In 1772, ‘On Man’ was published, with the reception which has been recorded. That early poem, ‘Happiness,’ also now publicly appeared for the first time, with a prose preface by Saint-Lambert—the prose, said Galiani, being much better than the verse.
To Helvétius’ works, or rather to his work, for ‘On the Mind’ is the only one that counts, is now generally meted the judgment which should have been meted to it when it appeared. Catch thistledown, imprison it, examine it beneath a microscope, and a hundred learned botanists will soon be confabulating and fighting over it. Put it in thefree air and sunshine—and, lo! it is gone. ‘On the Mind’ was but thistledown, and the winds have blown it away.
But the man who wrote it deserves recollection because, though he wrote it, he and Turgot alone among their compeers realised in practice that the best way to do good to mankind is to do good to individual man, here and to-day, and that the surest means to relieve the sorrows of the world is to help the one poor Lazarus lying, full of sores, at the gate.
AmongVoltaire’s friends Turgot and Condorcet at least were not merely great, but also good men. Even Condorcet, though himself of virtuous and noble life, had not that high standard of living, that sterner modern code of purity and uprightness, which were remarkably Turgot’s.
But Turgot was something more even than the best man of his party. He was the best worker. While Voltaire clamoured and wept for humanity, while d’Alembert thought, Grimm wrote, Diderot talked, and Condorcet dreamed and died, Turgot laboured. Broad and bold in aim, he was yet content to do what he could. Of him it might never be said ‘L’amour du mieux t’aura interdit du bien.’ To do one’s best here and now, with the wretched tools one has to hand, in the teeth of indolence, obstinacy, and the spirit of routine, to compromise where one cannot overcome, and instead of sitting picturing some golden future, to do at once the little one can—that was this statesman’s policy.
ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES TURGOT.From an Engraving by Le Beau, after the Portrait by Troy.
ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES TURGOT.From an Engraving by Le Beau, after the Portrait by Troy.
ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES TURGOT.
From an Engraving by Le Beau, after the Portrait by Troy.
It was so far successful, that all men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.
His father was the Provost of Merchants in Paris, and has earned the gratitude of Parisians by enlarging the Quai de l’Horloge and joining it by a bridge to the opposite bank of the Seine, and by erecting the fountain in the Rue de Grenelle de St. Germain.
Anne Robert Jacques was his third son, and a timid, shy little creature. His mother, who,en vraie Parisienne, thought everything of appearance and manners, worried him on the subject of his clumsiness and stupidity, which naturally made the child self-conscious and increased the faults fourfold. When visitors arrived to flatter Madame by admiring her children, Anne Robert hid under the sofa or the table; and when he was removed from his retreat, could produce no company manners at all. No wonder the mother never even suspected the strong intellect and the wonderful character that so much awkwardness concealed.
Anne Robert’s birth was contemporaneous with Voltaire’s visit to England, and took place on May 10, 1727. The child had already two brothers. The eldest was bound, after the foolish custom of the day, to follow his father’s profession;the second brother must go into the army; and for Anne Robert there was nothing left but the Church.
He followed Voltaire and Helvétius at the school of Louis-le-Grand, and when sufficiently advanced, moved on to the College of Plessis. As a schoolboy his pocket-money disappeared with the usual rapidity, but not in the usual way. This shy little student gave it to his poorer companions, to buy books. From the time he was sixteen—that is in 1743—until 1750, he was a divinity student. At Saint-Sulpice, whither he went in 1748 on leaving Plessis, he took his degree as a Theological Bachelor, and from there entered the Sorbonne.
The Sorbonne, which was swept away by the Revolution, was a very ancient Theological College and in some respects not unlike an English university. Young Turgot found there Morellet and Loménie de Brienne, besides a certain Abbé de Cicé, to whom in 1749 he addressed one of the first of his writings, a ‘Letter on Paper Money.’
In 1749, Turgot was made Prior of the Sorbonne, in whichrôlehe had to deliver two Latin lectures, choosing for his themes, ‘The Advantages of Christianity,’ and ‘The Advance of the Mind of Man.’ All the time he was reading, thinking, observing on his own account, studyingespecially Locke, Bayle, Clarke, and Voltaire. A priest he soon knew he could not be. To be sure, the fact that his friend Loménie de Brienne is a sceptic will not preventhimbecoming a cardinal and Archbishop of Toulouse; he would have been Archbishop of Paris had his Majesty not been so painfully particular as to demand that the Primate of the capital should at least believe in a God. But Turgot was of other metal and was not minded to live a lie. All his friends begged him to keep to the lucrative career assigned him, surely, by Providence! ‘You will be a bishop,’ says Cicé comfortably, ‘and then you can be a statesman at your leisure.’
The argument was very seductive; but this student was in every respect unlike other students, with a character breathing a higher and finer air than theirs. Morellet records, not without the suspicion of a sneer, that from their coarse boyish jokes he shrank as one shrinks from a blow. Even Condorcet, himself so pure in life, laughed at people wasting time in quenching the desires of the flesh; but Turgot vindicated purity as well as practised it, and reached a level of principle, as of conduct, which in the eighteenth century was unfortunately almost unique.
His father, wiser than most parents in like circumstances, countenanced his objections to thepriesthood. He had already studied law, as well as theology. In 1750 he left the Sorbonne, and Loménie gave a farewell dinner in his rooms, with Turgot and Morellet of the party, and the light-hearted guests planned a game of tennis behind the church of the Sorbonne for the year 1800.
The year 1800! Before then the Sorbonne itself had perished with Church, monarchy, and nobility; shallow Brienne, having done mighty mischief, had poisoned himself in the château his ill-earned wealth had been gained to restore; Morellet was writing revolutionary pamphlets; and Turgot was dead.
In 1752, two years after he left the Sorbonne, Anne Robert obtained the legal post of Deputy Counsellor of the Procurator-General, and a year later was made Master of Requests.
One must picture him at this time as a tall, broad-shouldered, rather handsome man, with that old boyish constraint in his manner, and that strict high-mindedness which his own generation could not be expected to find attractive. Add to these qualities that he was not in the least carried away by dreams and visions, as were nearly all his friends, that even then he saw the world as it was, and meant to do with it what he could—that, though in lofty aim he may have been an idealist, he never fell into the idealist’s fault of believingthat, because there is everything to do, he must do everything, or nothing. Just, reasonable, practical—what a wholesome contrast to your visionary Rousseaus, ay, and to your impulsive Voltaires! He was not a brilliant person, this; it is said that he was slow in everything he undertook. Nor had he given over the vigour of his youth and the strength of his understanding to any one party. He was studying them all.
He was about three or four and twenty when he first began to go into the intellectual society of Paris—when Montesquieu, d’Alembert, Galiani, Helvétius, found the stiffness of manner more than redeemed by the wealth of the mind. Presently he was introduced to Madame de Graffigny, and complimented her by writing a long review of her ‘Letters from a Peruvian,’ which, as giving his own views on education, on marriage, and on the fashionable avoidance of parenthood, retains all its interest. It is strange to hear a pre-Revolutionary Frenchman urging love-marriages—‘Because we are sometimes deceived, it is concluded we ought never to choose’—and strange also that, out of all the great reformers with whom his name is associated, Turgot alone perceived the fearful havoc which neglect of family duties makes in the well-being of the State.
He was presented to Madame de Graffigny by herniece, Mademoiselle de Ligniville. The bright and charming Minette naturally did not find it at all difficult to draw Anne Robert of five-and-twenty from the intellectual society of her aunt’ssalonto a game of battledore and shuttlecockà deux. Morellet, watching the pair, professed himself pained and astonished that their friendship did not end as nearly all such friendships do and should.
Most of Turgot’s biographers have sought the reason why Mademoiselle de Ligniville became Madame Helvétius and not Madame Turgot—and have not found it. As for Turgot, he said nothing. It remains idle to speculate whether he conceived for her a passion, which hisgaucherieand shyness, perhaps, prevented her from returning; or whether he had already devoted his life to his public duty, and thought that private happiness would be deterrent and not spur to his work for the race. An unhappy or an unrequited affection is one of the finest incentives to labour and success one can have. It may be that Turgot had it. The only certain facts are that Minette married Helvétius, and that Turgot remained her life-long friend.
In 1754 he made the acquaintance of Quesnay and of de Gournay, the political economists, who influenced not a little his life and thought. He soon began writing articles for the Encyclopædia,though he never joined in that battle-cry of the Encyclopædists,Écrasez l’infâme, and was wholly without sympathy for the atheism of d’Holbach and the materialism of Helvétius. Turgot, indeed, may be said to have been, in the broadest acceptation of the term, a Christian; or rather he would be called, and call himself, a Christian to-day. But his Christianity was not of Rome nor yet of Protestantism, but that in whose honest doubt there lives more faith than in half the creeds. He certainly gave little expression to it. It was the religion of the wise man—which he never tells.
When he was on a geologising tour in Switzerland, in 1760, he saw the great Pontiff of the Church of Antichrist at Délices. That generous old person was warm in delight and admiration for his guest. D’Alembert had introduced him, and d’Alembert’s friends must always be welcome. And then Turgot’s article on ‘Existence’ in the Encyclopædia had made even more impression on this impressionable Voltaire than on the world of letters in general. He took this young disciple to his heart at once. Well, then, if he is not precisely a disciple, he is at least a most ‘lovable philosopher,’ and ‘much fitter to instruct me than I am to instruct him!’ It was Voltaire who was dazzled by the young man’s splendid possibilities, not the young man who was dazzled by Voltaire’s matchless fame and daring genius. Turgot was never dazzled; it was his greatness, if it was also his misfortune, to see men and the world exactly as they are.
In 1761 he was made Intendant of Limoges. It was the great opportunity; he had wanted practical work—not to think, to write, or to dream. Voltaire wrote of him afterwards as one ‘qui ne chercha le vrai que pour faire le bien.’ He wanted to Do; and here was everything to be done.
The picture of provincial France before the Revolution has been painted often, but the subject is one of which the painter can never tire and to which he can never do justice.
The Limoges which Turgot found was one of the most beautiful districts of France—and one of the most wretched. Here, on the one side, rose the châteaux of the great absentee noblemen, who, always at Court, left behind them middlemen to wring from the poor innumerable dues, with which my lord, forsooth, must pay his debts of honour and make a fine figure at Versailles. The few nobles who did live on their country estates expected their new young Intendant to be an agreeable social light, as his predecessors had been, who would keep, for theéliteof the neighbourhood, an open house where one would naturally findgood wine, rich fare, and delightful, doubtful company.
On the other hand were the clergy—often ignorant, but generally cunning enough to play on the deeper ignorance of their flock by threats of the Hereafter, and to keep from them that knowledge which is the death-blow of superstition.
Then there were the poor. Picture a peasantry whose homes were windowless, one-roomed huts of peat or clay; who subsisted, in times of plenty, on roots, chestnuts, and a little black bread; who had neither schools nor hospitals, teachers nor doctors; who were the constant prey of pestilence and famine; whose bodies were the possession of their lords, and whose dim souls were the perquisites of the priests. Consider that these people were not allowed to fence such miserable pieces of land as they might possess, lest they should interfere with my lord’s hunting; nor to manure their wretched crops, lest they should spoil the flavour of his game; nor to weed them, lest they should disturb his partridges. Consider that, if such land could have borne any fruit, a special permission was required to allow its owners to build a shed to store it in. Consider that their villages, in which they herded like beasts, were separated from other villages by roads so vile that they would have rendered commerce difficult,if legal trammels had not made it impossible. Consider that these people had been scourged for generations by hundreds of unjust and senseless laws, made by and for the benefit of their oppressors, and that they were now the victims of taxes whose very name has become an indictment, and whose description is a justification of the French Revolution.
On the one flank they were whipped by thetaille—the tax on the income and property of the poor, which absorbed one-half of the net products of their lands—and on the other by thecorvée, which compelled them to give yearly twelve or fifteen days’ unpaid labour on the roads and the use of a horse and cart, if they had them. Themilicedemanded from each parish its quota of soldiers (the rich being exempt as usual), and compelled the parishes to lodge passing detachments of military and to lend cattle to draw the military equipages. Thegabelle, or tax on salt, forced each poor man to buy seven pounds of salt per annum—whether, as in one province, it was a halfpenny a pound, or, as in another, it was sixpence—and let the noble, the priest, and the Government official go free. Toll-gates were so numerous in the country that it is said fish brought from Harfleur to Paris paid eleven times its value on the journey. Wine was taxed; corn was taxed.
But this was not all. If these taxes were cruelly unjust, they were settled and regular. Irregular taxes could be levied at any moment at the caprice of the despot at Versailles, who no more realised the condition of his peasantry than an ordinary Briton realises the condition of a tribe of Hottentots. One, called with an exquisite irony the Tax of the Joyful Accession, had been raised when Louis the Fifteenth reached the throne of France—to topple it down the abyss. Another was thevingtième, or tax on the twentieth part of a franc, which could be doubled or trebled at the pleasure of the Government.
Apart altogether from the taxes, the peasantry were subject to tithes exacted by the Church, itself exempt from all taxation, to large fees for christening and marrying, for getting out of the misery of this world and avoiding worse misery in the next.
The clergy were on the spot to exact these dues, just as the middleman was on the spot to exact the dues for the nobles. Some of these dues and seigneurial rights are so shameful and disgusting that their very terms are unrepeatable. Even that vile age permitted many of them to lapse and become a dead letter; but the number, and the full measure of the iniquity of those that were insisted on, has never been counted, and will never be known until the Day of Judgment.
What effect would hundreds of years of such oppression have on the character of the oppressed? Hopeless, filthy, degraded, superstitious with the craven superstition which made them the easy prey of their unscrupulous clergy and left them wholly sensual and stupid; as animals, without the animals’ instinctive joy of life and fearlessness of the morrow; with no ambitions for themselves or the children who turned to curse them for having brought them into such a world; with no time to dream or love, no time for the tenderness which makes life, life indeed—they toiled for a few cruel years because they feared to die, and died because they feared to live. Such were the people Turgot was sent to redeem.
What wonder that many men gave up such a task in despair; that many even good men found it easier to prophesy a Golden Age in luxurious Paris than to fight hand to hand against the awful odds of such an awful reality? Turgot was thirty-four when he went to Limoges, and forty-seven when he left it. He spent there the most vigorous years of his life; if he did not do there his most famous work, he did his noblest.
He began at once. It was nothing to him that his own caste shot out the lip and scorned him. Cold and awkward in manner, regular and austere in habit, and as pure as a good woman, of coursethey hated him. But it was much to him that the clergy who ruled the people were also his foes, that that very people themselves were so dull and hopeless, that they too suspected his motives and concluded that because for them every change had always been for the worse, every change always would be. Slowly, gradually, he gained the favour of the priest and the love of the flock. He could not turn their hell into heaven: he could not make earth at all what Condorcet, uplifted in noble vision, would dream it yet might be. But he could do something.
In 1765, he procured for Limoges an edict restoring free trade in grain in that province. Versailles, wholly abandoned to its amusements, did not in the least care whether edicts were granted or whether they were revoked. Turgot did care. He perceived that the Court was not minded to be plagued with his reforms; and he plagued it till it gave him what he wanted—to go away.
Then he turned to the other taxes. The existence of a privileged class which pays nothing and devours much by its shameful exactions, is itself a monstrous thing.Tailleis the crowning iniquity; but it will take a Reign of Terror to kill it. In the meantime Turgot, in the teeth of the besotted ignorance and opposition of the wretched beingshe was trying to help, could and did see that it was fairly administered.
In place of the personal service demanded by thecorvée, he substituted a money-tax; which was better for the taxed and better also for the roads.
With regard to themilice, he proposed wide changes. But since the Government would not rouse itself to act on the proposals, he took advantage of its self-indulgent indifference and permitted evasions of the law; when an unlucky creature drew a black ticket in the conscription in Limoges, the new Intendant permitted him to find a substitute or to pay a fee. He also built barracks, which removed the necessity for quartering the soldiers on the poor.
The fearful trammels which ‘crippled trade and industry and doomed labour to sterility,’ he in part removed. He made new roads; he became President of the first Agricultural Society in the district; he founded a veterinary college. In the teeth of strong opposition he promoted the cultivation of the potato; and by having it served daily at his own table proved to the ignorance of the peasants that it was at least safe for human food. He also introduced the growth of clover, and entirely suppressed a worrying little tax on cattle. He first brought to Limoges a properly qualified midwife, who taught her business toother women. This was the beginning of the Hospice de la Maternité. During Turgot’s Intendancy the china clay, of which the famous Limoges pottery was afterwards made, was discovered.
Besides these public acts, he was engaged in hundreds of small individual charities. Among others, he educated at his own expense a youth whose father had been entirely ruined by taxation and famine. The youth was Vergniaud, afterwards the stirring orator of the Revolution.
In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was ‘the compulsory instrument of great evil,’ he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could—what a different world!
In 1765, he paid a visit to Paris, and in the Calas case, made famous by Voltaire, spoke on the side of tolerance with a vehemence unusual to him. Morellet, d’Alembert, and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse were still his friends. Condorcet was in his closest intimacy, and destined hereafter towrite his Life—‘one of the wisest and noblest of lives,’ says John Stuart Mill, ‘delineated by one of the noblest and wisest of men.’
In Paris, he met Adam Smith, the political economist. As a result of their acquaintance Turgot produced in the next year his ‘Reflections on the Reformation and Distribution of Wealth,’ fertile in conception, arid in style, and anticipating many of the ideas familiar to English readers through Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations.’
But the insistent claims of Limoges on his time and pity narrowed his hours for study, even for the study that would serve it well. In 1767 he cleared the province of wolves, by a system analogous to that by which Edgar rid Wales of the same pest.
Then, in 1770, Limoges and its Intendant began their fight with want. When Turgot came to the province, the wretched place was a million francs in arrears for its taxes. Some he had certainly lessened. The work he had started was just beginning to bear its first little harvest of good, when there came the withering blast of the two years’ famine. Its horrors were unthinkable. Turgot wrote to Terrai, the Controller-General, that it was impossible to extort the taxes and the arrears without ruin—ay, and with ruin—to the taxed. The people could not only not pay whatwas demanded of them, but they had nothing to sell for the barren necessities of their own existence. God knows they had learnt by long and bitter practice to subsist on little enough! But now they must surely sit down and die.
Strong and calm, Turgot rose up again. From the Parliament at Bordeaux he obtained permission to levy a tax on the rich in aid of the sufferers. He himself opened workshops in which he gave work, and paid for it, not in coin, which would certainly be spent at the nearestcabaret, but in leather tickets which could be exchanged for food at the cheap provision shops, also of his own institution.
Far beyond his age in every practical scheme for the benefit of mankind, he was beyond our own age in that he clearly perceived that the free soup-kitchen, and all the sentimental philanthropy which gives money in lieu of work, instead of paying money for work, must be demoralising, and in the long run create more misery than it relieves. ‘Such distributions,’ said he, ‘have the effect of accustoming the people to mendicity.’ Even through a famine he sent to prison every beggar he could lay hands on. Then, again far beyond his age, he induced the ladies of the district to teach the poor girls needlework; and so to give them ‘the best and most useful kindsof alms—the means to earn.’ The fight was long and hard. But it had its reward. The people came to love him who had helped them to help themselves; who had given them, not the bitter bread and scornful dole of charity, but the power to earn a livelihood and their first taste of self-respect.
On May 10, 1774, Louis the Sixteenth succeeded to the throne of sixty-six kings; and on July 20, Turgot was made Minister of Marine and thus called to wider and fuller work. The Limogian peasants clung about his knees with tears, and the Limogian nobles rejoiced openly at his departure. The one leave-taking was as great a compliment as the other.
The merits of this ‘virtuous philosophic Turgot, with a whole reformed France in his head,’ had not been in the least the reason of his promotion. But schoolfellow Cicé had whispered pleasant things of him to Madame Maurepas, the wife of the Minister; and Madame had settled the matter with her husband, who was a lively shrewd old man of seventy-four, not inconvenienced by any idea of duty, and with a very strong sense of humour.
Turgot was Minister of Marine for just five weeks; but in that time he had eighteen months’ arrears of wages paid to a gang of workmen atBrest, and made many plans for the improvement of the colonies, which more than twenty years ago, at the Sorbonne, he had significantly compared to ‘fruits which cling to the parent tree, only until they are ripe.’ On August 24, 1774, he was made Controller-General of Finances in the place of Terrai.
It sounded a fine position, but was it? Limoges represented all France in little. A ruined Treasury, a starving people, in high places corruption and exaction, and in low places misery such as has rarely been seen since the world began.
Terrai, profligate and dissolute—‘What does he want with a muff?’ said witty Mademoiselle Arnould when he had appeared with one in winter; ‘his hands are always in our pockets’—had left to his successor, debt, bankruptcy, chaos. The King was not quite twenty, weak with the amiable weakness which is often more disastrous in a ruler than vice. The Queen was nineteen, careless and gay, loving pleasure and her own way, and meaning to have both in spite of all the controllers in the world. Maurepas, being undisturbed by principles, would readily abandon his protégé if he perceived for himself the least danger in that patronage. Voltaire, indeed, wrote that he saw in Turgot’s appointment a new heaven and a new earth, and the enlightened among thepeople dreamt that the Millennium had come, but Voltaire was but a voice crying in the wilderness, and in the councils of State the people had neither lot nor part.
Once again Turgot, realising to the full the difficulties, the impossibilities even, of his position, resolved to do what he could. Within a few hours of his appointment he wrote a long letter to the King, urging the absolute necessity of economy in every department, denouncing bribes, privileges, exemptions, and pleading—daring to plead—equality in the imposition of taxes. No bankruptcy, no increase of taxation, no loans—this was to be the motto of his Controllership. ‘I feel all the perils to which I expose myself,’ he wrote. He was not even religious in the sense—what a sense!—that officials were expected to be religious. ‘You have given me a Controller who never goes to Mass,’ grumbled Louis to Maurepas. ‘Sire,’ answered the Minister, very happily, ‘Terrai always went.’
The new Controllership was still a nine days’ wonder when Turgot restored throughout France what he had restored in Limoges—free trade in grain. In 1770 he had written on the subject some famous ‘Letters’ in answer to Terrai’s revocation of the edict and the witty ‘Dialogues’ of Galiani which supported that revocation. Then,bolder still, he suppressed an abominable piece of official jobbery, thePot de Vin, or bribe of 100,000 crowns which the Farmers-General had always presented to the Controller when he signed a new edict. If the Farmers turned away sulkily, angry with a generosity they were by no means prepared to imitate, from the country came a long burst of passionate applause.
‘It is only M. Turgot and I who love the people,’ said the King. Well, this poor Louis did love them, but his was not the love that could stand firm by the man sent to save them. ‘Everything for the people, nothing by them,’ was Turgot’s motto, and, perhaps, his mistake. The King was to be the lever to raise his kingdom; and the weak tool broke in the Minister’s hand.
The first disaster of Turgot’s Controllership was the disaster that spoiled his Intendancy. In 1774-5 scarcity of bread made many distrust his edict restoring to them free trade in grain. With his firm hand over Louis’s shaking one he suppressed the bread riots of that winter, as it was never given to a Bourbon to suppress anything. But he would not in justice suppress, though he might have suppressed, Necker’s adverse pamphlet on the question, called ‘The Legislation and Commerce of Grain;’ though half the Encyclopædists, and many of Turgot’s personalfriends, were led thereby to adopt the opinions of the solid Genevan banker.
In the January of 1775, Turgot presented his Budget. The deficit left by Terrai was enormous. Let us pay then, said Turgot’s sound common-sense, the legitimate contracts of Government, not by your dear old remedy, taxation, for the ruined country can yield no more, but by limiting the expenses of that Government and of the Court. Officials and courtiers alike took as a judgment from Heaven the fact, that very shortly after this monstrous proposal, the audacious proposer was sharply attacked by the gout.
Turgot’s Controllership lasted in all twenty months, and for seven of them he was very ill. When he was blamed once for overworking himself and trying to force everybody’s hand, ‘Why, do you not know,’ he answered simply, ‘in my family we die of gout at fifty?’ His present illness kept him in his room many weeks, but did not prevent him from dictating an enormous correspondence, and trying urgently to persuade his master to begin his economical reforms by having his coming coronation ceremonies performed cheaply at Paris, instead of expensively at Rheims; and to make good his professions of tolerance by omitting from the service the oath binding him to extirpate heretics. Of course Louis was too weak for thesedrastic measures; he characteristically contented himself by mumbling the oath, and the senseless expenses of the coronation were as large as ever.
But Turgot, undaunted, went on working. In January 1776 he presented to the King what have been justly called the Six Fatal Edicts—the first for the suppression ofcorvée, four for the suppression of the offices interfering with the provisioning of Paris, and the sixth for the suppression ofjurandesor the government of privileged corporations. The first and sixth were the real cause of battle, and embodied one of the great aims of Turgot’s administration—to make the nobility and clergy contribute to the taxes.
A shrill outcry of indignation rang through Versailles. Make us pay!Us!The Court had always scorned Turgot with his shy, quiet manner, his gentle aloofness, and the reflection cast, in the most odious taste, by the purity of his life on its own manner of living. But now it hated him. Taxus! Curtailourextravagances! Reduceourexpenditure! What next? He has already abolished a number of our very best sinecures and lessened the salaries attached to several enticing little offices where we were enormously paid for doing nothing gracefully! He has given posts to persons fitted for them instead of to our noble and incompetent relations! If one ofus(even whenone of us is the Duc d’Orléans himself) wants to do something—well—illegal, he will not allow it! As though the makers of law could not be its breakers if they chose! And Versailles rustled indignantly in its unpaid-for silks, whispered, murmured, connived at the fall of this quiet, strong person who had not a thought in common with them—nor a thought of himself.
But he had a more dangerous enemy than the Court—the Queen. Quick-witted, wilful, impetuous, with a husband whose slow, hesitating intellect she must needs despise, clever enough to love to meddle with great things, but not wise enough to meddle well—Marie Antoinette took her first deep step down the stairway of ruin when she chose to be Turgot’s enemy instead of Turgot’s friend. Could he have saved her too, if she would have let him, as, but for her, men thought he might have saved France? God knows. Marie Antoinette wanted to be amused, and her particular amusement, gambling, was very expensive; she was infinitely good-natured and impetuously in love at the moment with Madame de Lamballe, and wanted for her the revival of the old post of Superintendent of the Household, with its enormous emoluments. And at her side stood Turgot, saying, ‘No.’ Maurepas had long since deserted him. It was much easier, and safer for one’s own interest, to give theQueen what she wanted and have done with it. As for Louis, he was, as usual, weak with the weakness that brought him to the guillotine and ended the French monarchy.
Turgot so far controlled him that the six Edicts were registered by the unwilling Parliament of Paris. Then Monsieur, afterwards Louis the Eighteenth, expressed in a pamphlet of very feeble wit the feelings of the upper classes against this terrible reformer. That paltry skit had already turned the King against his Minister, when Maurepas showed him a sharp financial criticism on Turgot’s calculations as Controller-General, and some forged letters purporting to come from Turgot and containing expressions offensive to the Royal Family. Not man enough to take them to Turgot and demand explanation, the wretched King went on distrusting him and giving him feeble hints to resign.
But until there was a better man to occupy his place, Turgot would take no hints. For the sake of France he would push those Edicts through, and gain his principles before he lost his power.
Then another friend failed him. Malesherbes, the brave old hero, who was hereafter to defend and to die for his King, but who, as Condorcet said, found on every subject ‘many fors andagainsts but never one to make him decide,’ resigned his post in Turgot’s government. ‘You are fortunate,’ says hapless Louis gloomily, ‘to be able to resign. I wish I could.’ The storm was coming up fast. But the first man on whom it was to fall remained calm and staunch.
On April 30, 1776, Turgot wrote to his King a note begging him not to appoint Amelot as Malesherbes’ successor, and containing these ominous words: ‘Do not forget, Sire, that it was weakness that brought the head of Charles the First to the block.’ Louis made no answer. Finally, the match was put to the tinder of the Queen’s wrath by Turgot’s dismissal from office of her worthless protégé, de Guines; and the Minister, it was whispered, had also declined to pay a debt she had incurred for jewellery, as against the new rules he had himself made. Rules for a Queen! This must certainly be the end of Queens or of Ministers! In this case, it was the end of both; only Turgot’s fall came first.
As he was sitting writing, on May 12, 1776, Bertin arrived to announce to him that he was no longer Controller-General. He had been drawing up an edict; laying down his pen he observed quietly, ‘My successor will finish it.’ His successor, it has been well said, was the National Assembly.
Two days later, Marie Antoinette wrote exultantly to her mother of his dismissal. What did she care for the just reproaches of the King and of the whole nation, which that old kill-joy, Mercy Argenteau, declared that this deed would bring on her head? She would have liked her enemy turned out of office and sent to the Bastille the very day that de Guines was made a Duke. Poor Queen! Her little triumph was so short, and her bitter punishment so long!
On May 18, Turgot took farewell of his master in language nobly dignified and touching. ‘My one desire,’ he said, ‘is that you may find I have judged wrongly, that I have warned you of imaginary dangers.’
Clugny was appointed Controller-General;corvéeandjurandeswere re-established; the edict establishing free trade in grain was revoked. The Court rejoiced aloud; the Paris Parliament was delighted. Old Voltaire at Ferney, indeed, wept and said that this was death before death, that a thunderbolt had fallen on his head and his heart; and the wise knew that nothing could save France now.
Turgot retired quietly into private life. That he was disappointed, not for himself, but for his country, is very true. True, too, he was angered at the backstairs policy which had dismissedhim. But far beyond this, there was so much he could have done, which now he could never do! Faithful to his life-long principle of gathering up the fragments that remain, he read and studied much, corresponded with Hume and Adam Smith, often met and talked with Franklin, went to see Voltaire when he came to Paris in 1778, made experiments in chemistry and physics, and was active in private benevolence.
Was the brief evening of his life solitary? The one human affection which, in its perfection, makes loneliness impossible, was not his; or at best was his only as a dream or a memory. But in the great family of earth’s toiling children he must have known there were many to love and bless him, many he had saved from wrong or from sorrow, some whom he had made from beasts into men. Another blessing was his—he did not long survive his active labours. He died March 21, 1781, aged fifty-four.
A failure, this life? It may be so; but a failure beside which many a success is paltry.
Turgot could not save France from her Revolution, but he gave her, and all countries, practical, working theories on government, on the liberty of the press, on the best means of helping the poor, on the use of riches, on civil, political, and religious liberty, which are still invaluable.
He has been justly said to have founded modern political economy; to have bequeathed to future generations ‘the idea of the freedom of industry;’ and to have made ready the way for the reforms which are the glory of our own day.
Among Voltaire’s fellow-workers there are far more dazzling personalities. But from their fiery words, exalted visions, and too glorious hopes one turns with a certain sense of relief to this quiet, strong, practical man, and understands why the people, whose instinct in judging the character of their rulers seldom betrays them in the long run, specially acclaimed Turgot as a friend.
Somemen do great things incidentally and unintentionally. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais bothered his clever head scarcely at all with schemes for the well-being of his country—was little concerned with humanity and very much with one man—himself. Yet by a special irony of destiny the author of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ played one of the chief parts in the prelude to the drama of the Revolution.
Born in Paris on January 24, 1732, the son of a watchmaker with a large family, Pierre Augustin Caron early learnt his father’s trade, picked up a little Latin at a technical school at Alfort and the rest of his education from experience and from the world.
A lively, impudent, good-looking boy, young Caron was from the first clever with that smart cleverness which is as distinct from genius or from wisdom, as kindness is distinct from sympathy
PIERRE-AUGUSTIN-CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS.From an Engraving, after Michon, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
PIERRE-AUGUSTIN-CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS.From an Engraving, after Michon, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
PIERRE-AUGUSTIN-CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS.
From an Engraving, after Michon, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
He was as sharp over his watchmaking as over everything he undertook in life. He had his first lawsuit—the first of so many!—over a discovery he made in his trade, and won it. But he was young, gay, musical, and Parisian. His trade was only a part of his life. There were debts and escapades. Then the watches took to disappearing mysteriously out of old Caron’s shop; and finally old Caron turned his scapegrace out of doors, till the mother pleaded, not in vain, for the prodigal’s return.
Then the prodigal made the loveliest and smallest of watches for Madame de Pompadour’s ring. The King was pleased to desire one also, and the King’s daughters, Mesdames, followed their father’s example; while the courtiers could not, of course, be out of the fashion. Pierre Caron, tall, handsome, audacious, was presented at Versailles, and made watchmaker to his Majesty. In 1755, another piece of luck befell him. (This Caron was one of the luckiest of human beings all through his life.)
A pretty young married woman, who had noticed him admiringly at Versailles, came to his shop to have her watch mended. Caron took it back to her house in person. A few months later the charming person’s elderly husband sold to Caron his post at Court, and on November 9, 1755,a patent was accorded to the watchmaker’s son declaring him ‘one of the Clerk Controllers of the Pantry of our Household.’ An agreeable little post, this of Pharaoh’s butler. Nothing to do, only be sure you do it handsomely! Caron, looking exceedingly effective and magnificent, preceded the King’s roast with a sword clanking at his side. At the end of a few months his predecessor in this arduous occupation died, and young Caron married the charming widow, Madame Francquet, who was certainly older than himself, but not the less agreeable to a very young man for that.
His marriage could not, at least, have been one of interest; or he was so far disinterested that he neglected to complete the marriage settlements, and when Madame Caron died, in ten months’ time, Caron found himself penniless. She had, it is said, a very small property, but it was apparently so small as to be invisible, for no one has ever discovered its whereabouts. But it is memorable as having suggested to Caron the name by which he now called himself, and has been ever since known—Beaumarchais.
In a very short time the young widower (he was only twenty-five) reappeared at Versailles, not as a watchmaker or butler, but as a musician.
All the social talents had Caron—tact, impudence, a witty tongue, a delightful voice, added to a real talent for the harp, which was the fashionable instrument of the moment. Mesdames killed a great deal of the too ample royal leisure with music; Madame Adelaide played every instrument down to the horn and the comb. This delightful youngparvenuis the very man to teach us the harp! He not only did that, but he organised concerts, of which he was himself the bright, particular star.
On one occasion the King was so impatient for him to begin to play, that he pushed towards him his own armchair; while on another, Mesdames declined the present of a fan on which the painter had portrayed their concerts—without the figure of Beaumarchais. Of course the courtiers were jealous. The beautiful insolence of his manners, the perfectly good-natured conceit (surely one of the most exasperating of the minor vices) naturally made him enemies. One scornful young noble handed this new favourite, this royal instructor, his watch to look at.
‘Sir,’ says Beaumarchais, ‘since I have given up my trade I have become very awkward in such matters.’
‘Do not refuse me, I beg.’
Beaumarchais takes the watch, pretends to examine it, and drops it. ‘Sir,’ says he, with abow to the owner, ‘I warned you of my clumsiness,’ and, turning on his heel, leaves the watch in fragments on the floor.
The new courtier was at least a match for the old ones. ‘I was born to be a courtier,’ says Figaro. ‘To accept, to take, and to ask; there is the secret in three words.’ Figaro’s father had the secret already. Soon he made friends with Paris-Duverney, financier and Court banker, ‘asked’ of him the art of making money, and ‘received’ so much of it that in 1761 he could buy himself a brevet of nobility. He would have bought also the post of Master of Woods and Forests, but that the other Masters objected so lustily to receiving such abourgeoisinto their order, that even the patronage of Mesdames, and his own wit displayed in an amusing pamphlet, could not gain thebourgeoishis point. So he bought the post of Lieutenant-General of the King’s Preserves instead, and in that capacity sat solemnly in a long robe once a week in judgment on the poachers of the neighbourhood of Paris.
In 1764, he made a journey into Spain, where one of his sisters, who had married a Spaniard, was living, and another had just been jilted with a peculiar insolence and brutality by a man called Clavijo. Beaumarchais brought Clavijo to book; the day of the wedding was fixed, when the shiftysuitor absconded a second time. Beaumarchais made the episode famous in his account of the affair, which appeared in his Fourth Memoir against Goezman in February 1774, and which naturally does not tend to the discredit of M. Pierre Augustin Caron.
Besides protecting his sister and exposing her betrayer, this energetic person was carrying out a secret mission from Duverney and recovering bad debts of old Caron’s. Then, too, he was enormously enjoying Spanish society, and writing love-letters to a pretty creole, Pauline, whom he had left in Paris and whom he may magnificently condescend to marry if her estates in St. Domingo really turn out to be worth consideration. He was further corresponding with Voltaire, and, richest and most fruitful of all his Spanish transactions, studying the Spanish stage.
He came home in 1765. After his return, he appeared, in 1767, as a playwright, making his début in one of those heavy and tearful dramas in the unfortunate style of Diderot’s ‘Natural Son.’ No one reads or acts ‘Eugénie’ now; but when the adaptable Caron had shortened and altered it, it mildly pleased the playgoing Parisians for a few evenings.
In 1768, Beaumarchais married another widow, Madame Lévêque, having abandoned Pauline, orhaving been abandoned by her on the score of his mercenariness. Madame Lévêque was rich and young, and when she suddenly died three years later there were not wanting envious enemies to accuse this aspiring Caron of having poisoned both his wives. The fact that their deaths left him the poorer might have exonerated him, if his own character did not; but, as Voltaire said—Voltaire, who was watching his rise in the world with a keen interest, and who rarely made a mistake in judging human nature—‘A quick, impetuous, passionate man like Beaumarchais gives a wife a blow, or even two wives two blows, but he does not poison them.’
It may be noted, moreover, that all the women who touched his life adored this Caron. He was so handsome and good-natured and successful! A little selfish certainly; but some women seem to love that quality in a man—it gives them so great a scope for denying themselves. And then he was always so brave and gay!
His success now deserted him for a little while. He offended the King by suggesting amotwith a meaning—Figaro, it seems, was getting apt in them already—which a duke gave forth at one of the little suppers of Madame Dubarry and which displeased his Majesty, who, to be sure, had reason to dread hidden meanings.
Then came the affair Goezman.
In 1770 Duverney died, and Beaumarchais immediately quarrelled with his heir, the Comte de la Blache, and plunged into a lawsuit over a sum of fifteen thousand francs. Beaumarchais won the first move in the game. But unluckily he had more than one iron in the fire just then. He fell out fiercely with the Duc de Chaulnes over a Mademoiselle Mesnard, with the result that the Duke was clapped into a fortress, and Beaumarchais into the prison of For-l’Évêque. La Blache seized his opportunity, brought his lawsuit before the Parliament of Paris, represented dumb and imprisoned Beaumarchais as the greatest scoundrel unhanged, won his cause, seized Beaumarchais’ furniture, and entirely ruined him.
Beaumarchais seldom lost his coolness and courage, and he did not lose them now. While in For-l’Évêque he had been let out on leave three or four times. He had taken these chances to try to win over to his side Goezman, who was Judge-Reporter in the lawsuit with la Blache, and a most unfavourable judge to Beaumarchais. By the simple and time-honoured expedient of handsome bribes to the wife, Beaumarchais attempted to gain the husband’s good will. Madame Goezman perfectly understands that, should Beaumarchais lose his cause, she is to return his giftsof a watch set in diamonds, and of money. The causeislost. She returns the watch and money, save only a certain fifteen louis, to which, for some absurdraisonnement de femme, she considers herself entitled, and with which she will by no means part. Then Councillor Goezman comes forward and accuses M. de Beaumarchais of seeking to corrupt his integrity.
This ridiculous situation Beaumarchais seized as a golden opportunity to restore his credit before the world, to dazzle it with his wit, to entice it with his audacity, and to make it own him the man of matchless cleverness he was. He appealed to public opinion, nominally to judge between himself and Goezman, in reality to judge between him, Goezman, la Blache, the Paris Parliament, and all his enemies and rivals whomsoever, in four famous Memoirs, which divided Paris into two hostile camps and fixed on him the delighted attention of Europe.
Except by name, and for a brilliant quotation here and there, few people know the Goezman Memoirs now. But in fire, wit, and irony, they are little, if at all, inferior to the comedies by which Beaumarchais lives. In both are the same gay surprises of situation, banter and mockery, parry and thrust—every page as light and elusive as thistledown borne on a summer breeze. Theircleverness gained him the admiration not only of a senile King, but of Voltaire as well. Old Ferney declared he had never been so much amused in his life. ‘What a man!’ he wrote to d’Alembert. ‘He has all the qualities;’ and again, ‘Don’t tellmehe has poisoned his wife, he is much too lively and amusing for that.’
Madame Dubarry had charades acted in her apartment, in which an interview between Beaumarchais and Madame Goezman was represented on the stage. The Memoirs were read aloud in the cafés. Of the Fourth, six thousand copies were sold in a single day. Horace Walpole delighted in them. Madame du Deffand gossiped of them. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre prophesied for Beaumarchais the reputation of Molière.
What did it avail then, on February 26, 1774, when the case had lasted some three years, to give judgment against him, sentence him to civic degradation, prohibit him from the occupation of any public function, and condemn the Memoirs to be burnt as scandalous, libellous, defamatory? He was the victor not the less. ‘Le monde a beau parler, il faut obéir,’ says Voltaire. The day after the sentence had been pronounced, the Prince de Conti and the Duc de Chartres fêted the criminal, and a delightful woman fell in love with him. Marie Antoinette named her latest coiffure after ajoke in the Memoirs. He was so wildly applauded when he appeared in public that Sartine, the Lieutenant of Police, advised him to appear no more. ‘It is not enough to be condemned,’ says Sartine, ‘one should be a little modest still.’ The Maupeou Parliament in attempting to destroy this wit had ruined itself. Its ban was worse than useless. Beaumarchais was the fashion.
The King, to be sure, had to enjoin silence on this ‘terrible advocate,’ but he promised him a revision of his suit; and then employed him, in March, 1774, as his secret agent in England to run to earth a person who had threatened to publish a scandalous pamphlet on Madame Dubarry. Beaumarchais succeeded in his mission. He always succeeded. But when he returned to France, Louis the Fifteenth was dying, so for all his pains his reward was, as he said, ‘swollen legs and an empty purse.’
Soon, however, news came of a libel against Marie Antoinette which was being prepared in London. Off starts Beaumarchais again, pursues the libeller (a shifty Jew) to Nüremberg, goes on to Vienna to procure from Maria Theresa an extradition treaty against him, is himself thrown into prison for a month, and then liberated with profusest apologies and the offer of a thousand ducats. All his adventures were delightfully romantic andpicturesque; and with his eye for scenic effect, he took care they should lose nothing in the telling.
A year later, in 1775, he came to England on another and far more important secret mission connected with the rebellion of the American colonies. It was the one enterprise of his life, it is said, into which he put more heart than head. He attended parliamentary debates, and was constantly at the house of Wilkes. ‘All sensible people in England,’ he wrote to Louis the Sixteenth in September 1775, ‘are convinced that the English colonies are lost.’ He advised that, while France should not openly embroil herself with England, she should send secret aid to the insurgents. For this purpose, financed by his country, he equipped for war three ships—his ‘navy’ he called it—and when he returned to Paris he traded in the American interest under the name of Roderigue, Hortalez & Co.
England was naturally angry when she found out how she had been tricked, and America, so far as money acknowledgments were concerned, was not a little ungrateful. But the clever instrument, Beaumarchais, came out of the affair with his usual flourish and distinction, and would have deserved a paragraph in history, even had he not earned a page in literature.
On February 23, 1775, there was produced atthe old Comédie Française in the Rue des Fossés, Saint-Germain des Prés, opposite the famous Café Procope, a play called ‘The Barber of Seville.’
Accepted by the Comédie Française in 1772, its first performance, fixed for Shrove Tuesday 1773, had been stopped by the authorities because just at that moment its author was unluckily serving a term of imprisonment for fighting the Duc de Chaulnes. Before the next date fixed for its début, he had been condemned by the Maupeou Parliament for the affair with la Blache. The third attempt was no luckier. The irrepressible creature had just published the Fourth Goezman Memoir!
And now, when the performance really did come off, it was a failure. La Harpe declared that its inordinate length bored people, its bad jokes irritated them, and its false morality shocked them. Theparterrewas loudly and vulgarly disgusted, and the boxes yawned behind their fans. By Beaumarchais? He was but mediocre before, we remember, in ‘Eugénie.’ Watchmaker, courtier, advocate, secret agent, this—but clearly no playwright!
In twenty-four hours Caron had laid violent hands on his ‘Barber,’ shortened him, enlivened him, cut out his distasteful jokes and his dubious moralities, and ‘under the pressure of a discontented and disappointed public’ turned him intoa masterpiece. At its second performance the play was applauded to the skies. It ran through the whole winter season. It delighted its author to print it with its title-page running: ‘The Barber of Seville, Comedy in Four Acts, represented and failed at the Comédie Française.’ It drew on him one of his dear lawsuits, and enabled him to place the rights of dramatists over their works on a new and firm basis, and to found the first Society of Dramatic Authors. Far above all, it led the way to ‘Figaro.’
The subject of ‘The Barber of Seville’ is the time-honoured one of the amorous old guardian who falls in love with his ward; only Beaumarchais’ guardian is a wit, not a fool. It is the defect, indeed, of both his great plays that all the characters are wits. He fell into Sheridan’s fault, and made hispersonæthe mouthpieces of his own cleverness. He wholly lacked the far higher and finer genius, the exquisite fidelity to life and character, which made Shakespeare give to each of his creatures the special kind of cleverness, and no other, proper to its nature.
Not the less, Beaumarchais writes with a lightness and effervescence which are without counterpart in dramatic literature. ‘The Barber of Seville’ was taken, it is said, from an opera of Sedaine’s, and was itself originally designed to be a comicopera. Nothing but a quarrel with the composer of the score prevented it from first appearing in that form in which it is to-day most familiar to the world.
Yet it hardly needs an accompaniment of lively music. The airs and the singing are there already—in the gaybizarrerieof situation, the laughing swing of repartee, and the brilliant recitative of the longer speeches. The characters, called by Spanish names and dressed in Spanish clothes, are thoroughly and essentially French. Its exquisite delicacy of touch and its rippling mocking gaiety declare it, in fact, not only the work of a Frenchman, but one of the most Gallic pieces that have ever held the stage. It inaugurated a new order of comedy, and introduced into it a new character: the Barber, who was also wit, hero, and moralist—the character of Figaro.
Beaumarchais was not at all the man to sit down and tranquilly enjoy his first dramatic triumph. He must not only follow it up by writing another, but he must with enormous difficulty, at the risk of much money, and three years’ hard work, become the editor of the first complete edition of Voltaire’s works ever given to the public.
Then, too, he must prepare the reorganisation of theferme généralewith the Minister,Vergennes. Actresses consulted him when they were out of an engagement, and dramatic authors when their liberties were endangered. The author of the Goezman Memoirs can surely help a poor simpleton engulfed in a lawsuit, and the friend of Duverney, the rich man who began the world in a tradesman’s shop, may well assist a ruined speculator! Inventors, impatient to air their discoveries, carried them to him who had brought his first legal action over a discovery of his own. Girls deceived by their lovers begged the assistance of the man who had held up Clavijo to infamy.
One of the most fortunate characteristics Beaumarchais possessed was his power of suddenly changing his occupation, and one of his most extraordinary characteristics was his love of doing so. ‘Shutting the drawer of an affair,’ he himself called this faculty. He shut the drawer with a bang, and perfectly good-natured, self-conceited, and successful, turned from a secret agency in London to interfere with the marriage of the Prince of Nassau, and from the marriage to assist the Lieutenant of the Police in censuring the works of his brother-playwrights, and from that censorship to put into the mouth of Figaro such sentiments as, ‘Printed follies are without importance except in those places wheretheir circulation is forbidden ... without the liberty to blame no praise can be flattering.’
By 1778, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was finished; and in 1781 it was received by the Comédie Française. But it contained that which no censor—not even dull Louis—could pass. In 1782, he read it, and flung it from him. ‘This is detestable, this shall never be played!’
But that prohibition was not enough for Beaumarchais. Forbidden fruit is ever the most tantalising and delicious. Daintily tied with pink ribbons he sent a copy of the play to thissalon; and another to that. He announced a reading of it—and, coquettishly and without offering any reason, abandoned the reading at the last moment. In a little while he had raised all Paris on the tip-toe of excitement. Not to have scanned at least a scene or two of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was to confess oneself out of the fashion. Then the author read the whole of it to the Grand Duke of Russia, and recited selections of it to the Comtesse de Lamballe and to Marshal Richelieu, ‘before bishops and archbishops.’
After all, Louis was very weak, and public opinion very strong. The First Gentleman of the Chamber permitted the thing to be rehearsed, more or less publicly, in the theatre of the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs. All the world and his wifecrowded thither. The Comte d’Artois was actually on his way when, with an awakening of his feeble obstinacy, the King sent a mandate forbidding the performance. Even Madame de Campan, kindly old sycophant of the Court, confessed that there were angry whispers of ‘tyranny’ and ‘oppression,’ and murmurs of ‘an attack on liberty.’ Beaumarchais, stung to the quick, swore that it should be played, ay, even if it was in the choir of Notre-Dame! The pressure on Louis was great; the Court was in want of a new sensation, and to be made to laugh at its own follies was a very new one indeed.
In three months, the Comte de Vaudreuil, the leader of Marie Antoinette’ssociété intimeof the Little Trianon, obtained the royal permission to have it acted in his house at Gennevilliers, by the company from the Comédie, before the Comte d’Artois and the Queen’s bosom friend, the Duchesse de Polignac. The Queen herself intended to have been present, but was prevented by an indisposition. When the permission was accorded, Beaumarchais was in England. He hurried home, saw to the performance himself, and made his own conditions.
On September 26, 1783, three hundred persons, the very flower of Court society, crowded into Vaudreuil’s theatre, and would have died ofsuffocation if the resourceful Beaumarchais had not broken the panes of the windows with his cane. It was said he had made a hit in two senses. The aristocratic audience received his play with rapturous applause. He adroitly followed up his success by presenting his piece to a tribunal of censors who, for some unknown reason, ‘felt sure it would be a failure,’ and expressed themselves satisfied with it after they had made a few insignificant omissions. Finally, a reluctant permission was wrung from the King, and on April 27, 1784, seven months after the performance at Gennevilliers, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was first publicly performed at the new Comédie Française, built on the site of the Hôtel de Condé, and now known as the Odéon.
The play was to begin at half-past five in the afternoon, but from early in the morning the doors were besieged by crowds, in whichcordons bleuselbowed Savoyards, and the classes and the masses began their long struggle. In the press three persons were suffocated—‘one more than for Scudéry,’ said caustic La Harpe. Great ladies sat all day in the dressing rooms of the actresses to be sure of securing seats, and duchesses were delighted to obtain a footstool in the gallery, a part of the house to which, as a rule, ladies never went. The theatre was lit by a new method.The famous Dazincourt played Figaro; and Molé, Almaviva. The author himself was in a private box between two abbés who had promised to administer ‘very spiritual succour’ in case of death. Then the curtain rose.
‘The “Marriage of Figaro,” said Napoleon, ‘was the Revolution already in action.’
As in the ‘Barber of Seville,’ the atmosphere and the clothes are Spanish, the spirit and essence wholly French. The story of Figaro, the servant who outwits his lord and wins Suzanne, whom his master has tried to steal from him, forms a plot simple enough. Count Almaviva, the master, is certainly one of the best representations of the great noble of the old régime ever put on the stage. Continually worsted in argument by his valet, and perpetually in the most ridiculous situations, he never loses the dignity of good breeding—as Beaumarchais himself puts it, ‘the corruption of his heart takes nothing from thebon tonof his manners.’ Figaro is, of course, democracy with its wits awake at last, and stung to courage and action by centuries of wrongs. The Countess (the Rosina of the ‘Barber’) and Suzanne are the most charming and seductive reproductions of the eighteenth-century woman—‘spirituelles et rieuses,’ coquettish, graceful and gay. The chief fault of the play is the episode of Marceline, in which the playgoer wearilyrecognises two, too familiar friends—the long-lost mother and the mislaid baby with the usual convenient birth-mark on the right arm.
The morals of the piece are throughout the morals of the time—indelicacy, delicately expressed. Figaro hardly ever says anythinginconvenant, but intrigue is in the very air he breathes. ‘The ripening fruit,’ writes Saint-Amand, ‘hanging on the tree, never falls but seems always on the point of falling.’ Virtue, of a kind, does triumph in the long run, but Beaumarchais knew his audience so well that up to the last moment he kept them fearing, or hoping, that it would not. If its unpleasant situations, and the character of the precocious page Cherubino (a particularly distasteful one to English ideas), gave spice to the wit in its own day, the modern reader can enjoy the sparkling and rippling stream of mocking gaiety without stirring up the mud it hides. One situation leads to another with the most complete naturalness, and yet that other is always perfectly unexpected. Moralisings and soliloquies, which spell ruin in other plays, are in this one rich in brilliancy and aptness. Those who as yet know ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ only by name, can purchase for a few pence one of the most exhilarating draughts of intellectual champagne ever given to the world.
But it is not only as literature that the play lives. Itwasthe Revolution already in action. There are hardly six consecutive lines which do not contain some indictment against the old order; there is not an aphorism which does not push, with a laugh, some abuse down the abyss. ‘There is one thing more amazing than my play,’ said Beaumarchais, ‘and that is its success.’ He was right. One can but marvel still that the old order, so clearly hearing its sentence of death, took that sentence only as a stupendous joke, ‘laughed its last laugh’ over ‘Figaro,’ and applauded the warrant for its own execution till its hands tingled again.
The fine ladies heard their vapours defined as ‘the malady that prevails only in boudoirs;’ and my lord, surrounded by sycophants, saw himself for a mocking second as other men see him, when Figaro says to Bazile: ‘Are you a Prince to be flattered? Hear the truth, wretch, since you have not the money to pay a liar.’
With what a roar of laughter that tribunal of censors who had licensed the play heard the words: ‘Provided I do not mention in my writings, authority, religion, politics, morality, officials ... or anyone who has a claim to anything, I can print everything freely under the inspection of two or three censors;’ and with what amusedself-complacency it listened to the axiom: ‘Only little minds fear little writings.’
The hereditary noble listened to this: ‘Nobility, money, rank, place, all that makes people so proud! What have you done for so much good fortune? You have given yourself the trouble to be born;’ and thebourgeoisat his side, to whom merit had opened no path to glory, heard with a strange thrill Figaro continue, ‘While for me, lost in a crowd of nobodies, I have had need of more knowledge and calculation simply to exist, than has been employed to govern all the Spains for a hundred years.’
Did the Minister who had filled the snug posts in the Government with his own relations and friends see nothing but a joke in: ‘They thought of me for a situation, but unluckily I was fit for it; they wanted an accountant; a dancer obtained the place’? ‘Intelligence a help to advancement? Your lordship is laughing at mine. Be commonplace and cringing, and you can get anywhere.’ ‘To succeed in life,le savoir-faire vaut mieux que le savoir.’
The ubiquitous Englishman of the audience heard Figaro announce ‘Goddam’ to be ‘the basis of the English language.’ The political world listened to a scathing definition of diplomacy: ‘To pretend to be ignorant of what everyone elseknows, and to know what everyone else does not know ... to seem deep when one is only empty and hollow ... to set spies and pension traitors ... to break seals and intercept letters ... there’s diplomacy, or I’m a dead man.’