Captain Cook was dead, massacred by the savages, but the ardor which had animated him was not extinct; on the 10th of August, 1785, a French sailor, M. de La Peyrouse, left Brest with two frigates for the purpose of completing the discoveries of the English explorer. The king had been pleased to himself draw up his instructions, bearing the impress of an affectionate and over-strained humanity. “His Majesty would regard it as one of the happiest successes of the expedition,” said the instructions, “if it were terminated without having cost the life of a single man.” La Peyrouse and his shipmates never came back. Louis XVI. was often saddened by it. “I see what it is quite well,” the poor king would repeat, “I am not lucky.”
M. de La Peyrouse had scarcely commenced the preparations for his fatal voyage, when, on the 5th of June, 1783, the States of the Vivarais, assembled in the little town of Annonay, were invited by MM. de Montgolfier, proprietors of a large paper-manufactory, to be witnesses of an experiment in physics. The crowd thronged the thoroughfare. An enormous bag, formed of a light canvas lined with paper, began to swell slowly before the curious eyes of the public; all at once the cords which held it were cut, and the first balloon rose majestically into the air. Successive improvements made in the Montgolfiers’ original invention permitted bold physicists ere long to risk themselves in a vessel attached to the air-machine. There sailed across the Channel a balloon bearing a Frenchman, M. Blanchard, and an Englishman, Dr. Jefferies; the latter lost his flag. Blanchard had set the French flag floating over the shores of England; public enthusiasm welcomed him on his return. The queen was playing cards at Versailles. “What I win this game shall go to Blanchard,” she said. The same feat, attempted a few days later by a professor of physics, M. Pilatre de Rozier, was destined to cost him his life.
So many scientific explorations, so many new discoveries of nature’s secrets were seconded and celebrated by an analogous movement in literature. Rousseau had led the way to impassioned admiration of the beauties of nature; Bernardin de St. Pierre had just published his Etudes de la Nature; he had in the press his Paul et Virginie; Abbe Delille was reading his Jardin, and M. de St. Lambert his Saisons. In their different phases and according to their special instincts, all minds, scholarly or political, literary or philosophical, were tending to the same end, and pursuing the same attempt. It was nature which men wanted to discover or recover: scientific laws and natural rights divided men’s souls between them. Buffon was still alive, and the great sailors were every day enriching with their discoveries the Jardin du Roi; the physicists and the chemists, in the wake of Lavoisier, were giving to science a language intelligible to common folks; the jurisconsults were attempting to reform the rigors of criminal legislation at the same time with the abuses they had entailed, and Beaumarchais was bringing on the boards his Manage de Figaro.
The piece had been finished and accepted at the Theatre Francais since the end of 1781, but the police-censors had refused permission to bring it out. Beaumarchais gave readings of it; the court itself was amused to see itself attacked, caricatured, turned into ridicule; the friends of Madame de Polignac reckoned among the most ardent admirers of the Manage de Figaro. The king desired to become acquainted with the piece. He had it read by Madame de Campan, lady of the chamber to the queen, and very much in her confidence. The taste and the principles of Louis XVI. were equally shocked. “Perpetually Italian concetti!” he exclaimed. When the reading was over: “It is detestable,” said the king; “it shall never be played; the Bastille would have to be destroyed to make the production of this play anything but a dangerous inconsistency. This fellow jeers at all that should be respected in a government.”
Louis XVI. had correctly criticised the tendencies as well as the effects of a production sparkling with wit, biting, insolent, licentious; but he had relied too much upon his persistency in his opinions and his personal resolves. Beaumarchais was more headstrong than the king; the readings continued. The hereditary grand-duke of Russia, afterwards Paul I., happening to be at Paris in 1782, under the name of Count North, no better diversion could be thought of for him than a reading of the Manage de Figaro. Grimm undertook to obtain Beaumarchais’ consent. “As,” says Madame de Oberkirsch, who was present at the reading, “as the mangy (chafouin) looks of M. de la Harpe had disappointed me, so the fine face, open, clever, somewhat bold, perhaps, of M. de Beaumarchais bewitched me. I was found fault with for it. I was told he was a good-for-naught. I do not deny it, it is possible; but he has prodigious wit, courage enough for anything, a strong will which nothing can stop, and these are great qualities.”
Beaumarchais took advantage of the success of the reading to boldly ask the keeper of the seals for permission to play the piece; he was supported by public curiosity, and by the unreflecting enthusiasm of a court anxious to amuse itself; the game appeared to have been won, the day for its representation, at the Menus-Plaisirs Theatre, was fixed, an interdiction on the part of the king only excited the ill-humor and intensified the desires of the public. “This prohibition appeared to be an attack upon liberty in general,” says Madame Campan. “The disappointment of all hopes excited discontent to such a degree, that the words oppression and tyranny were never uttered, in the days preceding the fall of the throne, with more passion and vehemence.” Two months later, the whole court was present at the representation of the Marriage de Figaro, given at the house of M. de Vandreuil, an intimate friend of the Duchess of Polignac, on his stage at Gennevilliers. “You will see that Beaumarchais will have more influence than the keeper of the seals,” Louis XVI. had said, himself foreseeing his own defeat. The Mariage de Figaro was played at the Theatre Francais on the 27th of April, 1784.
“The picture of this representation is in all the collections of the period,” says M. de Lomenie. “It is one of the best known reminiscences of the eighteenth century; all Paris hurrying early in the morning to the doors of the Theatre Francais, the greatest ladies dining in the actresses’ dressing-room in order to secure places.” “The blue ribands,” says Bachaumont, “huddled up in the crowd, and elbowing Savoyards; the guard dispersed, the doors burst, the iron gratings broken beneath the efforts of the assailants.” “Three persons stifled,” says La Harpe, “one more than for Scudery; and on the stage, after the rising of the curtain, the finest collection of talent that had probably ever had possession of the Theatre Francais, all employed to do honor to a comedy scintillating with wit, irresistibly lively and audacious, which, if it shocks and scares a few of the boxes, enchants, rouses, and fires an electrified pit.” A hundred representations succeeding the first uninterruptedly, and the public still eager to applaud, such was the twofold result of the audacities of the piece and the timid hesitations of its censors. The Mariage de Figgaro bore a sub-title, la Folle Journee. “There is something madder than my piece,” said Beaumarchais, “and that is its success.” Figaro ridiculed everything with a dangerously pungent vigor; the days were coming when the pleasantry was to change into insults. Already public opinion was becoming hostile to the queen: she was accused of having remained devoted to the interests of her German family; the people were beginning to call her the Austrian. During the American war, M. de Vergennes had managed to prevail upon the king to remain neutral in the difficulties that arose in 1778 between Austria and Prussia on the subject of the succession to the elector palatine; the young queen had not wanted or had not been able to influence the behavior of France, as her mother had conjured her to do. “My dear lady— daughter,” wrote Maria Theresa, “Mercy is charged to inform you of my cruel position, as sovereign and as mother. Wishing to save my dominions from the most cruel devastation, I must, cost what it may, seek to wrest myself from this war, and, as a mother, I have three sons who are not only running the greatest danger, but are sure to succumb to the terrible fatigues, not being accustomed to that sort of life. By making peace at this juncture, I not only incur the blame of great pusillanimity, but I render the king of Prussia still greater, and the remedy must be prompt. I declare to you, my head whirls and my heart has for a long time been entirely numb.” France had refused to engage in the war, but she had contributed to the peace of Teschen, signed on the 13th of May, 1779. On the 29th of November, 1780, Maria Theresa died at the age of sixty-three, weary of life and of that glory to which she “was fain to march by all roads,” said the Great Frederick, who added: “It was thus that a woman executed designs worthy of a great man.”
In 1784, Joseph II. reigned alone. Less prudent and less sensible than his illustrious mother, restless, daring, nourishing useful or fanciful projects, bred of humanity or disdain, severe and affectionate at the same time towards his sister the queen of France, whose extravagance he found fault with during the trip he made to Paris in 1777, he was now pressing her to act on his behalf in the fresh embarrassments which his restless ambition had just excited in Europe. The mediation of King Louis XVI. between the emperor and the Dutch, as to the navigation of the Scheldt, had just terminated the incident pacifically: the king had concluded a treaty of defensive alliance with Holland. The minister of war, M. de Segur, communicated to the queen the note he had drawn up on this important question. “I regret,” he said to Marie Antoinette, “to be obliged to give the king advice opposed to the desire of the emperor.” “I am the emperor’s sister, and I do not forget it,” answered the queen; “but I remember above all that I am queen of France and mother of the dauphin.” Louis XVI. had undertaken to pay part of the indemnity imposed upon Joseph II.; this created discontent in France. “Let the emperor pay for his own follies,” people said; and the ill-humor of the public openly and unjustly accused the queen.
This direful malevolence on the part of public opinion, springing from a few acts of imprudence and fomented by a long series of calumnies, was about to burst forth on the occasion of a scandalous and grievous occurrence. On the 15th of August, 1785, at Mass-time, Cardinal Rohan, grand almoner of France, already in full pontificals, was arrested in the palace of Versailles and taken to the Bastille. The king had sent for him into his cabinet. “Cardinal,” said Louis XVI. abruptly, “you bought some diamonds of Boehmer?” “Yes, Sir.” “What have you done with them?” “I thought they had been sent to the queen.” “Who gave you the commission?” (The cardinal began to be uneasy.) “A lady, the Countess de la Motte Valois, . . . she gave me a letter from the queen; I thought I was obliging her Majesty. . . . “ The queen interrupted. She had never forgiven M. de Rohan for some malevolent letters written about her when she was dauphiness. On the accession of Louis XVI. this intercepted correspondence had cost the prince his embassy to Vienna. “How, sir,” said the queen, “could you think, you to whom I have never spoken for eight years, that I should choose you for conducting this negotiation, and by the medium of such a woman?” “I was mistaken, I see; the desire I felt to please your Majesty misled me,” and he drew from his pocket the pretended letter from the queen to Madame de la Motte. The king took it, and, casting his eye over the signature: “How could a prince of your house and my grand almoner suppose that the queen would sign Marie Antoinette de France? Queens sign their names quite short. It is not even the queen’s writing. And what is the meaning of all these doings with jewellers, and these notes shown to bankers?”