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Updated: July 19, 2025
"'Who, continued His Highness, 'caused that infernal comedy, 'Le Mariage de Figaro', to be brought out, but the party of the Duchesse de Polignac? There was something personal in this exasperation. Beaumarchais had satirized the Prince.
"That which distinguishes man from the beast," said Beaumarchais, "is drinking without being thirsty, and making love at all seasons," and he spoke perhaps truer than he knew, for the fact that man is not bound by seasons and is not in entire subjection to his environment is the cardinal distinction between him and the brutes.
And finally, "a quantity of practice truly prodigious" is given to the ancien repertoire, the classic models of French dramatic literature, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Beaumarchais, etc.
At present all that transaction is in darkness; and we know not whether the whole, or a part, or no part, of the supplies he furnished were at the expense of government, the reports we have had being so inconsistent and contradictory; nor, if we are in debt for them, or any part of them, whether it is the king or M. de Beaumarchais who is our creditor."
Impudent, alert, sly, graceful, he incarnated the very ideal of Scaramouche, and he helped out his own native wit by many a remembered line from Beaumarchais, thereby persuading the better informed among the audience that here indeed was something of the real Figaro, and bringing them, as it were, into touch with the great world of the capital.
He could not be the Beaumarchais, the Aretino, the Freron of his epoch; he was not made of such stuff; he thought of nothing but his one desire, the patent of nobility; for he saw clearly that for him such a restoration meant a wealthy marriage, and, the title once secured, chance and his good looks would do the rest.
Under all the circumstances this was certainly asking too much; and in due time the envoys were courteously told so, but were also offered a strictly secret loan of $400,000, to be repaid after the war, without interest. It appears that Franklin had substantially no concern in the quasi commercial transactions pending at the time of his arrival between Deane and Beaumarchais.
In the four first acts Goethe adhered pretty closely to the story of Beaumarchais, but he invented the catastrophe; and when we observe that it strongly reminds the reader of Ophelia's burial, and the meeting of Hamlet and Laertes at her grave, we have said enough to convey an idea how strong a contrast it forms to the tone and colouring of the rest.
There are men and women in books, who seem more really alive to us than men and women who have lived and died Richardson's Clarissa, Chenier's Camille, the Delia of Tibullus, Ariosto's Angelica, Dante's Francesca, Moliere's Alceste, Beaumarchais' Figaro, Scott's Rebecca the Jewess, the Don Quixote of Cervantes, do we not owe these deathless creations to immortal throes?"
He began by giving him a share in one of his speculations to the amount of sixty thousand francs, on which he paid him interest at the rate of ten per cent.; after this, he gave him an interest in various other affairs. 'He initiated me, says Beaumarchais, 'into the secrets of finance, of which, as every one knows, he was a consummate master." Such was government in the good old times!
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