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Where round wreck-watching rocks they When some faint chord, long hushed and

From The Quarterly Review. BEAUMARCHAIS AND HIS TIMES.*

moted amongst all a rivalry of good manners and language, which has now completely disappeared." This theory is confirmed by one of Beaumarchais' letters to his father from Madrid in 1765:

"LE Mariage de Figaro," Beaumarchais' masterpiece, formed an epoch in the dramatic, social, and political annals of France. Napoleon called it the Revolution already in action. The author was the type, the living, breathing, varying, multiform type, of his times. There is no eighteenth century without him, said Sainte-Beuve, any more than without Voltaire, Mirabeau, or Diderot. His adventurous, tumultuous career, marked by the strangest alternations of fortune, might I have been five days and four nights withbe simultaneously presented as an excit-out eating or sleeping, and without ceasing to ing romance and studied as the most cry out. In the intervals when I suffered less, instructive introduction to his play. We I read Grandison, and in how many things have cannot say that M. de Loménie has made I not found a just and noble affinity between the best of his subject. His views are my son and Grandison! Father of thy sisters, just, his criticisms sound, and he has dis- friend and benefactor of thy father, if Engplayed a rare amount of discriminating land, I said, has her Grandison, France has research in the collection of his materials, the English Grandison is only a fiction of an which are rich and valuable; but they agreeable writer, whilst the French Beaumarhave been arranged and worked up with chais really exists for the consolation of my little regard to artistic effect: the interest decline. of the narrative is marred by minuteness of detail, as well as by want of due proportion in the parts; and altogether we incline to think that our best mode of proceeding will be to give an outline or summary of the strictly biographical por

"The bourgeoises of Madrid are the most foolish creatures in the universe, very different from what is seen amongst us, where all conditions have acquired the bon air et le bel esprit." There is also a letter from the father to the son, betokening a degree of cultivation not usual in his class :

tions of his work.

her Beaumarchais - with this difference, that

There was little affinity with Grandison in boyhood or in youth. Bred up an only son with five sisters, he was the spoilt child of the establishment; and the irrepressible joyousness and levity of his disposition were constantly leading Beaumarchais, who is even less known him into every sort of folly. In the to the general public by his veritable Preface to "Cromwell," to prove the patronymic than Voltaire, began life as necessity of allying the comic with the Pierre-Augustin Caron. He was born tragic element, Victor Hugo insists that January 24th, 1742, the son of a watch- this contrast is found in the authors "These Democrituses are maker in the Quartier St. Denis, which, themselves : — although deemed the Boeotia of Paris, also Heraclituses; Beaumarchais was can lay claim to Béranger, the son of a morose: Molière, sombre: Shakespeare, tailor, and Scribe, the son of a silk-mer- melancholy." In nine cases out of ten, a chant. The family of Caron occupied so man of genius naturally, if not necessahumble a position, that M. de Loménie rily susceptible and impressible, will be pauses to account for their comparative found alternating between gaiety and derefinement of tone and elevation of spondency. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso thought by the existence of a Court aris- are sister poems. We do not believe tocracy, "which mixing more and more with the classes of the bourgeoisie, without being confounded with them, pro

that Molière was habitually sombre, or Shakespeare constitutionally sad ; and all available evidence, external and internal, negatives the supposition that Beaumarchais was morose. The contrary was so notoriously the fact, that when (having been married only twice) he was accused of poisoning three wives, Voltaire, who

disliked him, said, "This Beaumarchais have been your ruin. However, out of con

is not a poisoner: he is too droll;" and, again, "I persist in my belief that so gay a man cannot be of the Locusta family." There were innumerable occasions when, without hoping against hope, without congeniality combined with hardihood, without glowing, electrical sympathy compelling energy, he would have been lost; when, like Charles Surface, he kept his spirits because he could not afford to part with them.

sideration for your weakness, I allow you the violin and the flute, but on the express condi

tion that you never play on either till after supper on working days, and never in the daytime; and that you do not disturb the repose of our neighbours nor my own.

The conditions were signed by the culprit with the deepest sense of humiliation than two years he had obtained that and apparently in good faith; for, in less celebrity in his profession which was the utmost extent of the father's wishes or

All we are told of his education is, that he was sent to the College (Anglicè expectations in his behalf. In December, | 1753, he addressed a letter (his first apschool) of Alfort; that, though an apt scholar, he gave slight indication of pearance in print) to the editor of the "Mercure," in which he laid claim to capacity, and that he was apprenticed to the invention of a new escapement for his father, with the view of succeeding to the business, at thirteen. This is the watches, stolen from him by one Sieur precise age of Cherubin, the precocious Lepante, and concluded by proposing to refer the question to the Academy. The page whose heart beats at the rustling of. a petticoat; and it is a plausible specula- attract the attention of the Comte de affair having made noise enough to tion of the biographers, that the page was Saint-Florentin, a high official, two Comcopied from the life. Some verses commissioners were named for the purpose posed by Beaumarchais at the period have been preserved, fully justifying the appellation of polisson, which is indiscriminately applied by himself to both copy and original. With an excessive fondness for music, which made him neg lect his trade, he is said to have united other less innocent tastes, and his father strove in vain to subdue his turn for dissipation and extravagance. In one of

the numerous diatribes levelled at him in the height of his celebrity, he is described as turned out of house and home at eighteen, and forming one of a strolling party of jugglers. That he was banished from the paternal roof is true, but this was no more than a temporary and provisional expedient for the reformation of his morals and his ways. He was received by friends with the connivance of the family, and when it was thought that a sufficiently impressive lesson had been conveyed he was taken back, upon conditions which show that the profligate sons of those days could not resist paternal rule with impunity. One of them ran thus:

4. You will give up your unlucky music altogether, and (above all) the company of young people. I will tolerate neither. Both

by the Academy; and their decision was not merely that the invention belonged to Beaumarchais, but that, for watches, it was at the same time the most perfect yet tion. In the course of the year following, hit upon and the most difficult of execuJune 16, 1755, he alludes to this and other mechanical improvements in terms showing that he had obtained some illustrious customers by his ingenuity:

By these means I make watches as flat as they are called for, flatter than have hitherto their goodness. The first of these simplified been made, without in any respect diminishing watches is in the hands of the King. His Majesty has had it for a year, and is quite satisfied with it. I have also had the honour, within these few days, of presenting a watch to Madame de Pompadour of this new construction, the smallest ever made; it is only four lines and a half in diameter, and twothirds of a line in thickness between the plates.

This letter is signed Caron fils, Hor loger du Roi. In a preceding letter, July, 1754, he says that the King has ordered a facsimile of the watch made for Madame de Pompadour, and that all the lords were following the example, each eager to be served first. Till his twenty-fourth year, he was content with his prosperous busi

"The King

pride, his troops were paid, his fortified places supplied, his fleets equipped." Ingenuity was racked to invent offices or sinecures carrying rank or title; and the existing ones were multiplied at will. There were sixteen contrôleurs clercs when Beaumarchais joined the band,

ness as a watchmaker, and it was an inci- | Letters" of Montesquieu : dent connected with it that led to his of France has no mines of gold, like the throwing it up and turning courtier, in King of Spain, his neighbour; but he the hope of contending for the prizes of has more wealth, for he draws it from the love and ambition with his customers. vanity of his subjects, more inexhaustiHe had one main requisite for success ble than mines. He has been seen unon an arena where so much depended on dertaking or sustaining great wars, havthe favour of the fair. "No sooner diding no other funds than titles of honour Beaumarchais appear at Versailles, than for sale; and, by a prodigy of human the women were struck by his lofty stature, his well-proportioned figure, the regularity of his features, his clear and animated complexion, his confident look; by that commanding air which seemed to raise him above all around, and, above all, by that involuntary ardour which glowed in him at the sight of them." A with whom he did not remain long. His shade of coxcombry did no harm and predecessor added to the obligation that there was something more than a already conferred by dying soon aftershade, may be inferred from a sentence wards, and before the expiration of the in one of his later pamphlets: Si j'étais prescribed year of mourning the widow un fat, s'ensuit-il que j'étais un ogre? bestowed her hand on the young Caron, It was not, however, to any of the great who, three months after the marriage, at ladies that he was indebted for the first the beginning of 1757, assumed the name of step in his advancement. The wife of de Beaumarchais in right of a fief belongone of the minor functionaries - contrô- ing to his wife. What was the nature of leur clerc d'office de la maison du roi, the fief, whether it had any local existwhich corresponds pretty nearly with ence or was a fief of pure phantasy, his deputy clerk of the royal kitchen-hav-biographers are confessedly unable to ing seen him at Versailles, called at his declare; and he must have winced at the shop in Paris under the pretence of sarcasm of his fellest adversary, Goëzbringing a watch to repair. She was a man: "The Sieur Caron borrowed from handsome woman of about thirty, with one of his wives the name of Beaumaran old and infirm husband. They came chais, which he lent to one of his sisters." to an understanding at a glance. The young artist requested permission to be personally the bearer of the watch when repaired. The favourable impression was rapidly improved; and the husband after complacently sanctioning their intimacy for some months, was induced to make over his office, in consideration of transaction in 1773, he writes: "I must an annuity, to Beaumarchais, who was formally installed in it by royal brevet of November 9, 1755.

His clerkship did not confer nobility, a privilege restricted to the more highlypriced offices; and it was not until 1761, that he became regularly entitled to the coveted prefix de by the purchase for 85,000 francs of the nominal charge of secrétaire du roi. Ironically referring to this

take time to consider whether I ought not to be offended at seeing you thus rummaging in the archives of my family, and Behold him now released from the recalling my ancient origin which was degrading trammels of a mechanical trade, almost forgotten. Are you aware that I with his foot on the rong a very low can lay claim already to twenty (twelve) one, we must allow of the ladder of years of nobility: that this nobility is Court preferment. The succeeding rongs honestly mine, in good parchment, sealed were not attained or attainable by merit; with the great seal of yellow wax: that it they were a mere matter of money like is not, like that of many, uncertain and the first. The explanation may be col-oral; and that no one could contest it lected from a passage in the "Persian with me, for I have the receipt (j'en ai la