He even attempted to feed the people of Paris by free gifts. But still the people of Paris were not contented, and above them, in the ranks that make “Opinion,” there was an increasing demand, an insistence for the “Mariage de Figaro.” It was already March, and the play was still disallowed.
In his bishop’s palace that March, the woman La Motte was telling the Cardinal de Rohan one of those truly considerable lies upon which history turns; a lie comparable to the lie of Bismarck at Ems—or to any other that any of my readers may cherish. The Cardinal sat listening, his florid, proud, prominent, unintelligent face all ears. “She had reached the result of so much patient waiting. Her dignity of Valois (and she was a Valois) was to be recognised; her lands (she had no lands) were to be restored to her. It was the Queen whom she had conquered: the Queen was now her friend, her intimate friend. The Queen would do anything in the world for her. Through her was Rohan’s avenue to the Queen. Her poverty was at an end. She could soon repay so many years of his kindness.”
Marie Antoinette was concerned with little in those weeks; it is just possible she again spoke a word for that eternal “Figaro.” If she did she was but one of a hundred—and the King gave way. The censorship should be removed, but on condition that certain passages most offensive to the established order of the State should be deleted. On that point Louis would not budge ... it made all the difference. They were deleted, and the King—misjudging now—said (not without foreboding): “I hope it will be a frost.” On the first night the Public answered him.
A vast crowd broke for hours against the railings of the Comédie Française, a crowd in which every kind of man was crushed against every kind. The doors opened to a mob that stormed the theatre like a citadel, and that, when it entered, could see, in reserved places and entered earlier than the public, every head in Paris that counted. Even Monsieur, deep in his private box, was there, and there behind their bars were the Parliament, the Ministry—even, discreetly, the Church.
The play began.... To-day, in a society which it has helped to create, its jests seem obvious, its epigrams platitudes. To that eager people, starved of reform in the midst of a huge transformation of society, they were brilliant exactitudes of wit, struck off like bright coins—precisely the thing desired. This man found satisfied as the play proceeded his revenge against bought law, that man his brooding against an old insult of privilege, that other his disgust at an apparent national decline, yet another his mere hunger: and all these Frenchmen found in the play an echo of their national contempt for a government that cannot excuse itself, even by logic; all found and each found his necessity for passion against existing things assuaged by the sparkle and the venom of the play. They roared at it with delight as men do at the close of successful assault. They laughed as do men satisfied to repletion. They felt a common enemy gone under. There was not one so privileged but had heartily supped of ridicule against some aspect of the society he had learnt to despise.
The curtain fell to a storm of triumphant noise. The Parisians went out into the darkness full and fed with the idea of change, and a great crack had opened in the walls of the palace. It was the 27th of April 1784.