But to return to the decision given by the parliament on the report of Goëzman April 5th. Loménie says: “At the same time that this decree dishonored Beaumarchais it was a rude blow to his fortune. The Parliament had not dared award to the Comte de la Blache as he had demanded, the passing of the act of settlement declared by it nul; the iniquity would have been too glaring; but it condemned his adversary to pay fifty-six thousand livres of debt annulled by the act of settlement, the interests of the debt and the costs of the suit.
“It was enough to crush him for at the same time the Comte de la Blache seized all his goods and revenues, other pretending creditors with equally false pretentions, united their persecutions with those of the Comte de la Blache,
and the man thus attacked demanded in vain, with loud cries that the doors of his prison be opened.
“‘I am at the end of my courage,’ he wrote April 9, 1773, to M. de Sartine. ‘The opinion of the public is that I am entirely sacrificed, my credit has fallen, my business is ruined, my family of which I am the father and the support is in despair. Monsieur, I have done good all my life without ostentation and I have never ceased to be torn to pieces by those evilly disposed.
“‘If my home were known to you, you would see me in the midst of its members, a good son, a good brother, a good husband, and a useful citizen; I have assembled only benedictions about me, while my enemies calumniate me at a distance.
“‘Whatever vengeance one may wish to take of me for that miserable affair of Chaulnes, will it then have no limits? It is well proved that my imprisonment makes me lose a hundred thousand francs. The form, the ground, everything makes one shudder in that iniquitous sentence, and it is impossible for me to rise above it so long as I am kept in this horrible prison. I have courage to support my own misfortunes; but I have none against the tears of my respectable father, seventy-five years of age, who is grieving himself to death for the abject state to which I have fallen. I have none against the anguish of my sisters, of my nieces, who already feel the horror of my detention and know of the disorder which has come to my affairs because of it. All the activity of my being is again turned inward, my situation kills me, I am struggling against an acute malady of which I feel an agonizing premonition, through loss of sleep and disgust with food. The air of my prison destroys me.’
“It was in this state of deep depression and misery when
the soul of Beaumarchais seemed overwhelmed and all his manhood slipping from him, that the petty detail of the fifteen louis came to stir his mind once more to action, and while his sisters wept and his father prayed, his proud and unconquerable spirit rose triumphant out of the abyss into which for a moment it had fallen, and with fresh courage gleaming in his eyes he began pacing the floor of his prison, already ‘meditating his memoirs.’
“The minister de la Vrillière allowed himself at last to be touched, and on the 8th of May, 1773, after two months and a half of detention without cause, he gave the prisoner his liberty.
“It is here that out of this lost process sprang suddenly another more terrible still, which should complete the ruin of Beaumarchais, but which saved him and made him pass in a few months from the state of abjection and of misery where to use his own expression, ‘He was an object of disgust and pity to himself, to a state where he is acclaimed the vanquisher of the hated parliament and the favorite of the nation.’”