“I know very well to live is to combat, and perhaps I should be afflicted at this if I did not know that in return to combat is to live.”
Caron de Beaumarchais.
“—Often broken-hearted, always consoled by the sublime principle of the compensation of good and evil—which was the ground of his optimism...”
Lintilhac in Beaumarchais et Ses Œuvres.
House of Beaumarchais Searched—The 10th of August—Letter to his Family in Havre—Letter of Eugénie to her Father—Commissioned to Buy Guns for the Government—Goes to Holland as Agent of Comité de Salut Public—Declared an Emigré—Confiscation of his Goods—Imprisonment of his Family—The Ninth Thermidor Comes to Save Them—Life During the Terror—Julie again in Evidence—Beaumarchais’s Name Erased From List of Emigrés—Returns to France.
EARLY in 1792, Beaumarchais embarked in a new political and commercial operation which, says Loménie, “was destined to embarrass his fortune and to be the torment of his latter days. France was without arms and he undertook to procure them for her. It is difficult to understand that a man sixty years old, rich, fatigued by a most stormy existence, afflicted with increasing deafness, surrounded [254] with enemies, and desirous only of repose should have allowed himself to be induced to attempt to bring into France sixty thousand guns detained in Holland under circumstances which rendered this operation as dangerous as it was difficult.”
However, Gudin tells us, “he had only the choice of dangers. To have refused to procure the arms would have marked him for disfavor. He therefore chose the danger of being useful to his country. This resolution exposed him to the risk of being pillaged and assassinated, but in the end it saved his life.... During the days of frenzy which preceded the overthrowing of the throne, the most hostile menaces sounded around his house.”
The populace insisted that he had stored it with wheat and guns. In vain Beaumarchais protested, in vain he placarded the walls of his garden with official statements proving that the house had been searched and that nothing had been found. The fury of the mob was not to to be appeased. Finally on the 8th of August, the threatenings became so ominous that he was persuaded to spend the night in the home of a friend, who had sought safety outside Paris, leaving an old domestic alone in charge. Beaumarchais says:
“At midnight the valet, frightened, came to the room where I was, ‘Monsieur,’ he said to me, ‘get up, the people are searching for you, they are beating the doors down, someone has turned traitor, the house will be pillaged.’ ... The frightened man hid in a closet while the mob searched the house.” When morning came, he returned to his own home, around which the threatenings still continued without ceasing.
Gudin says: “He received the most alarming notices, and the day after the imprisonment of the king, August 10th, a great multitude set out in the direction of his house, threatening to break down the iron gates if they were not immediately opened. I and two other persons were with him.