During the Terror he was at Hamburg, in direst poverty and in mortal anxiety as to the fate of his wife, his daughter, and his sister Julie. They escaped with their lives; but when Beaumarchais was at last taken off the list of émigrés and returned to Paris in 1796, he found house and fortune alike in ruins, his door besieged by creditors, and his famous garden a wilderness.
He was sixty-four years old and had already done more in his life than a hundred ordinary men compress into a hundred ordinary careers. And now he must start afresh!
He saw his daughter married; revived his old social tastes, produced ‘The Guilty Mother,’ and took the keenest interest, both in prose and verse, in that young Lieutenant of Artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte. He also published two very anti-Christian letters in praise of Voltaire. The watchmaker’s son, who had charmed Mesdames at Versailles, was to the end witty, gay, bold, and practical.
On the morning of May 18, 1799, his friends found him dead of apoplexy. To die in his bed at last was surely not the least of his clevernesses.
Caron de Beaumarchais was not a very unusual type of character or even of intellect; but in the use he made of his brains, of his qualities and of his circumstances, he was a man in a million. His marvellous enterprise and industry enabled him to build more than one successful career on very ordinary foundations. His luck, that astonishing luck which followed him from the cradle to the grave, seems to have prevented such dangerous qualities as his conceit, his pugnaciousness, and his love of intrigue and speculation, from bringing their usual fatal results. Such gifts as a handsome face, a fine figure, a ‘parvenu grandeur of manner’ and real kindness and generosity, he used to their utmost advantage. For himself and his contemporaries he was a brilliantly successful individuality.
For posterity, he is the man who, with a single thrust, pushed open that door, which by long labour and bitter sacrifice Voltaire and the Encyclopædists had unbarred, upon the great Revolution and the Day.
X
CONDORCET: THE ARISTOCRAT
Voltaire was the son of a lawyer, and Diderot the son of a cutler; d’Alembert was a no-man’s child educated in a tradesman’s family; Grimm and Galiani were foreigners in the country to which they gave their talents. Of all Voltaire’s fellowship only Vauvenargues and Condorcet came from the order their work was pledged not to benefit but to destroy. Condorcet alone lived to experience the extreme consequences of his principles, and paid for them by imprisonment and death. The Aristocrat who lost his life through the People to whom he had devoted it—this was Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.
Born in 1743, at Ribemont, a town in Picardy, Condorcet belonged to a noble family highly connected both with the Church and the Army.
His father was a captain of cavalry and designed his son for the same aristocratic post. But he died when the child was four; and a devout mother vowed him to the Virgin and au blanc,