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Updated: June 19, 2025
Such accounts sadly puzzled that body; and it may be imagined to what a further hopeless degree of bewilderment this gathering of American lawyers and tradesmen, planters and farmers, must have been reduced by the extraordinary letters of the wild and fanciful Beaumarchais. The natural consequence was that the easier course was pursued, and no merchandise was sent to Hortalez.
I know the work of Beaumarchais, Eglantine, Mercier, Chenier, and many others of our contemporaries. Then I have read, of course, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, besides many other lesser French writers. Of foreign authors, I am intimate with the works of Gozzi, Goldoni, Guarini, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Secchi, Tasso, Ariosto, and Fedini.
As only packets of a certain weight might be sent in this way, a German translation of Beaumarchais' Figaro, of which Uhlig possessed an ancient copy, enjoyed the singular destiny of acting as ballast for our letters to and fro. Every time, therefore, that our epistles had swelled, to the requisite length, we announced them with the words: 'Figaro brings tidings to-day.
By dint of meditating upon existence, of laying stress upon its bitter irony, of pouring floods of sarcasm and raillery upon our infirmities, the very men who make us laugh so heartily become profoundly sad. These Democrituses are Heraclituses as well. Beaumarchais was surly, Molière gloomy, Shakespeare melancholy. The fact is, then, that the grotesque is one of the supreme beauties of the drama.
The actor, who had been witnessing at Beaumarchais some dark-browed melodrama drenched with gore even to the illustrated headlines of its poster, was startled by that knock at such an advanced hour. "Who is there?" he asked in some alarm. "It is I, Sidonie. Open the door quickly."
This general clamor, this tempest of the public opinion, excited even the king's curiosity; and as everybody attended the readings of Beaumarchais' drama, the crowned heads had also to bow to the fashion. Madame de Campan had to read before the king and the queen this renowned "Wedding of Figaro," so that the king might give his decision.
In laughing at the letter of Beaumarchais, the ridicule was directed against the queen, who had been refused in so shameful a manner. But Marie Antoinette did not wish to be laughed at. She still hoped to overcome her enemies, and to win the public sentiment.
And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the marvelous vicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the wasted wit, the Beaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power, the adventures like a page of fairy tale, the brains whose strength could have guided a scepter, which he had found and known, hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr; buried beneath the canvas shirt of a Roumi; lost forever in the wild, lawless escapades of rebellious insubordinates, who closed their days in the stifling darkness of the dungeons of Beylick, or in some obscure skirmish, some midnight vedette, where an Arab flissa severed the cord of the warped life, and the death was unhonored by even a line in the Gazettes du Jour.
Catherine was magnified. She stood before me like an evil genius; she sought, it seemed to me, to enter my consciousness and abide there." "He dreamed all that," whispered Beaumarchais; "he certainly never invented it." "'My reason is bewildered, I said to the queen.
"But," continued the lawyer, "I am not sure that I ought to relate what happened, for though I am inclined to believe it was all a dream, it concerns grave matters. "Of religion?" asked Beaumarchais. "If there is any impropriety," remarked Calonne, "these ladies will excuse it." "It relates to the government," replied the lawyer.
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