“But the moment when the enthusiasm became delirium, frenzy—the moment when the dukes and peers, the ministers, the cordons rouges, the cordons bleus—were transported to the seventh heaven of acclaim, was when the daring Barbier transformed himself into a tribune and said to all of them in the monologue under the chestnut tree:
“‘Because you are a great lord you believe yourself a great genius. Rank, fortune, position, all that make you so proud! What have you done to deserve so many gifts? You have taken the trouble to be born, nothing else!’
“The functionaries charged with the censure were particularly enchanted with this phrase of the same monologue: ‘On condition that I do not speak in my writings, either of authority, or religion, or politics, or morals, or of people in position, or bodies in favor, or anyone who holds to anything, I am allowed to write, to print everything freely under the inspection of two or three censors.’
“The ministers charged to fill public functions found the following phrase very just: ‘They thought of me for a position, but by ill luck I was suited to it; they needed a calculator, it was a dancer who received it.’”
“The Mariage de Figaro” says Loménie, “was presented sixty-eight times consecutively, something unheard of in that day. The receipts for the first presentation amounted to 6,511 livres, that of the sixty-eighth was 5,483. During eight months, from the 27th of April, 1784, to the 10th of January, 1785, the piece had brought to the Comédie Française (not counting the fiftieth presentation which at Beaumarchais’s request had been given for the benefit of the poor) a gross sum of 347,197 livres, which left when all expenses were deducted, a net profit to the Comedians of 293,755 livres, except the part of the author which was valued at 41,499 livres....
“This sum the author of the Mariage de Figaro, as if to sanctify the piece, consecrated to works of charity.
“‘I propose,’ he wrote in the Journal de Paris, the 12th of August, 1784, ‘un institut de bienfaisance, to which any woman recognized as needy and inscribed in her parish, can come, her infant in her arms and with her certificate from the parish priest, say to us, “I am a mother and a wet nurse, I gain twenty sous a day, my infant makes me lose twelve.” Let us give her nine livres a month in charity.... So if the comedians have gained two hundred thousand francs from my Figaro, my nursing mothers will have twenty-eight thousand which with the thirty thousand of my friends, will produce a whole regiment of marmots stuffed with maternal milk.’”
“This institute,” continues Loménie, “of les pauvres mères nourrices, encountered obstacles at Paris which prevented its establishment in that city; but since the idea was good it did not remain fruitless. The Archbishop of Lyon, M. de Montazet, adopted it. He accepted the help and money of Beaumarchais, and the Institut de bienfaisance maternelle, if I am not mistaken still in existence in Lyon, was the outcome of the Mariage de Figaro. Beaumarchais was one of its most constant protectors and in 1790 he sent six thousand francs to it and received in return the following letter signed by three of the most respectable and important inhabitants of Lyon:
“‘Lyon, the 11th of April, 1790.
“‘Monsieur: