“‘Madame, I was the most unfortunate man of France during the last reign; the queen in that terrible time did not disdain to show an interest in my fate. In serving her to-day, I am only acquitting an immense debt; the more difficult the enterprise, the more my ardor is inflamed....’
“‘But, Monsieur, what necessity had you to change your name?’
“‘Madame, I am unfortunately too well known in Europe under my own name to permit me to employ it while undertaking so delicate and important a mission as the one in which I am engaged.’
“The Empress seemed to have a great curiosity to read the work whose destruction had caused me so much trouble. The reading immediately followed our explanation. Her Majesty had the goodness to enter with me into the most intimate details of this subject; she had also that of listening a great deal to what I had to say. I remained with her more than three hours and a half, and I implored her not to waste a moment in sending to Nuremberg and securing the person of Angelucci....
“The Empress had the goodness to thank me for the ardent zeal which I had shown; she begged me to leave the pamphlet with her until the next day. ‘Go and repose yourself,’
she said, with infinite grace, ‘and see that you are promptly bled....’”
Whatever pleasing effect the ardor and enthusiasm of Beaumarchais may have produced upon Marie Thérèse, it was soon dispelled by the Chancellor Kaunitz, to whom she at once showed the libel, and related the adventure as she had heard it from Beaumarchais. Kaunitz not only pronounced the whole story an invention, but at once suspected that Beaumarchais himself was the author of the libel, and that the Jew Angelucci was a fabrication of his own brain. At the Chancellor’s instigation, Beaumarchais was at once arrested and kept in custody until the matter could be cleared up. To continue the narrative as given by Beaumarchais in his report to the King:
“I returned to Vienna, my head still hot with the excitement of that conference. I threw upon paper a host of observations which seemed to me very important relative to the subject in question; I addressed them to the Empress.... The same day at nine o’clock I saw enter my room, eight grenadiers, bayonets and guns, two officers with naked swords, and a secretary of the regency bringing me word which invited me to allow myself to be arrested, reserving all explanations. ‘No resistance,’ said the officer to me.
“‘Monsieur,’ I replied coldly, ‘I sometimes have resisted robbers, but never Empresses.’ I was made to put all my papers under seal. I demanded permission to write to the Empress, and was refused. All my effects were taken from me, knives, scissors, even to my buckles, and a numerous guard was left in my room, where it remained thirty-one days or forty-five thousand, six hundred and forty minutes; because, while the hours fly so rapidly for happy people that they scarcely note their succession, those who are unfortunate count time by minutes and seconds, and find it flows
slowly when each one is noted separately....