“This Monday, Sept. 15th, 1783.”
“The success of this representation at Grennevilliers was such,” to continue the account of Loménie, “that a complete change operated in Beaumarchais’s attitude toward the piece. Resigned hitherto under the royal prohibition, working slowly and carefully to gain ground, he now became impatient, pressing and almost imperious. It is clear to anyone who will reflect, that on the day when Louis XVI permitted at the insistence of the Queen, the Comte d’Artois and M. de Vaudreuil to the representation at Grennevillier, he placed himself where he would be unable long to resist public curiosity, carried now to the heights by that very representation, of which everyone spoke, and by the address of Beaumarchais.” It was not, however, until March, 1784, that the desired permission was given.
“The picture of that representation of Le Mariage de Figaro,” says Loménie, “is in all the chronicles of the times, it is the best remembered scene of the eighteenth century. All Paris from earliest morning, pressed the doors of the Théâtre-Français; the greatest ladies dining in the boxes of the actresses so as to be sure of their places—the guards dispersed, the doors broken down, the iron railings giving way before the crowd of assailants. When the curtain rose upon the scene, the finest reunion of talent which the Théâtre-Français had ever possessed was there with but one thought, to bring out to the best advantage a comedy, flashing with esprit, carrying one away in its movement and audacity, which if it shocks some of the boxes, enchants, stirs, enflames and electrifies the parterre.”
And what is this play that roused such wild enthusiasm a century and more ago, and which to-day, although its political significance has long vanished, would still give its author, had he done nothing but create its characters, a right to a place among the immortals?
“The Mariage de Figaro,” to quote his own words, “was the most trivial of intrigues:
“A great Spanish nobleman, in love with a young girl whom he wishes to seduce, and the efforts of that same girl and of him to whom she is engaged, and of the wife of the nobleman united to outwit his designs—and he an absolute master whose rank, fortune and prodigality render all powerful its accomplishment—that and nothing more.”
The characters are those in the main of the Barbier: the Comte Almaviva, the Comtesse Rosine, and the valet Figaro, are old friends. But there are new ones, the page Cherubim, and Suzanne, lady’s maid to the Comtesse—“Always laughing, tender, full of gaiety, of esprit, of love and delicious!—but good.”
“Like the Barbier,” says Lintilhac, “it is here a question of marriage, but it is the valet this time who is to marry and the obstacles which retard this desired dénouement arise, not from the jealousy of a guardian, or the resistance of a father but from the covetousness of a young libertine master.... It is the master who is outwitted, the valet and his fiancée who triumph, and in this dénouement lies the whole secret of the wild enthusiasm with which the piece was greeted. Right here lies the Revolution.”
But the master is as truly painted in the play as the other characters. “The Comte Almaviva,” says Imbert de Saint Amand, “is the old régime, Figaro is the new society. Almaviva is corrupt, but he is always comme il faut. Even in his anger he remains the man of good society; no doubt his faults are great; he is a libertine from ennui, jealous from vanity, but he is not odious, not ridiculous.”