The audience trooped out into the night—the performance lasted from half-past five till ten—with enthusiastic admiration on its lips and still ringing in its ears the seventh couplet of the vaudeville:
Par le sort de la naissance,
L’un est roi, l’autre est berger;
Le hasard fit leur distance;
L’esprit seul peut tout changer.
The writer, certainly, had as little idea as his audience that his was to be the wit to change everything. From first to last, Beaumarchais was the man we have always with us, who means to advance in the world and let that world take care of itself; whose argument is that posterity having done nothing for him, he need do nothing for posterity; the true time-server, just audacious enough to say what less courageous people only dare to think, and earning thereby their gratitude and applause. Caron had reaped place and fortune from the old order, and was not at all minded to overthrow it. Tyranny for tyranny, he preferred the despotism of the King to the despotism of the mob. If he revenged himself in his play for the slights and humiliations from which even his cleverness had not been able to save him—that was absolutely all. Overturn Throne and Church! Such a bouleversement would very likely overturn Caron de Beaumarchais too, and was not to be thought of.
Yet it was this man who gave light popular expression to the principles to which Voltaire and his friends devoted their lives, their ardour, and their genius. It was surely a cruelty of fate that the Master could not live to see ‘Figaro.’ Its author might miss its significance, but Voltaire—never.
Beaumarchais, indeed, had merely caught the accent of his age, as a child catches the accent of its nurse, and ‘wrote revolutionary literature, as M. Jourdain spoke prose, without knowing it.’ In ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ he said what all men were feeling, but not what he felt. He wished to be a successful playwright, and he was one; but he did not mean to be one of the greatest and most influential of Revolutionists—and he was that too.
He followed up the success of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ by generously founding a fashionable charity, to be known later as the Benevolent Maternal Institution, and the King followed up the success he had always disliked by punishing an imprudent letter Caron had written in a newspaper, and which had offended Monsieur, by writing on a playing card, as he sat at his game, an order for Beaumarchais’ imprisonment.
By one of those charming little surprises for which the old régime was so celebrated, Beaumarchais, of fifty-three, found himself locked up in St. Lazare, then a house of correction for juvenile offenders. At first Paris went into roars of laughter, and then she became very angry indeed. In a few days she obtained the release of her playwright; and Louis, with the inconceivable inconsistency that distinguished his career, not only gave him enormous monetary compensation, but permitted as a further reparation, ‘The Barber of Seville’ to be played at the Little Trianon.
That representation marked the crowning point of Beaumarchais’ success. Dazincourt trained the company of royal and noble amateurs. Marie Antoinette was rehearsing the part of Rosina with Madame de Campan when she first heard of the opening of a grimmer drama, the scandal of the Diamond Necklace. On August 15, 1785, Cardinal de Rohan was arrested. On the 19th, ‘The Barber of Seville’ was played in the theatre of the Little Trianon, with lucky Beaumarchais in the audience, the Queen as Rosina, the Comte de Vaudreuil as Almaviva, the Duc de Guiche as Bartholo, and the Comte d’Artois as Figaro.
The Queen was infinitely vivacious in her part. Did Bazile’s terrible definition of Calumny disconcert her?
‘At first a mere breath, skimming the ground like a swallow, but sowing poison as it flies ... it takes root, creeps up, makes its way, goes ... from mouth to mouth: then, all of a sudden, one knows not how, Calumny is standing upright, rearing its head, hissing, swelling, growing visibly. It spreads its wings, takes flight, eddies round ... bursts, thunders, crashes, and becomes, thanks to heaven, a general outcry, a public crescendo, a universal chorus of hatred and proscription. What devil could resist it?’