M. de Sartine seemed to have been convinced, at all events he succeeded in inducing the young king to copy with docility the model which Beaumarchais had drawn up, and which ran as follows:
“The sieur de Beaumarchais, charged by my secret orders, will start for his destination as soon as possible; the
discretion and vivacity which he will put into their execution will be the most agreeable proofs which he can give me of his zeal for my service.
“Louis.
Marly, July 10, 1774.”
Beaumarchais, exultant, wrote at once to the minister, “The order of my master is still virgin, that is to say, it has been seen by no one; but if it has not yet served me in relation to others, it has none the less been of a marvelous help to myself, in multiplying my powers and redoubling my courage.”
He even went so far as to address the King personally. He wrote, “A lover wears about his neck the portrait of his mistress; a miser, his keys; a devotee, his reliquary—while as for me, I have had made a flat oval case of gold, in which I have enclosed the order of your Majesty, and which I have suspended about my neck with a chain of gold, as the thing the most necessary for my work, and the most precious for myself.”
Satisfied at last in his ambition to have in his possession a written order from the King, Beaumarchais set about arranging with redoubled zeal for the suppression of the publication mentioned before. “He succeeded,” says Loménie, “through great supply of eloquence, but also through great supply of money. For 1,400 pounds sterling, the Jew renounced the speculation. The manuscript and four thousand copies were burned in London. The two contractors then betook themselves to Amsterdam for the purpose of destroying the Holland edition. Beaumarchais secured the written engagement of Angelucci, and then free from care, he gave himself up to the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam en tourist.”
Up to this point the authority of M. de Loménie seems to
hold good upon this mission of Beaumarchais, which of late years has given rise to much bitter controversy. “This obscure affair Angelucci—Atkinson,” says Lintilhac, “has caused as much ink to flow in the last twenty years, as the chefs-d’œuvre of our author.”
We shall not attempt here to enter into the intricacies of this case, and shall scarcely blame our hero, even supposing we should find him playing a bit of comedy, very much à la Figaro, upon the stage of real life; for it is necessary to recall the fact that under the cloak of philosophic acceptance of his fate, Beaumarchais was all the while, at heart, a desperate man. The death of the old King at the moment when he had every reason to expect a speedy restitution to his rights as citizen, had been a cruel blow which left him in a state of inward desperation. When we consider the intense mental excitement in which he had been living from the day of his frightful adventure with the duc de Chaulnes, his imprisonment, the loss of his property, the dissolution of his family, the execration of his enemies, the adulation of a nation; when we consider all this and the events immediately following, our wonder is, not that Beaumarchais lost for a time his sense of proportion and the true relation of things, but rather that he had not been a thousand times over, crushed and broken by the overwhelming combination of circumstances against which he had struggled.