ON the 24th of May, 1776, Beaumarchais returned to France. He wrote to the Count de Vergennes the same night:
“Monsieur le Comte,
“I arrive very tired, completely exhausted. My first care is to ask you for your orders and the hour when you will be so good as to give me audience. It is three o’clock in the morning. My negro will be at your levée, he will be back for mine. I hope he will bring me the news which I desire with the greatest impatience, which is to go in person, and assure you of the very respectful devotion with which, I am, M. le Comte, yor very humble and very obedient servitor, Beaumarchais.”
(Doniol.)
SILAS DEANE
No written statement was ever made of the exact arrangement arrived at between the minister and his confidential agent. What is certain is that as soon as the latter understood the new plan of procedure he brought at once to the aid of the undertaking the whole force of his powerful mind as well as the experience of those years passed under the tutelage of old Du Verney, and in his attempted enterprise at the court of Spain.
A letter without date, published for the first time by George Clinton Genet in the Magazine of American History, 1878, written by Beaumarchais to the King, gives a clear statement of how he proposed to proceed in founding this new mercantile house which should hide from all the world and even from the Americans themselves the connivance of the Government in the operations:
“To the King Alone: