The very spicy charade, “John Bête à la Foire,” was written in 1762 for a special festival given at this château in the forest of Senart. On this occasion and on all similar occasions the farces of Beaumarchais found no more spirited interpreters than his own sisters. Fournier says, “The youngest played comedies with a surprising verve de gaillardise, and it would seem, was not frightened by the most highly seasoned of her brother’s productions. She and
the Countess of Turpin played the leading parts. Comedies and charades were also played enchantingly by Julie who frequently arranged them in her own style; several scenes and not the least spicy, according to family tradition, passing as her own production.”
But this vein of true Gallic wit which was later to carry its possessor to almost unprecedented heights of fame was not in keeping with the spirit in which Beaumarchais found himself during the winter of 1766.
The entire family as we have seen possessed in an unusual degree a warm life blood which burst spontaneously into joyful expression, but it showed itself also in sentimental sallies. The English novelist, Richardson, was a favorite with them all and we find Julie writing in her diary, about this time, “I see in Beaumarchais a second Grandison; it is his genius, his goodness, his noble and superior soul, equally sweet and honest. Never a bitter sentiment for his enemies arises in his heart. He is the friend of man. Grandison is the glory of all who surround him, and Beaumarchais is their honor.”
The father writing to his son during an illness said: “In the intervals when I suffer less I read Grandison and in how many things I have found a just and noble resemblance between him and my son. Father of thy sisters, friend and benefactor of thy father, ‘if England,’ I said to myself, ‘has her Grandison; France has her Beaumarchais; with this difference, that the English Grandison is the fiction of an amiable writer, while the French Beaumarchais really exists to be the consolation of my days.’”
It was, therefore, Beaumarchais, as Grandison, whom we now find seriously occupying himself with the thought of literature. Nor shall we be surprised later to find those of the literary profession preparing to meet him in very much
the same spirit as did in the beginning M. Lepaute, watchmaker, and a little later, Messieurs les Courtisans at Versailles. So long as his literary ambition limited itself to charades, farces, and comic songs the antagonism of men of letters was not aroused; but that he who had received no regular training in the schools should presume, de se mêler, with serious literary productions was quite another matter.
Lintilhac says: “But our immature author, shaking his tête carrée braved this danger like all the rest, arming himself with patience and esprit; let us see him at his work.
“A literary instinct had from the beginning led him straight to those Gallic writers whose race he was destined to continue. We find him studying Montaigne; he extracts notes and imitates Marot, translates in verse and sets to music one of the hundred and twenty romances of the Cid going against the Moors in the eleventh century.
“But his taste for the ancestor of the esprit français is not exclusive; he is happy to find it among their direct descendants: Regnier, whom he quotes abundantly, La Fontaine, of whom he is a disciple, Molière and Pascal, who furnish the models of his chefs-d’œuvre. More than that, he goes back to their antique masters. The rudiments of Latin which he learned at school serve to help him to read Lucrece, Catulle, Tibulle, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca, and to take from them that salt of citation with which he heightens so effectively the sallies of his Gallic wit.”