class. They will excuse me for taking this occasion to confound you, where forced to defend a moment of my life I am about to spread a luminous daylight over the rest. Dare then to contradict me. Here is my life in a few words.
“For the last fifteen years I honor myself with being the father and the sole support of a numerous family, and far from being offended at this avowal which is torn from me, my relatives take pleasure in publishing that I have always shared my modest fortune with them without ostentation and without reproach.
“O you who calumniate me without knowing me, come and hear the concert of benedictions which fall upon me from a crowd of good hearts and you will go away undeceived.
“As to my wives, from having neglected to register the contract of marriage, the death of the first left me destitute in the rigor of the term, overwhelmed with debts and with pretentions which I was unwilling to follow, not wishing to go to law with the relatives, of whom, up to that moment, I had no reason to complain. My second wife in dying carried with her more than three-fourths of her fortune, so that my son, had he lived, would have found himself richer from the side of his father than that of his mother....
“And you who have known me, you who have followed me without ceasing, O my friends, say, have you ever known in me anything but a man constantly gay, loving with an equal passion study and pleasure, inclined to raillery but without bitterness, welcoming it against himself when it was well seasoned, supporting perhaps with too much ardor his own opinion when he believed it to be just, but honoring highly and without envy everyone whom he recognized as superior, confident about his interests to the point of neglecting them, active when he is goaded, indolent and stagnant after the tempest, careless in happiness but carrying
constancy and serenity into misfortune to the point of astonishing his most intimate friends....
“How is it that, with a life and intentions the most honorable, a citizen sees himself so violently torn to pieces? That a man so gay and sociable away from home, so solid and benevolent in his family, should find himself the butt of a thousand venomous calumnies? This is the problem of my life. I search in vain for its solution.”
It was by such outbursts of feeling that Beaumarchais won the hearts of all except those who for personal reasons were bent upon his ruin. But as the admiration of the one side increased, the fury of the other was proportionally augmented. Under the able guidance of M. de Loménie, let us examine a few of the adversaries who presented themselves, and from the few, the reader may judge of the rest.
First of all is Madame Goëzman, “who,” says Loménie, “wrote under the dictates of her husband and threw at the head of Beaumarchais a quarto of seventy-four pages, bristling with terms of law and Latin quotations.
“Beaumarchais sums up in a most spirituelle manner the profound stupidity of the factum when he cries out, ‘An ingenuous woman is announced to me and I am presented with a German publicist.’