If Queen or audience found in the words too awful an application and prophecy, history does not relate.
How strange, with the knowledge of after events, sound in the mouth of d’Artois the words: ‘I am happy to be forgotten, being sure that a great man does enough good when he does no harm. As to the virtues one requires in a servant, does your Excellency know many masters who are worthy of being valets?’ and, most strange of all, ‘I hasten to laugh at everything, lest I should have to weep at everything.’
The performance of the ‘Barber’ at Trianon was the last flicker of the dying fire of royal pleasure. Beaumarchais’ own light began to fail. He was shortly involved in a famous dispute with Mirabeau about the Paris Water Company, in which that great genius brought out his mighty guns of irony and invective and in one fierce blast blew, as it were, Beaumarchais’ nimble-witted head from his shoulders. ‘Figaro’ has dubbed my diatribes ‘Mirabelles,’ has he? Well, he shall pun at my expense no more. All Paris stood watching. Dazzling, burning, and terrible, Mirabeau’s sun was rising above the horizon, and Beaumarchais’ star was fading in the stormy sky. Then he had another lawsuit, in which he entered the lists as the champion of wronged beauty. His opponent was Bergasse, the young lawyer, who ‘had his reputation to make’ at some one’s expense, and made it at Beaumarchais’.
In 1786, Caron married Mademoiselle Willermaula, who had long been his mistress, and by whom he had a daughter, Eugénie. For them, he built a splendid house looking on to the Bastille, near the Porte Saint-Antoine, which became one of the sights of Paris.
In 1787, he produced a very feeble opera, ‘Tarare,’ which had a small temporary success.
On July 14, 1789, the Bastille fell. Not only the fine house was in danger, but its fine owner as well. He had written ‘Figaro’? Yes. But he had been the courtier and the secret agent of kings. His pluck and energy did not in the least desert him. In the midst of the uproar he was writing a new play, ‘The Guilty Mother.’
La Harpe (no wonder his friends called him La Harpie) declared it was ‘downright silly;’ and perhaps this thorough-going verdict is but little too severe. ‘The Guilty Mother’ forms a sort of third volume to the ‘Barber’ and ‘Figaro,’ and falls as flat as most sequels. The same characters appear, grown old. The Guilty Mother is the Rosina of the ‘Barber’ and the Countess Almaviva of ‘Figaro;’ while Cherubino has grown up into the very objectionable young man such a boy would grow into. Beaumarchais had built a theatre—the Théâtre du Marais—near his house, in which he proposed his new piece should appear.
On June 6, 1792, the day before it was to be produced, its author was denounced before the National Assembly by Chabot. He had indeed, with a view to making at once a coup for his country and for himself, and though he was now sixty years old and getting deaf, undertaken to bring into France sixty thousand guns—‘to massacre patriots,’ shouted unreasonable patriotism. On August 10 his house was searched; on August 23 he was taken to the Abbaye prison, and on August 30 he was freed by Manuel (his brother littérateur, as well as Procurator of the Commune), just two days before the September massacres. After all, his star had not yet declined.
After hiding in barns and roaming ‘over harrowed fields, panting for his life,’ he escaped to England, where very luckily for himself a London merchant, to whom he was in debt, prevented his returning to Paris and the guillotine by shutting him up in the King’s Bench Prison. In March, 1793, he did return, ‘to offer my head to the sword of justice, if I cannot prove I am a good citizen.’ That he did not thus pay for his imprudence proves that there was as much in that head as had ever come out of it.
Three months later, Beaumarchais was sent as the emissary of the Revolutionary Government to fetch those sixty thousand guns which had been left in Holland. He had many highly dramatic escapes and adventures; and, being wholly modern in his belief in self-advertisement, he once more made the most of them. In his absence the Government which had sent him, by one of those little mistakes which make its history so vivacious, declared him an émigré!