Chapter VII: Part 7

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. Their cleverness 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 tell _me_ he 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 a joke 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 and picturesque; 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 at the 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. The _parterre_ was 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 into a 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 his _personæ_ the 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 comic opera. 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 gay _bizarrerie_ of 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 the _ferme générale_ with 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 where their 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 this _salon_; 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 wife crowded 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’s _société intime_ of 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 of suffocation 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 which _cordons bleus_ elbowed 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 the _bon ton_ of 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 wearily recognises 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 anything _inconvenant_, 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. It _was_ the 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 amused self-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 the _bourgeois_ at 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 else knows, 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.’

The audience trooped out into the night--the performance lasted from half-past five till ten--with enthusiastic admiration on its lips and still ringing in its ears the seventh couplet of the vaudeville:

Par le sort de la naissance,
L’un est roi, l’autre est berger;
Le hasard fit leur distance;
L’esprit seul peut tout changer.

The writer, certainly, had as little idea as his audience that his was to be the wit to change everything. From first to last, Beaumarchais was the man we have always with us, who means to advance in the world and let that world take care of itself; whose argument is that posterity having done nothing for him, he need do nothing for posterity; the true time-server, just audacious enough to say what less courageous people only dare to think, and earning thereby their gratitude and applause. Caron had reaped place and fortune from the old order, and was not at all minded to overthrow it. Tyranny for tyranny, he preferred the despotism of the King to the despotism of the mob. If he revenged himself in his play for the slights and humiliations from which even his cleverness had not been able to save him--that was absolutely all. Overturn Throne and Church! Such a _bouleversement_ would very likely overturn Caron de Beaumarchais too, and was not to be thought of.

Yet it was this man who gave light popular expression to the principles to which Voltaire and his friends devoted their lives, their ardour, and their genius. It was surely a cruelty of fate that the Master could not live to see ‘Figaro.’ Its author might miss its significance, but Voltaire--never.

Beaumarchais, indeed, had merely caught the accent of his age, as a child catches the accent of its nurse, and ‘wrote revolutionary literature, as M. Jourdain spoke prose, without knowing it.’ In ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ he said what all men were feeling, but not what he felt. He wished to be a successful playwright, and he was one; but he did not mean to be one of the greatest and most influential of Revolutionists--and he was that too.

He followed up the success of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ by generously founding a fashionable charity, to be known later as the Benevolent Maternal Institution, and the King followed up the success he had always disliked by punishing an imprudent letter Caron had written in a newspaper, and which had offended Monsieur, by writing on a playing card, as he sat at his game, an order for Beaumarchais’ imprisonment.

By one of those charming little surprises for which the old _régime_ was so celebrated, Beaumarchais, of fifty-three, found himself locked up in St. Lazare, then a house of correction for juvenile offenders. At first Paris went into roars of laughter, and then she became very angry indeed. In a few days she obtained the release of her playwright; and Louis, with the inconceivable inconsistency that distinguished his career, not only gave him enormous monetary compensation, but permitted as a further reparation, ‘The Barber of Seville’ to be played at the Little Trianon.

That representation marked the crowning point of Beaumarchais’ success. Dazincourt trained the company of royal and noble amateurs. Marie Antoinette was rehearsing the part of Rosina with Madame de Campan when she first heard of the opening of a grimmer drama, the scandal of the Diamond Necklace. On August 15, 1785, Cardinal de Rohan was arrested. On the 19th, ‘The Barber of Seville’ was played in the theatre of the Little Trianon, with lucky Beaumarchais in the audience, the Queen as Rosina, the Comte de Vaudreuil as Almaviva, the Duc de Guiche as Bartholo, and the Comte d’Artois as Figaro.

The Queen was infinitely vivacious in her part. Did Bazile’s terrible definition of Calumny disconcert her?

‘At first a mere breath, skimming the ground like a swallow, but sowing poison as it flies ... it takes root, creeps up, makes its way, goes ... from mouth to mouth: then, all of a sudden, one knows not how, Calumny is standing upright, rearing its head, hissing, swelling, growing visibly. It spreads its wings, takes flight, eddies round ... bursts, thunders, crashes, and becomes, thanks to heaven, a general outcry, a public crescendo, a universal chorus of hatred and proscription. What devil could resist it?’

If Queen or audience found in the words too awful an application and prophecy, history does not relate.

How strange, with the knowledge of after events, sound in the mouth of d’Artois the words: ‘I am happy to be forgotten, being sure that a great man does enough good when he does no harm. As to the virtues one requires in a servant, does your Excellency know many masters who are worthy of being valets?’ and, most strange of all, ‘I hasten to laugh at everything, lest I should have to weep at everything.’

The performance of the ‘Barber’ at Trianon was the last flicker of the dying fire of royal pleasure. Beaumarchais’ own light began to fail. He was shortly involved in a famous dispute with Mirabeau about the Paris Water Company, in which that great genius brought out his mighty guns of irony and invective and in one fierce blast blew, as it were, Beaumarchais’ nimble-witted head from his shoulders. ‘Figaro’ has dubbed my diatribes ‘Mirabelles,’ has he? Well, he shall pun at my expense no more. All Paris stood watching. Dazzling, burning, and terrible, Mirabeau’s sun was rising above the horizon, and Beaumarchais’ star was fading in the stormy sky. Then he had another lawsuit, in which he entered the lists as the champion of wronged beauty. His opponent was Bergasse, the young lawyer, who ‘had his reputation to make’ at some one’s expense, and made it at Beaumarchais’.

In 1786, Caron married Mademoiselle Willermaula, who had long been his mistress, and by whom he had a daughter, Eugénie. For them, he built a splendid house looking on to the Bastille, near the Porte Saint-Antoine, which became one of the sights of Paris.

In 1787, he produced a very feeble opera, ‘Tarare,’ which had a small temporary success.

On July 14, 1789, the Bastille fell. Not only the fine house was in danger, but its fine owner as well. He had written ‘Figaro’? Yes. But he had been the courtier and the secret agent of kings. His pluck and energy did not in the least desert him. In the midst of the uproar he was writing a new play, ‘The Guilty Mother.’

La Harpe (no wonder his friends called him La Harpie) declared it was ‘downright silly;’ and perhaps this thorough-going verdict is but little too severe. ‘The Guilty Mother’ forms a sort of third volume to the ‘Barber’ and ‘Figaro,’ and falls as flat as most sequels. The same characters appear, grown old. The Guilty Mother is the Rosina of the ‘Barber’ and the Countess Almaviva of ‘Figaro;’ while Cherubino has grown up into the very objectionable young man such a boy _would_ grow into. Beaumarchais had built a theatre--the Théâtre du Marais--near his house, in which he proposed his new piece should appear.

On June 6, 1792, the day before it was to be produced, its author was denounced before the National Assembly by Chabot. He had indeed, with a view to making at once a _coup_ for his country and for himself, and though he was now sixty years old and getting deaf, undertaken to bring into France sixty thousand guns--‘to massacre patriots,’ shouted unreasonable patriotism. On August 10 his house was searched; on August 23 he was taken to the Abbaye prison, and on August 30 he was freed by Manuel (his brother _littérateur_, as well as Procurator of the Commune), just two days before the September massacres. After all, his star had not yet declined.

After hiding in barns and roaming ‘over harrowed fields, panting for his life,’ he escaped to England, where very luckily for himself a London merchant, to whom he was in debt, prevented his returning to Paris and the guillotine by shutting him up in the King’s Bench Prison. In March, 1793, he did return, ‘to offer my head to the sword of justice, if I cannot prove I am a good citizen.’ That he did not thus pay for his imprudence proves that there was as much in that head as had ever come out of it.

Three months later, Beaumarchais was sent as the emissary of the Revolutionary Government to fetch those sixty thousand guns which had been left in Holland. He had many highly dramatic escapes and adventures; and, being wholly modern in his belief in self-advertisement, he once more made the most of them. In his absence the Government which had sent him, by one of those little mistakes which make its history so vivacious, declared him an _émigré_!

During the Terror he was at Hamburg, in direst poverty and in mortal anxiety as to the fate of his wife, his daughter, and his sister Julie. They escaped with their lives; but when Beaumarchais was at last taken off the list of _émigrés_ and returned to Paris in 1796, he found house and fortune alike in ruins, his door besieged by creditors, and his famous garden a wilderness.

He was sixty-four years old and had already done more in his life than a hundred ordinary men compress into a hundred ordinary careers. And now he must start afresh!

He saw his daughter married; revived his old social tastes, produced ‘The Guilty Mother,’ and took the keenest interest, both in prose and verse, in that young Lieutenant of Artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte. He also published two very anti-Christian letters in praise of Voltaire. The watchmaker’s son, who had charmed Mesdames at Versailles, was to the end witty, gay, bold, and practical.

On the morning of May 18, 1799, his friends found him dead of apoplexy. To die in his bed at last was surely not the least of his clevernesses.

Caron de Beaumarchais was not a very unusual type of character or even of intellect; but in the use he made of his brains, of his qualities and of his circumstances, he was a man in a million. His marvellous enterprise and industry enabled him to build more than one successful career on very ordinary foundations. His luck, that astonishing luck which followed him from the cradle to the grave, seems to have prevented such dangerous qualities as his conceit, his pugnaciousness, and his love of intrigue and speculation, from bringing their usual fatal results. Such gifts as a handsome face, a fine figure, a ‘parvenu grandeur of manner’ and real kindness and generosity, he used to their utmost advantage. For himself and his contemporaries he was a brilliantly successful individuality.

For posterity, he is the man who, with a single thrust, pushed open that door, which by long labour and bitter sacrifice Voltaire and the Encyclopædists had unbarred, upon the great Revolution and the Day.

X

_CONDORCET: THE ARISTOCRAT_

Voltaire was the son of a lawyer, and Diderot the son of a cutler; d’Alembert was a no-man’s child educated in a tradesman’s family; Grimm and Galiani were foreigners in the country to which they gave their talents. Of all Voltaire’s fellowship only Vauvenargues and Condorcet came from the order their work was pledged not to benefit but to destroy. Condorcet alone lived to experience the extreme consequences of his principles, and paid for them by imprisonment and death. The Aristocrat who lost his life through the People to whom he had devoted it--this was Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.

Born in 1743, at Ribemont, a town in Picardy, Condorcet belonged to a noble family highly connected both with the Church and the Army.

His father was a captain of cavalry and designed his son for the same aristocratic post. But he died when the child was four; and a devout mother vowed him to the Virgin and _au blanc_,

_From an Engraving by Lemort, after the Bust by St. Aubin._]

dressed him in white frocks like a little girl, so that the luckless Caritat could neither run nor jump as nature bade him, and owed to his mother’s piety a weakness in his limbs from which he never recovered.

His first schoolmasters were the Jesuits. What is one to make of the fact that they had as virgin soil the intellects of at least four of their mightiest and fiercest opponents--Voltaire, Diderot, Turgot, and Condorcet?

At eleven, Caritat was under their supervision, with his home influence pressing him to their way of thought, with an uncle a bishop, and Cardinal de Bernis a relative. At thirteen, he was sent to Rheims, to be more completely under their control. At fifteen, he came up to Paris, and began at the College of Navarre to study mathematics and to think for himself; and when once a mind has begun to do that, nothing can stop it.

His treatment of a particularly difficult theme brought him the acquaintance of d’Alembert, who first saw in the boy, who was to be to him as a son, a kindred genius, a future colleague at the Academy. Caritat was only seventeen when he introduced himself to his other great friend, Turgot, writing him a ‘Letter on Justice and Virtue’ which already proclaimed this college student a thinker of a high order. An ‘Essay on the Integral Calculus,’ which he presented at the Academy of Sciences when he was twenty-two, attracted to him the flattering notice of the famous mathematician, Lagrange. There was in it not only the ardour of youth and a buoyant fecundity of idea, but a profundity of learning not at all youthful.

Caritat was now no longer a student, but still lodging in Paris. In 1769, when he was twenty-six, he entered the Academy of Sciences in opposition to the wishes of all his relatives, who never pardoned him, he said, for not becoming a captain of cavalry.

The man who ought, by the solemn unwritten laws of the family compact, to have been a heavy dragoon, was soon acknowledged as one of the finest original thinkers of his age, the friend of d’Alembert and of Voltaire, and something yet greater than a thinker--greater than any great man’s friend--a practical reformer and a generous lover of human-kind.

The character of Condorcet--he who with Turgot has been said to have been ‘the highest intellectual and moral personality of his century’--has in it much not only infinitely good, but also infinitely attractive. Perfectly simple and modest, somewhat shy in the social world which he himself defined as ‘dissipation without pleasure, vanity without motive, and idleness without rest,’ among his intimates no one could have been more gay, witty, and natural. Though his acquaintances might find him cold, his friends knew well what a tender and generous soul shone in the thoughtful eyes. If he listened to a tale of sorrow coldly and critically almost, while others were commiserating the unfortunate, Condorcet was remedying the misfortune. Though he never could profess affection, he knew better than any man how to prove it; and if all his principles were stern, all his deeds were gentle. So quiet in his tastes that he had no use for riches, wholly without the arrogance and the blindness which distinguished his class, he had its every merit and not one of its faults; and he well deserved the title Voltaire gave him--‘The man of the old chivalry and the old virtue.’

In 1770, when he was twenty-seven, he went with d’Alembert to stay at Ferney. Voltaire was delighted with him. Here was a man after his own heart, with his own hatred of oppression and fanaticism and his own zeal for humanity, with better chances of serving it! The Patriarch did not add, as he might have added, that this young Condorcet had a thousand virtues a Voltaire could never compass--that he was pure in life and hated a lie; that he was wholly without jealousy, without vanity, and without meanness. Caritat soon worshipped at the feet of a master of whom his friendship with d’Alembert had already proclaimed him a pupil, while Voltaire enlisted his guest’s quiet, practical help for the rehabilitation of the Chevalier de la Barre, for the revision of the process of d’Étallonde; and honoured him by becoming his editor and assistant in the critical ‘Commentary on Pascal’ which Condorcet produced later.

Because his humility was the humility of a just mind and his modesty of the kind that scorns to cringe, Condorcet’s admiration for his host did not blind him to his literary faults or make him meanly spare them; and while it was Condorcet who spoke in warm eulogy of his ‘dear and illustrious chief’ as working not for his glory but for his cause, it was also Condorcet who deprecated that production of Voltaire’s senility, ‘Irène.’ Sometimes the three friends would talk over the future of France--the two older men who had done much to mould that future and the young man who had much to do. ‘You will see great days,’ old Voltaire wrote afterwards to his guest; ‘you will make them.’

The visit lasted a fortnight, and was a liberal education indeed.

Three years later, in 1773, Condorcet received the crown of his success as a mathematician and was made Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, where he wrote _éloges_ of the savants who had belonged to it, with the noble motto for ever in his mind, ‘One owes to the dead only what is useful to the living--justice and truth.’

So far, Condorcet had been a mathematician alone. Knowledge might free and redeem the world--in time; but the time was long. Beneath that quiet exterior, palpitating through his leisurely, exact studies at the College of Navarre and the Scientific Academy, there throbbed in this man’s breast a vaster and fiercer passion than any passion for learning--the passion for human-kind. Where did young Condorcet come by that ruling idea of his that opened to him a field of labour which he must till all his days, unremittingly, before the night cometh when no man can work--that idea which should steel him to endure, exulting, the cruellest torments of life and death--‘the infinite perfectibility of human nature, the infinite augmentation of human happiness’?

The friend of d’Alembert was Condorcet, the geometrician; the friend of Turgot was Condorcet, the reformer.

In August, 1774, Turgot was made Controller-General. He appointed Condorcet his Inspector of Coinage at a salary of 240_l._ a year, a payment which Condorcet never accepted.

The pair had work to do, which only they could do, and do together. The vexed subject of Trade in Grain--‘for a moment,’ says Robinet, ‘the whole question of the Revolution lay in this question of Grain’--incited them to fierce battle for what they took to be the cause of freedom against the cause of that well-meaning commonplace, Necker. Condorcet attacked Necker with a rare, fierce malignity, and wrote two stinging pamphlets on the subject which made him many enemies.

But there were other reforms waiting the doing, less in importance then and greater in importance now. To curtail the advantages of the privileged classes, to open for commerce the rivers of central France, to abolish the slave trade, _Taille_ and _Corvée_, _Vingtième_ and _Gabelle_, and to make the nobility share in the taxation--these were the tasks into which this noble put his life and his soul. That every reform meant loss to himself, that all his interests were vested in the privileges he sought to destroy, that every human tie drew him towards the old order, makes his work for the new, more excellent than that of his fellow-workers. They had nothing to gain; Condorcet had everything to lose.

In May, 1776, a Queen of one-and-twenty demanded that ‘le sieur Turgot fût chassé, même envoyé à la Bastille’; and, in part, she had her way, for her own ruin and that of France. Condorcet renounced his Inspectorship of Coinage; he would not serve under another master. Turgot’s death in 1781 was the first great sorrow of his life. His other friend, d’Alembert, won for him a seat in the French Academy in 1782; and in the next year he too died. Condorcet tended him to the last, with that quiet and generous devotion which says little and does much. D’Alembert left to him the task of providing annuities for two old servants, and Condorcet accepted the obligation as a privilege, and fulfilled it scrupulously in his own poverty and ruin.

He was now not a little lonely. His relatives still resented his choice of a profession; his best friends were dead; the great Master of their party had preceded them. From ‘social duties falsely so called’ Caritat had long ago freed himself. He was three and forty years old, occupied in writing that ‘Life of Turgot’ which is a declaration of his own principles and policy, in contributing to the Encyclopædia, and in many public labours, when he first met Mademoiselle Sophie de Grouchy.

If the supreme blessing of life be a happy marriage, then Condorcet was a fortunate man indeed. Mademoiselle was full twenty years younger than himself, very girlish in face and figure, with a bright cultivated mind, and a rare capacity for love and tenderness. He found in her what is uncommon even in happy marriages perhaps--his wife was also his friend. From the first she shared his work and his love for his fellow-men, approved of his sacrifices, and was true not only to him, but to his example of unselfish courage and unflinching devotion, to the end of her life.

For the moment--for what a brief moment!--their world looked smiling enough.

Condorcet abandoned himself to his happiness, with the deep passion of a strong man who has never wasted his heart in lighter feelings. For a dowry--so essential to a French marriage--he wholly forgot to stipulate. For the opinion of his friends, who considered a married geometrician as a sort of freak of Nature, he cared nothing; and when they saw his wife, and forgave him, their pardon was as little to him as their blame.

The two settled on the Quai de Conti in a house where Caritat had previously lived with his mother. At that Hôtel des Monnaies Sophie held her _salon_ (_le foyer de la République_, men called it), where she received, with a youthful charm and grace, not only her husband’s French political friends, but also Lord Stormont the English Ambassador, Wilkes, Garrick, Sterne, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Mackintosh, and Adam Smith.

Large and shy, with a little awkwardness even in his manner, it was not Condorcet but his wife who was socially successful. She was the one woman in a thousand who estimated social success at its low, just value, and was great in knowing her husband to be much greater.

Only two years after their marriage, in 1788, Condorcet entered the arena as one of the earliest and most noteworthy of all champions of Women’s Rights. On the ground of their equal intelligence he claimed for them equal privileges with men, and ignored the very suggestion that their bodily weakness and inferiority are reproduced in their minds. He judged, in fact, all women from one woman. No nobler testimony can be borne to the intellect and character of the Marquise de Condorcet than to say that she deserved as an individual what her example made her husband think of her sex.

It is not a little curious to note that Condorcet, though so wholly faithful and happy himself in the relationship, thought the indissolubility of marriage an evil. In later years, he pleaded warmly for the condemnation of mercenary marriages by public opinion, as one of the best means of lessening the inequalities of wealth.

In 1790, the profound happiness of his wedded life was crowned by the birth of his only child, a daughter. Before that, the fierce whirlpool of politics had drawn him into it, and he had addressed the electors of the States-General and appeared publicly as the enemy of sacerdotalism and aristocracy, with all his gospel based on two great principles--the natural rights of man and the mutable nature of the constitutions which govern him. He was made member of the municipality of Paris, and in that, his first public function, flung the gauntlet before his caste and broke for ever with an order of which the smug selfishness was admirably typified by a Farmer-General who said to him, ‘Why alter things? _We_ are very comfortable.’

The fall of the Bastille, the insurrection of October, the journey of the Royal Family to Paris, he had watched with the calm of one who knows that such things must needs be, who realises the necessity of painful means to a glorious end. To the monarchy he was not at first opposed. If the King were but a man! But when in June, 1791, came the ignominious flight to Varennes, Condorcet rose in a fierce, still wrath and proclaimed the necessity for a Republic. ‘The King has freed himself from us, we are freed from him,’ said he. ‘This flight enfranchises us from all our obligations.’

Nearly all the Marquis’s friends broke with him, and he stood alone. Before his ripened views on royalty were fully known, it had been proposed that he should be the tutor of the Dauphin, and to Sophie that she should be the _gouvernante_. Husband and wife were in different places when the proposals were made; but, though they had never spoken with each other on the subject, they declined the offers almost in the same words. If Condorcet’s friends misunderstood him and parted at the parting of the ways, his wife never did.

In 1791, he was elected member for Paris in the Legislative Assembly and became in quick succession its Secretary and its President. As its President, he presented to it his Educational Scheme, startlingly modern in its demands that education should be free and unsectarian.

By the order of the Assembly, in 1792, there was burnt in Paris an immense number of the brevets and patents of nobility--among them the patent of Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet--at the very moment when at the bar of the tribune Condorcet himself demanded that the same measure should be adopted all over France. Not one dissentient voice was raised against the scheme; who, indeed, should dissent from it when a marquis proposed it? A few months later he was elected Member of the National Convention for the Department of Aisne, and the extremist of the Legislative Assembly found himself all too moderate for the Convention.

Then came the trial of the King.

There was never a time when Condorcet could be called either an orator or a leader of men. Though he had written most of its official addresses, he had appeared but little before the Legislative Assembly. Nervousness caused him always to read any speeches he did make, and a delicate voice robbed them of their effectiveness. His deeds and his character earned him a hearing and applause; and sometimes his complete self-devotion and the white heat of his enthusiasm discounted his manner and touched his hearers with something of his own deathless passion. But he was, as d’Alembert said, a volcano covered with snow, and that audience of his, coarse in fibre, mad for excitement, overwrought, uncontrolled, must needs see the mountain in flames, vomiting lava and death.

To be a great orator one must have in a supreme degree the qualities one’s hearers have in a lesser degree. The thoughtful reason and the lofty ideals of Condorcet found little counterpart in the parliaments of the Revolution. A Marat or a Danton for us! Or a Fouquier-Tinville even, drunk with blood, with his wild hair flung back, and his words shaking with passion; but not this noble, with the high courage of his caste, his ‘stoical Roman face,’ his stern truthfulness, his unworldly enthusiasms. Worse than all, Condorcet never was for a cause, but always for a principle; and since he followed no party blindly, he was in turn abused by all.

He proved in his own history that to be a great demagogue it is essential to be without too fine a scrupulousness and the more delicate virtues; that successfully to lead the vulgar the first requisite is not to be too much of a gentleman.

Condorcet, although he had broken with monarchy as a possible form of government for France, had still no personal feeling against the monarch. Firmly convinced of his culpability, he was equally convinced that the Convention was not legally competent to judge its King at all; and proposed that he should be tried by a tribunal chosen by the electors of the Departments of France. But to take the judging of its sovereign from the Convention was to take the prey whose blood he has tasted from the tiger. When the great moment came, Condorcet was at Auteuil; he hastened to Paris, and arrived at the Assembly a few moments before the King.

What a strange contrast was this Marquis--serene in strong purpose, with his ‘just mind justly fixed,’ great in his compassion for his country and not without compassion for his King--to that poor Bourbon, ‘who means well had he any fixed meaning,’ and whom Condorcet himself described in an admirable but rarely quoted description as standing before his judges, ‘uneasy, rather than frightened; courageous, but without dignity.’

On January 15, 1793, to the momentous question if the prisoner at the bar were guilty, Condorcet answered, ‘Yes:’ he had conspired against liberty. On the 17th and 18th the vote was taken on the nature of the punishment to be awarded. Consider the judgment-hall filled with the fierce faces and wild natures of men who, for centuries starved of their liberties, had drunk the first maddening draught of power. Consider that among them this noble alone represented a class they hated worse than they hated royalty itself, that if he had forsworn it, broken with it, denied it, he had still its high bearing, its maddening self-possession and self-control. We vote for death--shall you dare to know better? An Orleans sitteth and speaketh against his own kin; why not a noble, then, who owes him nothing? Condorcet rises in his place and pronounces for exile--the severest penalty in the penal code which is not death. ‘The punishment of death is against my principles, and I shall not vote for it. I propose further that the decision of the Convention shall be ratified by an appeal to the people.’

On Saturday, January 19, 1793, the execution of the King having been fixed for the Monday, Condorcet implored his colleagues to neutralise the fatal effect of their decision on the other European Powers by abolishing the punishment of death altogether. With the Terror then struggling to the birth in her wild breast, one of the greatest children of his country begged for the suppression of that penalty as the most ‘efficacious way of perfecting human-kind in destroying that leaning to ferocity which has long dishonoured it. Punishments which admit of correction and repentance are the only ones fit for regenerated humanity.’

In the roar of that fierce storm of human passions, the quiet voice was unheeded, but not unheard. There were those who looked up at the speaker, and remembered his words--for his ruin.

How far, up to this point, Condorcet realised his danger is hard to say. A Louis, with the fatal blindness of kingship, might believe to the last that his person really _was_ inviolable, that from the tumbril itself loyal hands would deliver his majesty from the insult of a malefactor’s death. But a Condorcet?

The immediate result of his part in the King’s trial was that his name was struck from the roll of the Academies of St. Petersburg and Berlin. That insult touched him so little that there is not a single allusion to it in his writings.

In the month succeeding the King’s death, a Commission of nine members of the Convention, of whom Condorcet was one, laid before it their project for the New Constitution of the Year II., to which Condorcet had written an elaborate Preface. The project was not taken. Hérault de Séchelles made a new one. In his bold and scathing criticism upon it--his ‘Appeal to the French Citizens on the Project of the New Constitution’--Condorcet signed his own condemnation.

On July 8, 1793, Chabot denounced that ‘Appeal’ at the Convention. This ex-Marquis, he said, is ‘a coward, a scoundrel, and an Academician.’ ‘He pretends that his Constitution is better than yours; that primary assemblies ought to be accepted; _therefore_ I propose that he ought to be arrested and brought to the bar.’ On the strength of this logical reasoning and without evidence of any kind against him, the Convention decreed that Condorcet’s papers should be sealed and that he should be put under arrest and on the list of those who were to be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the coming third of October. He was further condemned in his absence and declared to be _hors la loi_.

If it is doubtful whether Condorcet realised the probable effect of his opinion and vote in the matter of the King’s trial, he had realised to the full the jeopardy in which the ‘Appeal’ would place him. But he looked now, as he had looked always, not to the effect his deeds might have on his own destiny, but to their effect on the destiny of the race. If the unit could but do his part for the mass, then, having done it, he must be content to be trampled under its feet, happy, if on his dead body some might rise and catch a glimpse of a Promised Land.

But yet he must save himself if he could.

For seven years, through storms of which the story still shakes men’s souls, he had known in his own home, first on the Quai de Conti and then in the Rue de Lille, the deep, calm joys of his happy marriage. When the troubles of life come only from without, through the fiercest of such troubles man and wife may be happy still. It is those evils alone which rise from their own characters which can wholly destroy the beauty of life. In the serene tenderness of the woman who kept for ever, it is said, some of the virgin freshness of the girl, who united to strength gentleness, and to courage quietness, who was at once modest and clever, simple and intelligent, Condorcet was given a rich share of the best earth has to offer.