughter Eugénie. The maudlin complications onstage between the comte, his wife Rosine, and the other characters from Le Barbier and Le Mariage proved trite, dull, and meaningless — and without the biting humor of Figaro’s previous appearances. After fifteen badly attended — and badly acted — performances, La Mère closed. Touched nonetheless by the distress he had written into the plot, Beaumarchais decided that, after twelve years together, it was time to marry Marie-Thérèse and “legitimize” their beloved daughter Eugénie.

  Beaumarchais’s martyrdom raised him to mythic status in France. He could go nowhere without attracting a crowd of admirers. In the months that followed his imprisonment, only his study — and his writing — provided peaceful retreats, and he decided to fulfill a long-standing ambition by composing an opera. After completing the dialogue a
nd song lyrics, he sent his work to his favorite operatic composer, Christoph Willibald Gluck,22 then in residence at Versailles under the patronage of Queen Marie Antoinette. Gluck rejected the play but referred Beaumarchais to one of his protégés, the Italian composer Antonio Salieri.23 Beaumarchais sent the play to Salieri, with instructions to “write me music that will be subservient and not dominant, with all its effects made subordinate to my dialogue and drama.”24 Based on a Persian fable of the supernatural, Tarare was a melodramatic variation of the Figaro theme: Two warring genii — the genius of Fire and the genius of Nature — create the opera’s two primary characters: one of them a prince, destined by birth to become the powerful, despotic king of all Asia; the other, a common soldier named Tarare, who uses his intelligence, courage, and virtue to triumph over evil. He overthrows the king, is himself crowned king, and wins the beautiful leading lady away from the old corrupt monarch.

  Thousands lined the avenues leading to the opera in anticipation of opening night. Four hundred troops rushed to the scene and put up barriers to keep the crowd orderly. “Never before did any of our theaters see such a crowd as that which besieged all the avenues of the opera the day of the first presentation of Tarare,” wrote a journalist in Grimm’s Correspondence, in June 1787. “Barriers … scarcely sufficed to keep it in restraint.”25

  Still called Salieri’s, if not Beaumarchais’s, “masterpiece,” it slipped into the dustbin of operatic archives during the nineteenth century, along with most of the composer’s other works,26 because of music that critics described as “obvious and commonplace.” Tarare nonetheless contained every theatrical artifice Beaumarchais could devise to please the public — drama, songs, dance, ballet, magnificent scenery, fantasy, philosophy, and even an occasional laugh for comic relief. And, of course, the Figaroan outcry against aristocratic privilege.

  Mortel! the cast sings out “majestically,” according to Beaumarchais’s stage instructions for the climactic closing scene,

  Mortel! qui que tu sois, prince, brahme, ou soldat,

  Homme, ta grandeur sur la terre

  N’appartient point à ton état,

  Elle est toute à ton caractère.27

  Mortal man, be you prince, brahmin, or soldier,

  Thy greatness on earth

  Stems not from thy birth

  But from thy character.

  It was pure Figaro. Pure Beaumarchais.

  Built in 1370 under King Charles V, the Bastille was originally a fortress guarding the Saint-Antoine gate of eastern Paris. As Paris expanded in the sixteenth century, modern arms rendered it obsolete, and Cardinal Richelieu converted it into a prison, whose fearsome shadow darkened the forbidding streets of the working-class neighborhood.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  Although the public embraced the work, one contemporary critic dissented, calling the music “inferior” and the recitative “almost always insipid and commonplace.”28

  Never content to limit himself to one project at a time, Beaumarchais also sought to revive his spirits by investing his every fantasy into the design of a new home — a retreat for his retirement — where he and his family could live securely in a castlelike dwelling amid gardens unmatched in their beauty even in Tarare’s mythological Persia. Always the clever merchant searching for undervalued assets, the playwright bought an acre of vacant land at the gates of the Saint-Antoine working-class slums in eastern Paris, in the very shadow of the forbidding medieval prison — La Bastille.

  Dissatisfied with what he considered the pedestrian designs of professional architects, Beaumarchais designed and built a structure of his own creation at a cost of 1.7 million francs that surpassed almost every mansion in Paris in elegance and luxury, with the possible exception of the Palais des Tuileries at the Louvre. Napoleon later called it “une folie” — sheer madness. But what madness! A madness that incorporated every element of theatrical magic at Beaumarchais’s command. Using tricks of trompe l’oeil perspective, Beaumarchais designed terraced gardens and a winding stream with rowboats that passed beneath a Chinese bridge and seemed to stretch the one-acre rectangle to the horizon, past beds of exotic flowers and shrubs, thick stands of trees, and a rock tunnel that disguised a functioning icehouse. Although fantasy gardens had become the rage of Paris nobility, the Beaumarchais fantasies went beyond any ever before seen. He incorporated a stable for ten horses into an artificial hillside, and on the artificial hilltop above it stood a Greek temple to Bacchus with a surrounding colonnade, topped by a classical dome and a frieze that read, “ To Voltaire: He showed the world the errors of its ways.” A central carriageway bisected the length of the property, ending in a roundabout at the main entrance of a four-story, castlelike house, where, as in a child’s fairy tale, Beaumarchais planned to retire and live happily ever after.

  The elaborate garden of the Beaumarchais mansion reflected a growing mania among eighteenth-century French noblemen for fantasy gardens. A Greek temple to Bacchus can be seen at upper left; at center is the entrance to a rock tunnel containing a functioning icehouse.

  CABINET DES ESTAMPES, BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE, PARIS

  The front door opened into an enormous, circular salon on the ground floor, capped by a cupola thirty feet above. Great mahogany panels alternated with grandiose paintings by Joseph Vernet around the central atrium.29 Off the main court lay smaller salons, a billiard room with seats for spectators, and the great man’s office. Below ground lay vast kitchens and wine cellars, while grand staircases led to the upper floors and the sumptuous apartments he designed for family members and guests. The house and gardens were so elaborate that, when times permitted, they would become an all but obligatory destination for visitors to Paris and, indeed, for many Parisians. Always the showman, Beaumarchais printed admission tickets, for which he charged nothing and on which he would often inscribe a few words of original poetry.

  Construction on the house began in 1787 — just as the French economy began to collapse. The cost of the war with England and the failure of the United States to repay its wartime debts had left the government bankrupt, and in September 1788 the king turned for help to the Estates General, an assembly of noblemen, clergymen, and privileged commoners — professionals, bankers, and bourgeois business and property owners.

  In early 1789, after months of useless debates by the Estates General, Versailles announced it would print paper money to pay the Crown’s internal debts. The result was economic disaster. Vendors in every industry refused the paper money; textile producers shut their doors and laid off more than 200,000 workers across France — 80,000 in Paris alone. The national monopoly of farmers doubled wholesale prices; retail food prices soared. Making matters worse, two successive years of drought and a freak hailstorm in the Paris region decimated crops and produced food shortages that sent prices 60 percent higher. Food riots erupted across France — in the Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, Normandy, and Brittany. Mobs of peasants and impoverished workers raided granaries, wheat convoys, and bakeries in every town and city. Mobs swarmed through streets; thieves broke into homes across Paris — including the home of American minister plenipotentiary Thomas Jefferson — to steal anything made of gold or silver to trade for food.

  “Paris is in danger of hourly insurrection for the want of bread,” Jefferson wrote in haste to Secretary for Foreign Affairs John Jay. “The patience of … people … is worn thread-bare … civil war is much talked about.”30

  Pamphleteers covered Paris walls with leaflets accusing Versailles and the aristocracy of starving the nation. As anarchy spread across Paris, 30,000 troops massed in and around Versailles to protect the king. The rest of the regular army — 200,000 men — went on alert in Metz, 180 miles to the east, awaiting the king’s order to march into Paris.

  Beaumarchais sympathized deeply with the demonstrators, comparing them to the American revolutionaries of the previous decade. As economic distress spread, however, Beaumarchais’s unbridled success and his unabashe
d, conspicuous display of wealth began to alienate those with whom he sympathized. His opulent new house, rising at the edge of the city’s poorest neighborhood — in the shadow of the city’s cruelest and most despised prison — seemed an “insolent provocation.” To counter street-corner provocateurs, he opened the grounds to visitors, letting them come and go as they pleased, and passed out money for food to all the families within a reasonable radius of his house. When an anonymously published pamphlet accused him of having profited from the plight of the American revolutionaries, he fired back indignantly with a letter to the Commune of Paris:

  Since I have been attacked … I am going to describe the labor which a single man was able to accomplish in that great work. Frenchmen: you who pride yourselves to have drawn the desire and ardor of your liberty from the example of the Americans, learn that that nation owes me very largely her own liberty. … I sent at my risks and perils, whatever could be had of the best in France, in munitions, arms, clothing, etc., to the insurgents who needed everything on credit, at the cost price … and that after twelve years, I am still not paid. … The third of my fortune is in the hands of my debtors, and since I have aided the poor … four hundred letters at least are on my desk from unfortunates, raising their hands to me.31

  On Sunday, July 12, 1789, thousands of Parisians poured from their churches and milled about the streets and squares, where orators harangued mobs with angry denunciations of priests as purveyors of the king’s lies. In the gardens of the Palais Royal, a huge crowd gathered under the plain trees, hypnotized by the resonant voice of Georges-Jacques Danton, an ugly but glib lawyer who thrilled as he watched his words seduce the great mass before him. Suddenly the cry “To arms!” rang out. As some raced for refuge under nearby arcades, the rest of the mob sprang like a great beast of prey, out the gates onto the rue Saint-Honoré, hungering for bread and thirsting for blood. Shots rang out a few streets away near the Tuileries Gardens, where palace guards raked the crowd with fire. By day’s end, anarchy raged in the streets. The mob burned and demolished forty-four of the fifty-four hated customs posts that the farm monopoly had built to collect taxes on foodstuffs entering Paris. Brigands took advantage of the surging mob to loot shops and homes in their path. Ordered by officers to fire on the mobs, army regulars — themselves commoners — refused, and when several of their sergeants were jailed for disobedience at the Hôtel des Invalides — the military hospital — the mob and the soldiers smashed through the gates and released them and all other prisoners.