The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Not the less, Beaumarchais writes with a lightness and effervescence which are without counterpart in dramatic literature. ‘The Barber of Seville’ was taken, it is said, from an opera of Sedaine’s, and was itself originally designed to be a comic opera. Nothing but a quarrel with the composer of the score prevented it from first appearing in that form in which it is to-day most familiar to the world.

Yet it hardly needs an accompaniment of lively music. The airs and the singing are there already—in the gay bizarrerie of situation, the laughing swing of repartee, and the brilliant recitative of the longer speeches. The characters, called by Spanish names and dressed in Spanish clothes, are thoroughly and essentially French. Its exquisite delicacy of touch and its rippling mocking gaiety declare it, in fact, not only the work of a Frenchman, but one of the most Gallic pieces that have ever held the stage. It inaugurated a new order of comedy, and introduced into it a new character: the Barber, who was also wit, hero, and moralist—the character of Figaro.

Beaumarchais was not at all the man to sit down and tranquilly enjoy his first dramatic triumph. He must not only follow it up by writing another, but he must with enormous difficulty, at the risk of much money, and three years’ hard work, become the editor of the first complete edition of Voltaire’s works ever given to the public.

Then, too, he must prepare the reorganisation of the ferme générale with the Minister, Vergennes. Actresses consulted him when they were out of an engagement, and dramatic authors when their liberties were endangered. The author of the Goezman Memoirs can surely help a poor simpleton engulfed in a lawsuit, and the friend of Duverney, the rich man who began the world in a tradesman’s shop, may well assist a ruined speculator! Inventors, impatient to air their discoveries, carried them to him who had brought his first legal action over a discovery of his own. Girls deceived by their lovers begged the assistance of the man who had held up Clavijo to infamy.

One of the most fortunate characteristics Beaumarchais possessed was his power of suddenly changing his occupation, and one of his most extraordinary characteristics was his love of doing so. ‘Shutting the drawer of an affair,’ he himself called this faculty. He shut the drawer with a bang, and perfectly good-natured, self-conceited, and successful, turned from a secret agency in London to interfere with the marriage of the Prince of Nassau, and from the marriage to assist the Lieutenant of the Police in censuring the works of his brother-playwrights, and from that censorship to put into the mouth of Figaro such sentiments as, ‘Printed follies are without importance except in those places where their circulation is forbidden ... without the liberty to blame no praise can be flattering.’

By 1778, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was finished; and in 1781 it was received by the Comédie Française. But it contained that which no censor—not even dull Louis—could pass. In 1782, he read it, and flung it from him. ‘This is detestable, this shall never be played!’

But that prohibition was not enough for Beaumarchais. Forbidden fruit is ever the most tantalising and delicious. Daintily tied with pink ribbons he sent a copy of the play to this salon; and another to that. He announced a reading of it—and, coquettishly and without offering any reason, abandoned the reading at the last moment. In a little while he had raised all Paris on the tip-toe of excitement. Not to have scanned at least a scene or two of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was to confess oneself out of the fashion. Then the author read the whole of it to the Grand Duke of Russia, and recited selections of it to the Comtesse de Lamballe and to Marshal Richelieu, ‘before bishops and archbishops.’

After all, Louis was very weak, and public opinion very strong. The First Gentleman of the Chamber permitted the thing to be rehearsed, more or less publicly, in the theatre of the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs. All the world and his wife crowded thither. The Comte d’Artois was actually on his way when, with an awakening of his feeble obstinacy, the King sent a mandate forbidding the performance. Even Madame de Campan, kindly old sycophant of the Court, confessed that there were angry whispers of ‘tyranny’ and ‘oppression,’ and murmurs of ‘an attack on liberty.’ Beaumarchais, stung to the quick, swore that it should be played, ay, even if it was in the choir of Notre-Dame! The pressure on Louis was great; the Court was in want of a new sensation, and to be made to laugh at its own follies was a very new one indeed.

In three months, the Comte de Vaudreuil, the leader of Marie Antoinette’s société intime of the Little Trianon, obtained the royal permission to have it acted in his house at Gennevilliers, by the company from the Comédie, before the Comte d’Artois and the Queen’s bosom friend, the Duchesse de Polignac. The Queen herself intended to have been present, but was prevented by an indisposition. When the permission was accorded, Beaumarchais was in England. He hurried home, saw to the performance himself, and made his own conditions.

On September 26, 1783, three hundred persons, the very flower of Court society, crowded into Vaudreuil’s theatre, and would have died of suffocation if the resourceful Beaumarchais had not broken the panes of the windows with his cane. It was said he had made a hit in two senses. The aristocratic audience received his play with rapturous applause. He adroitly followed up his success by presenting his piece to a tribunal of censors who, for some unknown reason, ‘felt sure it would be a failure,’ and expressed themselves satisfied with it after they had made a few insignificant omissions. Finally, a reluctant permission was wrung from the King, and on April 27, 1784, seven months after the performance at Gennevilliers, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was first publicly performed at the new Comédie Française, built on the site of the Hôtel de Condé, and now known as the Odéon.