CHAPTER XXV
“I know very well to live is to combat, and perhaps I should be afflicted at this if I did not know that in return to combat is to live.”
Caron de Beaumarchais.
“—Often broken-hearted, always consoled by the sublime principle of the compensation of good and evil—which was the ground of his optimism...”
Lintilhac in Beaumarchais et Ses Œuvres.
House of Beaumarchais Searched—The 10th of August—Letter to his Family in Havre—Letter of Eugénie to her Father—Commissioned to Buy Guns for the Government—Goes to Holland as Agent of Comité de Salut Public—Declared an Emigré—Confiscation of his Goods—Imprisonment of his Family—The Ninth Thermidor Comes to Save Them—Life During the Terror—Julie again in Evidence—Beaumarchais’s Name Erased From List of Emigrés—Returns to France.
EARLY in 1792, Beaumarchais embarked in a new political and commercial operation which, says Loménie, “was destined to embarrass his fortune and to be the torment of his latter days. France was without arms and he undertook to procure them for her. It is difficult to understand that a man sixty years old, rich, fatigued by a most stormy existence, afflicted with increasing deafness, surrounded [254] with enemies, and desirous only of repose should have allowed himself to be induced to attempt to bring into France sixty thousand guns detained in Holland under circumstances which rendered this operation as dangerous as it was difficult.”
However, Gudin tells us, “he had only the choice of dangers. To have refused to procure the arms would have marked him for disfavor. He therefore chose the danger of being useful to his country. This resolution exposed him to the risk of being pillaged and assassinated, but in the end it saved his life.... During the days of frenzy which preceded the overthrowing of the throne, the most hostile menaces sounded around his house.”
The populace insisted that he had stored it with wheat and guns. In vain Beaumarchais protested, in vain he placarded the walls of his garden with official statements proving that the house had been searched and that nothing had been found. The fury of the mob was not to to be appeased. Finally on the 8th of August, the threatenings became so ominous that he was persuaded to spend the night in the home of a friend, who had sought safety outside Paris, leaving an old domestic alone in charge. Beaumarchais says:
“At midnight the valet, frightened, came to the room where I was, ‘Monsieur,’ he said to me, ‘get up, the people are searching for you, they are beating the doors down, someone has turned traitor, the house will be pillaged.’ ... The frightened man hid in a closet while the mob searched the house.” When morning came, he returned to his own home, around which the threatenings still continued without ceasing.
Gudin says: “He received the most alarming notices, and the day after the imprisonment of the king, August 10th, a great multitude set out in the direction of his house, threatening to break down the iron gates if they were not immediately opened. I and two other persons were with him.
“At first his desire was to open the doors and to speak to the multitude. But persuaded that secret enemies conducted the crowd, and that he would be assassinated before he could open his mouth, we induced him to leave the house by a side entrance.... As we were but four we decided to separate in the hope of deceiving those who sought him....
“Whatever the cause, once admitted and masters of the situation, someone proposed to swear that they would destroy nothing. The populace swore and kept its word. Always extreme, it even swore to hang anyone who stole anything. It visited the whole house, the closets, the granaries, the cellars, and the apartments of the women and my own. They wished to hang my own domestic, who seeing the crowd, ran from room to room with some of my silver hidden in her pocket; they thought she was stealing, and she was forced to call in the other domestics as witnesses. They searched everywhere and found only the gun, hunting case, and sword of the master of the house, these they did not disturb.
“Thirsty from excitement and fatigue, that breathless troop, instead of opening a cask of wine, satisfied itself with water from the fountain. They even left the master’s watch hanging at the head of his bed, and other articles of jewelry about the rooms.... A troup conducted by a magistrate would not have been more exact in its perquisition, or more circumspect in its conduct.
“Truth here resembles fable,—something extraordinary always mingled itself with the events which came to Beaumarchais. This conduct of the populace was the fruit of the benefits which he had poured upon the poor of his neighborhood. If he had not been loved, if he had not been dear to his domestics, all his goods would have been dissipated by pillage.”
The next day Beaumarchais wrote to his daughter in Havre:
“August 12, 1792.
“... My thoughts turned upon thy mother, and thee and my poor sisters. I said with a sigh, ‘My child is safe; my age is advanced; my life is worth very little and this would not accelerate the death by nature but by a few years. But my daughter! Her mother! They are safe? Tears flowed from my eyes. Consoled by this thought I occupied myself with the last term of life, believing it very near. Then, my head hollow through so much contending emotion, I tried to harden myself and to think of nothing. I watched mechanically the men come and go; I said, ‘The moment approaches,’ but I thought of it as a man exhausted, whose ideas begin to wander, because for four hours I had been standing in this state of violent emotion which changed into one like death. Then feeling faint, I seated myself on a bank and awaited my fate, without being otherwise alarmed.”
“When the crowd had retired,” says Gudin in his narrative, “Beaumarchais returned and dined in his home, more astonished to find all undisturbed than he would have been to have seen the whole devastated....”
“And so we continued to live alone in that great habitation, occupied in meditating on the misfortunes of the state and sometimes upon those which menaced us....
“On the 23rd of August, upon awakening I perceived armed men in the streets, sentinels at the doors and under the windows. I hastened to the apartment of my friend—I found him surrounded by sinister men occupied in searching his papers and putting his effects under seal. Tranquil in the midst of them, he directed their operations. When they were through, they took him with them and I was left alone in that vast palace, guarded by sans culottes whose aspect made me doubt whether they were there to conserve the property, or to give the signal for pillage.”
Beaumarchais had been carried off to the mairie (police court) “where he defended himself so perfectly,” continues Gudin, “that his denouncers were confounded and about to liberate him when Marat denounced him anew.... He was sent to l’Abbaye along with others whose virtues were a title of proscription.
“At the end of a week his name was called. General consternation in the prison.
“‘You are called for.’
“‘By whom?’
“‘M. Manuel. Is he your enemy?’
“‘I never saw him.’ Beaumarchais went out. All the assembly sat silent.
“‘Who is M. Manuel?’ demanded Beaumarchais.
“‘I am he. I come to save you. Your denouncer, Colmar, is declared culpable—he is in prison—you are free.’...
“Two days later came the September massacres. And thus a second time his life was saved. ‘Long afterwards he learned that a woman to whom he had rendered an eminent service had solicited Manuel to obtain the liberty of her benefactor.’” (Gudin, p. 430.)
“It would seem natural,” says M. de Loménie, “that in such a moment, the author of the Mariage de Figaro would consent to set aside the matter of the guns and occupy himself with his own personal safety.”
He consented, however, to hide himself during the day outside Paris, but every night he returned on foot by byways and across ploughed fields, to urge the ministers to make good the promises of their predecessors and make it possible for him to obtain the sixty-thousand guns from Holland which he had promised the nation.
“The fact was,” says Loménie, “that on the one hand, until those guns were delivered, he remained an object of suspicion to the people, while on the other he believed that the minister Lebrun was trying to exploit the matter to his own credit while leaving to Beaumarchais, if necessary, all the responsibility of failure. This was what rendered him so tenacious, that he tormented even Danton who, by the way, could not help laughing to see a man so badly compromised who should be thinking only of his safety, obstinately returning every night to demand the money which had been promised as a deposit, and to obtain a commission for Holland.”
Finally Lebrun consented to give the author of the Mariage de Figaro a passport to Holland and promised to have the necessary money ready for him at Havre.
“He set out,” says Lintilhac, “on the 22nd of September, 1792, with Gudin, directing himself toward Havre, where, after so many emotions, he wished to press his wife and his daughter in his arms. From there, he passed to England where he was arrested, imprisoned, then set free. As soon as Madame de Beaumarchais knew that her husband was safe, she returned to Paris to be nearer, so as to defend his interests. A noble task which she accomplished at the peril of her life.
“The departure of Beaumarchais, the motive of which remained a secret, emboldened his enemies who renewed their accusations. The 28th of November a second decree was rendered against him as suspected. Immediately seals were placed upon all the houses which he owned in Paris. Madame de Beaumarchais hastened to protest the accusations against her husband and against the placing of the seals. With great difficulty she finally obtained a decree dated February 10, 1793, which accorded to her husband a delay of two months to present his defense and at the same time the immediate removal of the seals. He wrote from London, December 9, 1792, to his family:
“‘My poor wife and thou, my dear daughter. I do not know where you are, nor where to write to you, neither by whom to give you news. Still I learn by the gazette that seals have been placed for the third time on my property and that I am decreed, accused for this miserable affair of the guns of Holland.... Be calm, my wife and my sisters. Dry thy tears, my sweet and tender child! they trouble the tranquillity of which thy father has need to enlighten the National Convention upon grave subjects which it is important it should know.’”
Beaumarchais returned immediately to France, drew up a memoir for his justification, secured the removal of the seals at Paris; but the municipality of Strausborg maintained those which it had imposed. Beaumarchais grew impatient, addressed a petition to the minister of the interior who sent a dispatch to the administrator of that department of the Bas-Rhein. Again, the author of the Mariage de Figaro is vindicated and absolved.
The troubles of Beaumarchais showed no signs of diminishing either in number or perplexity. In the month of January, 1793, the English government, having joined the coalition against France, was on the point of herself taking possession of the sixty-thousand guns for which Beaumarchais had so long been negotiating.
“He, however,” says Loménie, “did not lose his head, having already had wind of the project. At the very time when he was imprisoned in London he had induced an English merchant ... by means of a large commission ... to become the purchaser of those same guns and to maintain them in his name at Tervère as English property, until the real owner could dispose of them. But the fictitious owner could not hold them long, because the English ministers said to him, ‘Either you are the real owner or you are not; if you are, we are ready to pay for them; if you are not, we intend to confiscate them.’...
“The English merchant remaining faithful to the engagement with Beaumarchais, resisted; affirmed the guns to be his property, invoked his right to dispose of them as he pleased, and this respect for law which distinguishes the English Government above all other governments, left the question undecided. The guns remained at Tervère under guard of an English battleship.” (Loménie, Vol. II, p. 424.)
“Things were at this pass when the committee of public safety informed Beaumarchais that he must secure the arms, or else prevent their falling into the hands of the English; failing which his family and goods in default of his person would answer for the success of the operation.” And so, early in June, 1793, again he left France on this most difficult mission.
“To enter into all the details of his interminable tours et détours, going from Amsterdam to Basle, from Basle to Hamburg, from Hamburg to London ... all which he directed like a very ingenious intrigue de comédie ... would be too long. He was able to keep the guns at Tervère and when the moment seemed to him favorable, he supplicated the committee of public safety with loud cries, to order the General Pichegru to come and carry off the guns; but the committee absorbed by a thousand things made no reply.... The only missive he ever received from them was the following, dated, 5 pluviose, An II (January 26, 1794), written by Robert Lindet, ‘You must be quick, do not await events. If you defer too long, your service will not be appreciated. Great returns are necessary and they must be prompt. It is of no use to calculate the difficulties, we consider only results and success.’”
“Not only,” continues Loménie, “did the Committee abandon Beaumarchais to himself, but with a thoughtlessness which is another sign of the times, they allowed their agent to be put upon the lists as an émigré, which act entailed the confiscation of his property.
“Madame de Beaumarchais went at once to the committee of public safety, explained that her husband was not an émigré, since he had left the territory of the republic because of an official mission, and provided with a regular passport, and her proof in her hand, she succeeded in having the decree withdrawn and the seals removed from the property. Beaumarchais had at this time taken refuge in Hamburg.
“He found himself,” says Loménie, “in the most cruel situation both materially and morally. He knew that the revolutionary tribunal was fixed permanently at Paris, that it struck without pity mothers, wives, and daughters of the absent ones, and that the bloody knife never ceased to fall. The unfortunate man was in torture. Eugénie tried to comfort her father in the unconscious tranquillity of a young girl. Every precaution had been taken to hide from her the horrible tragedy which was being enacted about her; she presented a striking contrast with the terrible reality of the times.
“She walked alone and melancholy in the lovely garden, while the dismal car passed along the terrace perhaps. But in her sad dreaming, she did not turn her head; she admired the earliest advances of spring. On March 11th, she wrote to her father,
“‘The verdure of our trees is beginning to appear, the leaves develop from day to day, and flowers already beautify thy garden. It would be very lovely, if we could walk here with thee. Thy presence would add a charm to everything which surrounds us. There is no happiness for me but what thou partakest in. We are only happy through thee, oh my tender father!’”
The very next day measures were taken which ended in the annulling of the decree rendered by the comité de salut public in which the comité de sûreté générale, which had taken its place, once more declared Beaumarchais to be an émigré, replaced the seals upon his property, confiscated his revenues and on the 5th of July, 1794, arrested his wife, his two sisters, and his daughter.
They were shut up in the convent of Port-Royal which had been changed into a prison and which, says Loménie, “by an atrocious irony was called Port-Libre, where they waited their turn to mount the fatal cart that should conduct them to the guillotine.” The ninth thermidore came to put an end to these butcheries. Eleven days later, another decree of the comité de sûreté générale, again established, gave to the Citoyennes Caron their liberty.
During this frightful period of the terror, Beaumarchais, still at Hamburg, deprived of all communication with his family, was a prey to the most terrible mental agony. His correspondence shows that he had moments of the deepest despair when he asked himself if he were not losing his mind.
“Where shall I address thee?” he wrote his wife. “Under what name? What shall I call thee? Who are thy friends? Whom can I consider mine? Ah, without the hope of saving my daughter, the atrocious guillotine would be sweeter to me than my horrible condition.”
It was at this period that the following address to the American people was written.
“Americans: Though I have served you with an indefatigable zeal, I have in my life received only bitterness for recompense, and I die your creditor. Permit then in dying that I will to my daughter the debt which you owe me. Perhaps after I am gone, other injustices, from which I cannot defend myself, will rob me of all I possess so nothing will be left for her, and perhaps Providence has ordained by your delay in paying me, that through you she will be spared absolute want. Adopt her as a worthy child of the state. Her mother, equally unfortunate, and my widow, will conduct her to you. Let her be looked upon as the daughter of a citizen! But if after these last efforts, if after all has been said, I must still feel that you will reject my demands—If I am to fear that you will refuse her arbitrators; at last, desperate, ruined in Europe as well as by you, your country being the only one in which I could beg without shame—what would remain for me to do, but to supplicate Heaven to give me the strength to take the voyage to America?
“Arrived in your midst, mind and body weakened, unable to maintain my rights, should I there be forced, my proofs in my hand, to have myself carried to the doors of your National Assembly, and, holding aloft the cap of liberty, with which I helped as much as anyone to adorn your heads—to cry out ‘Give an alms to your friend, whose accumulated services have only had this recompense, date obolum Belisario!’
“Pierre-Augustin Caron Beaumarchais.”
It was precisely to save her daughter, that Madame de Beaumarchais had broken all communication with her husband, retaken her family name and thought only of making herself forgotten.
“The Revolutionary laws,” says Gudin, “ordained the divorce of the wives of émigrés, under pain of being suspected and of running the risk of death that could not be inflicted upon their husbands. Madame de Beaumarchais, worthy of the courageous man whose hand she had received, went to the Revolutionary Committee and with that firmness which inspired respect and that grace which embellished every action, said, ‘Your decrees oblige me to demand a divorce. I obey, although my husband, charged with a commission is not an émigré and never had the thought: I attest it and I know his heart. He will justify himself of this accusation, as he has of all the rest, and I shall have the satisfaction of marrying him a second time, according to your new laws.’”
“Such was the effect of his destiny,” observes this eighteenth century philosopher, “that he was obliged to renew the knot of his own marriage at the same time that he occupied himself with the marriage of his daughter.”
The condition of the family of Beaumarchais when they found themselves once more free, was far from enviable. Their revenues had been seized and their beautiful home was ordered to be sold. Eugénie felt only horror for the place and persuaded her mother to live in a small house. Gudin had gone into the country and Julie, the faithful sister of Beaumarchais, went to live alone with an old servant in the deserted palace of her brother, which was now guarded by agents of the Republic and which bore written upon its walls, “Propriété nationale.”
“If, as I hope,” says Loménie, “the reader has retained an agreeable impression of Julie, it will be a pleasure perhaps to see again that intelligent, merry, courageous face which neither age, privations, nor dangers had been able to change.
“A picture of the domestic and inner life of three women, once rich, forced to face the difficulties of a fearful epoch will give details of interest to that period which history itself cannot furnish.
“During the time when the head of the household was proscribed, it was Madame Beaumarchais, a person of rare merit who joined to all feminine graces a truly virile energy of character, who bore the weight of the situation and while working on one hand to prevent the sale of her husband’s property, tried on the other, to have his name erased from the fatal list; and all the time was obliged to provide for her family with what she had been able to save from the wreck of their fortune. On her side Julie guarded the house of her brother, kept her sister-in-law in touch with events at the house, and urged her to resistance in the animated and original tone which characterised her.
“‘Morbleu! my child,’ she wrote her after the Terror, ‘let us quickly get the decree suppressed. Even the fruits, the same as last year, are requisitioned; the cherries being ripe, they are to be picked to-morrow and sold, and the rest as it ripens, and then close the garden to the profane and the gluttons! Isn’t it sweet to have lived here alone for six months, and only be allowed to eat the stones of the fruit? And even they are sold with the rest. It is for the birds that I am sorry ... nevertheless, it is a pity that the agency had to interfere this year;... See if thou cannot prevent this brigandage by a firm protest at the agency....
“‘And here a pound of veal has been brought me which costs twenty-eight francs, and at even that it is a bargain, for it might sell for thirty. Rage! Fury! Malediction! One cannot even live by ruining oneself and devouring three times one’s fortune. How happy those who have gone before! They feel neither the confusion in my head, nor my eye which weeps, nor the flame which devours me, nor my tooth which sharpens itself to eat twenty-eight francs worth of veal; they feel none of these evils.’
“Those twenty-eight francs worth of veal, which Julie consumed with humorous anger, bring us to say a word of the curious state of want which was produced by the constant depreciation of paper money after the Terror. It is still Julie who informs us how people lived at that time; her sister-in-law had just given her four thousand francs in paper money and she returned an account of the use to which she put them that December 1794.
“‘When you gave me those four thousand francs, my good friend, my heart beat fast. I thought you suddenly had lost your reason to give me such a fortune; I slipped them quickly into my pocket and spoke of other things, so that you would forget them.
“‘Returned home and quick, some wood, some provisions, before the prices go higher! And see Dupont (the old servant) who runs, exhausts herself! And lo, the scales fall from my eyes when I see the result of four thousand, two hundred, and seventy-five francs.
“‘When I think of this royal expenditure which costs me from eighteen to twenty thousand francs without allowing myself the least luxury, J’envoie au diable le régime.’
“Shortly after this the value of paper money decreased still more and the price of commodities increased in alarming proportion. In another letter to her sister-in-law Julie gave the following details:
“‘Ten thousand francs which I have scattered in the last two weeks, give me such a fright, seize me with such pity that I no longer know how to count my income. In the last three days, wood has risen from 4,200 francs to 6,500 and all the costs of transporting and piling are in proportion, so that my load of wood has cost me 7,100 francs. Every week it costs from 700 to 800 francs for a pot-au-feu, and other meat without counting butter, eggs, and a thousand other details; laundry work has increased so that 8,000 francs are not enough for one month. All this makes me impatient and I solemnly affirm that I have not for two years allowed myself a luxury, or gratified a single whim, or made any other expenditures but for the house; nevertheless the needs I have are urgent enough to make me need potfulls of money.’
“But if the sister of Beaumarchais is at the point of famine, the wife and the daughter are no better off; I see in the correspondence of Madame de Beaumarchais that one of her friends went the rounds of the neighborhood to try to obtain some bread which was becoming rarer than diamonds; ‘I am told,’ she wrote, the 5th of June 1795, ‘that at Briare, flour is to be had, if that is true I will make a bargain with some country man and send it direct to you by the barge which goes from Briare to Paris, but that will greatly increase the cost. Please tell me what you think, while waiting I still hope to get hold of a small loaf somewhere. Oh, if I had the gift of miracles, I would send you, not manna from heaven—but good bread and very white!’
“When Beaumarchais in exile, learned all the deprivations from which his family suffered he learned also that they had sufficient moral courage to support them. Gaiety had not wholly disappeared from that interior which used to be so joyous; even if exposed to starvation, the frightful guillotine no longer operated and one began to breathe more freely.”
One of his old friends wrote to him, “See now the soup tureen of the family arrive, that is to say, upon the mahogany table (there is no such thing as a cloth) is a plate of beans, two potatoes, a carafe of wine, with very much water. Thy daughter asks for a white poodle to use as a napkin and clean the plates—but no matter, come, come; if we have nothing to eat we have plenty to laugh about. Come, I tell thee, for thy wife needs a miller since thy salon is decorated with a flour mill; while thy Eugénie charms thee upon her piano, thou wilt prepare her breakfast, while thy wife knits thy stockings, and thy future son-in-law turns baker; for here everyone has his trade and that is why our cows are so well guarded.
“It is too droll to see our women, without perruque in the morning, filling each one her occupation, because you must know that each one of us is at their service and because in our régime, if there are no masters, there are at least valets. This letter costs thee at least a hundred francs counting the paper, pens, the oil of the lamp, because for economy’s sake I came to thy house to write it. We embrace thee with all our hearts.”
And his faithful Gudin wrote him, though in much more somber strain, from his retreat in the country: “My most ardent desire, my friend, is to see you again and to press you to my heart; but circumstances are such that I had to leave Paris where I could no longer subsist. I have taken refuge in a little hamlet fifty miles away, where there are thirteen peasant cabins. The house which I inhabit was a tiny priory, occupied once by a single monk.” And after a very long and profoundly pessimistic discourse upon the sad condition of affairs which he likens to the barbarity which formerly engulfed Greece and Egypt and Assyria, Sicily, and Italy, he terminates thus:
“Adieu my good friend, I would have wished to have talked to you of yourself, of your family, of those whom you love, the regrets which we feel to meet no more together. Our hearts like your own, are crushed with sorrow.... I embrace you and sigh for the happy moment that will unite us.
“Gudin.”
MADAME DE BEAUMARCHAIS
Now that his anxieties for his family were allayed, Beaumarchais was not idle, for his stay in Hamburg was occupied in drawing up memoirs upon matters of public utility, in commercial negotiations, and in agreeable companionships with distinguished émigrés who like himself were anxiously awaiting the moment when they could return to France.
As for Beaumarchais, the affair of the 60,000 guns had ended, distressingly enough for his coffers, by the English carrying them off. They consented, however, at the urgent request of the merchant friend, to pay an arbitrary sum which was, however, far below their real value, but saved Beaumarchais from complete ruin. The affair ended, his only desire was to return home. This he was prevented from doing because of the proscription unjustly continued against him, which all the efforts of his friends and his family had been as yet unable to have removed.
Finally a member of the committee which he was serving, the same Robert Lindet before mentioned, wrote in his behalf to the minister of police, Cochon, the following letter:
“You have asked me to enlighten you regarding the second mission of Citizen Beaumarchais, and upon the exact time when that mission ended or should end.
“In charging the Citizen Beaumarchais with a mission, the committee of public safety proposed to itself two objects. The first was to procure the 60,000 guns deposited in the armory at Tervère, as objects of commerce; the second was to prevent these guns from falling into the power of the enemy.
“The Committee was obliged to pay for them only at the agreed price on condition that they should be delivered and placed at their disposition in one of the ports of the Republic, within five or six months, The negotiation might take longer, but these terms were used to excite the zeal of the Citizen Beaumarchais.
“Before the expiration of the term he sent from Holland to Paris, the Citizen Durand, his friend, who had accompanied him on his journey, to give an account of the obstacles which delayed the execution of the enterprise and to propose measures which he thought were needful.
“Citizen Durand was sent back to Citizen Beaumarchais with a revised passport, which ran thus; ‘to conduct him to his destination and to continue his mission;’ because it seemed important to procure the guns for the government at whatever time that should be found possible, and also that the enemy should be prevented from seizing and distributing them in Belgium among the partisans of the house of Austria.
“The department of Paris placed the Citizen Beaumarchais upon the list of émigrés and placed seals upon his property.
“The committee decreed that since the Citizen Beaumarchais was on a mission he should not be treated as an émigré, because he was absent on a mission for the government. The department removed the seals.
“Some time after, the citizen Beaumarchais was replaced on the list of émigrés. There had been no new motive. The mission was not finished, his negotiations continued to be useful, he had not been recalled.... However, they persisted in considering him an émigré! ... the presence of citizen Beaumarchais in a foreign country was necessary up to the moment when the secret of his mission having been divulged, the English carried off the guns from the armory at Tervère to their ports, which they did last year.
“Nothing would then have prevented citizen Beaumarchais from returning to France because he could no longer hope to be able to fulfil his mission; but his name still rested on the list of émigrés and he could not return until it was erased.
“It was an injustice ever to have placed it upon the list of émigrés, since he was absent for the service of the Republic.
“Robert Lindet.”
“To the Minister of Police.”
This letter and the ardent solicitations of the wife and friends of the proscribed man, finally induced the committee to have his name erased from the list of émigrés, and so after three years of absence the author of the Mariage de Figaro was able to return to his native land.