Early in December, Beaumarchais appeared in Versailles with his famous chest, containing at last the entire mass of papers, the negotiation of which had occupied the minister of Louis XVI since the time of the latter’s accession to the throne. Overjoyed at the successful termination of the affair, the King and his minister testified their satisfaction with warmth.
A very honorable discharge was given their agent with a certificate which terminated thus: “I declare that the King has been very well satisfied with the zeal which he has shown on this occasion, as well as with the intelligence and dexterity with which he has acquitted himself of the commission which his Majesty has confided to him. The King has therefore ordered me to deliver the present attestation to serve him at all times and in all places where it may be necessary.
“Made at Versailles, the 18th of December, 1775.
“Signed: Gravier de Vergennes.”
The matter of the papers was indeed settled; they were safe in the hands of the government, and all uneasiness in regard to them was at an end; not so Beaumarchais with his amazone intéressante. Furious to find that his exorbitant demands upon the French government had miscarried, d’Eon thought only of wreaking his vengeance upon Beaumarchais. After exhausting himself with very “masculine abuse” upon his “austere friend” (Loménie), he suddenly, with the same art with which he had avowed himself a woman, set about convincing Beaumarchais that he was in love with him, uttering bitter reproaches for the cruelty, hardness and injustice with which he had treated an unhappy woman, who in a moment of weakness had revealed herself to him. “Why,” cried this disguised dragoon, “why did I not remember that men are good for nothing upon this earth but to deceive the credulity of women, young and old?... I still thought that I was only rendering justice to your merits, admiring your talents, your generosity; I loved you already no doubt; but this situation was still so new for me that I was very far from realizing that love could be born in the midst of trouble and sorrow.”
In a note, M. de Loménie remarked that what there was specially piquant in this correspondence of d’Eon and Beaumarchais is that the former, while posing as a woman, “often gives an enigmatic turn to his phrases, as though he wished to establish for the day when the fraud would be unveiled, that he had been able to dupe a man as clever as the author of the Barbier de Séville, and that he duped him in mocking at him to his very face, without being suspected. Beaumarchais, for his part, amused himself at the expense of that vieille Dragonne in love, and confirmed himself more and more in the error as d’Eon more adroitly simulated the anger of an offended old maid.”
Beaumarchais wrote to M. de Vergennes: “Everyone tells me that this crazy woman is crazy over me. She thinks that I undervalue her, and women never forgive similar offenses. I am very far from doing so; but who could ever have imagined that to serve the King well in this affair, I should have been forced to become gallant cavalier to a capitaine de dragons? The adventure appears to me so ridiculous that I have all the trouble in the world to regain my seriousness so as suitably to finish this memoir.”
If d’Eon had the satisfaction of duping Beaumarchais in a certain sense, he failed utterly in inducing him to loosen the strings of the royal purse which he carried, and without which nothing was accomplished. Finding that Beaumarchais was inexorable on this point, all the pent-up fury of the chevalier blazed forth. He began at once addressing interminable memoirs to the minister Vergennes, full of accusations against his agent, couched in the coarsest and most violent language, attributing to the latter all the epithets that fall so glibly from his pen, “the insolence of a watchmaker’s boy, who by chance had discovered perpetual motion.”
“Beaumarchais,” said Loménie, “received these broadsides of abuse with the calm of a perfect gentleman: ‘She is a woman,’ he wrote to M. de Vergennes, ‘and a woman so frightfully surrounded that I pardon her with all my heart; she is a woman—that word says everything.’”
But exactly this was what the chevalier did not want; he did not want to be pardoned by Beaumarchais; he wanted a quarrel with him, and to have his accusations credited by the minister. He succeeded in neither of his objects, although his resentment and his desire for revenge augmented rather than diminished with time. Returned to France, he openly accused Beaumarchais of having retained for himself money that was destined for him. His abuse was so violent that in self-defense the accused man appealed for justification to the minister, and received the following letter, which bears date of January 10th, 1778: