“Where shall I address thee?” he wrote his wife. “Under what name? What shall I call thee? Who are thy friends? Whom can I consider mine? Ah, without the hope of saving my daughter, the atrocious guillotine would be sweeter to me than my horrible condition.”
It was at this period that the following address to the American people was written.
“Americans: Though I have served you with an indefatigable zeal, I have in my life received only bitterness for recompense, and I die your creditor. Permit then in dying that I will to my daughter the debt which you owe me. Perhaps after I am gone, other injustices, from which I cannot defend myself, will rob me of all I possess so nothing will be left for her, and perhaps Providence has ordained by your delay in paying me, that through you she will be spared absolute want. Adopt her as a worthy child of the state. Her mother, equally unfortunate, and my widow, will conduct her to you. Let her be looked upon as the daughter of a citizen! But if after these last efforts, if after all has been said, I must still feel that you will reject my demands—If I am to fear that you will refuse her arbitrators; at last, desperate, ruined in Europe as well as by you, your country being the only one in which I could beg without shame—what would remain for me to do, but to supplicate Heaven to give me the strength to take the voyage to America?
“Arrived in your midst, mind and body weakened, unable to maintain my rights, should I there be forced, my proofs in my hand, to have myself carried to the doors of your National Assembly, and, holding aloft the cap of liberty, with which I helped as much as anyone to adorn your heads—to cry out ‘Give an alms to your friend, whose accumulated services have only had this recompense, date obolum Belisario!’
“Pierre-Augustin Caron Beaumarchais.”
It was precisely to save her daughter, that Madame de Beaumarchais had broken all communication with her husband, retaken her family name and thought only of making herself forgotten.
“The Revolutionary laws,” says Gudin, “ordained the divorce of the wives of émigrés, under pain of being suspected and of running the risk of death that could not be inflicted upon their husbands. Madame de Beaumarchais, worthy of the courageous man whose hand she had received, went to the Revolutionary Committee and with that firmness which inspired respect and that grace which embellished every action, said, ‘Your decrees oblige me to demand a divorce. I obey, although my husband, charged with a commission is not an émigré and never had the thought: I attest it and I know his heart. He will justify himself of this accusation, as he has of all the rest, and I shall have the satisfaction of marrying him a second time, according to your new laws.’”
“Such was the effect of his destiny,” observes this eighteenth century philosopher, “that he was obliged to renew the knot of his own marriage at the same time that he occupied himself with the marriage of his daughter.”
The condition of the family of Beaumarchais when they found themselves once more free, was far from enviable. Their revenues had been seized and their beautiful home was ordered to be sold. Eugénie felt only horror for the place and persuaded her mother to live in a small house. Gudin had gone into the country and Julie, the faithful sister of Beaumarchais, went to live alone with an old servant in the deserted palace of her brother, which was now guarded by agents of the Republic and which bore written upon its walls, “Propriété nationale.”