[In the excerpt below, Grendel ponders the appeal of The Barber of Seville and provides background on Beaumarchais's life.]

THE BARBER OF SEVILLE

Here we go. With this devil of a man, nothing is ever signed, sealed and delivered. There is always a reason for starting all over again. As he wrote to Gudin in 1774, ‘I have been alive for two hundred years.’ It would take a good couple of centuries, and innumerable books, to tell his life story. At this point in his labours, the author of this biography feels his mind reel. As he discovers the errors made by others, he realizes how many he has made himself. At every step he feels the urge to go back over what he has written and start the impossible task all over again. Appearances are there to blind him; if he is to understand, he has to interpret. Beaumarchais never appears without a mask, and to throw us off the scent he is constantly changing his disguise.

The voluminous scholarly works inspired by The Barber alone haven't nearly exhausted the subject. Alongside the transparent, sparkling comedy whose workings are obvious, there is an obscure, ambiguous work which, albeit less mysterious than The Marriage, poses a number of problems. ‘So what,’ you may say, ‘since the work is a great one and can still make audiences laugh two hundred years after it was first performed?’ To this objection, I reply that perfection is conditioned by enigma. The magic of a masterpiece depends on the extent of its veiled overtones. Dom Juan, a very imperfect play, is still Molière's best work, because it remains undefinable.

The same applies to The Barber of Seville, the title page of which bears the following epigraph: ‘And I was a father and I could not die! (Zaïre, act II)’ Why? In his excellent critical edition of The Barber, Georges Bonneville refers to this ‘enigmatic epigraph borrowed from Voltaire’. The eminent professor at least had the grace to confess he was puzzled. The difficulty isn't easy to resolve, but I shall try to throw some light on the matter in a moment.

Even before its first performance the play had already had its ups and downs. It is thought to have started out as a parade and it is known to have become a comic opera, which was rejected by the Comédie Italienne, before being turned into what it is today—a stage play which went through at least three successive versions. The first version, in four acts, which passed the censor (Marin, as it happened) in 1773, was due to be staged at the Comédie Française on 12 February 1774, but was banned on 11 February because Beaumarchais had created a scandal on 10 February with his fourth memoir. The second version, in five acts, opened on 23 February 1775, and was booed on its first night. Two days later, however, the play was a triumphant success in its final reworked version in four acts. The changes from one manuscript to another are considerable—a close study of them would take up a hundred pages of this book at least. The work has already been done by a cohort of experts headed, as usual, by Linthilac, so I shall not linger over such questions, since my subject is limited to our knowledge of the author.

Having flopped on the Friday, The Barber was back in triumph on the Sunday. ‘At the first night the comedy was booed; at its second performance it was an extravagant success,’ writes Mme du Deffand. Anyone who knows a little about the theatre can imagine what this tour de force represented. But, as Figaro tells Almaviva, ‘The harder it is to succeed, the more you need to try.’ Not only did the author have to rewrite his play at lightning speed, but the actors had to learn new lines and the stage manager had to rehearse the new scene changes. Beaumarchais, who only really came into his own when tackling the impossible, surpassed himself. As usual, his apparently easy triumph was in fact the result of much hard work.

In its final version The Barber appears to be the simplest of comedies. The author himself sketched the plot as follows: ‘An old man in love intends to marry his ward tomorrow; a young suitor, more adroit than he, thwarts him, and marries the girl today under the guardian's very nose and in his house.’ This plot, one of the oldest in the world, has given rise in France alone to thousands of farces, pantomimes, plays, operas and what have you. Beaumarchais knew some of them—Scarron's The Pointless Precaution, for example, as he acknowledged in the title of his own variation on the theme, The Barber of Seville, or, The Pointless Precaution. He knew Molière's School for Wives as well. But Scarron and Molière had their own sources, Italian or Spanish ones. Who cares about such niceties? The thing that matters is that Beaumarchais made the theme his own. No one before him, not even Molière, had used the devices of ellipsis and punning so freely and so naturally. Beaumarchais's experience of parades and his penchant for word games come close to destroying normal syntax at times, and his language becomes a language of the absurd. Like Molière, though with less restraint, he makes great use of repetition. And of course the play works like clockwork. Everything is prepared and executed with incredible precision—everything but verisimilitude, that is. The play has nothing to do with reality: it is set in the spheres of imbroglio. Bartholo is alternately keen-sighted or short-sighted, quick of hearing or almost deaf, to suit his author. He never recognizes Almaviva, but he does notice the letter tucked into Rosine's bodice and the ink stain on her finger; in the same scene he tells Almaviva to speak louder because he's deaf and to lower his voice because he isn't deaf. Beaumarchais isn't content with justifying these contradictions, he also uses them to make us laugh. In the third act Almaviva, Rosine and Figaro try to get rid of Bartholo for a short while so that the girl can be given an essential piece of information. Their attempts to get the old man to leave last for five marvellously funny scenes, at the end of which the guardian finally exits—but Beaumarchais contrives with diabolical skill, but contrary to all logic, to avoid giving the information, thereby giving the action a fresh twist. It isn't Bartholo who is duped, but the audience, to their great delight.

What is more, Beaumarchais succeeds in rejuvenating the characters of the traditional comedy. I am not thinking here of Wakeful, who spends all his time yawning, or Youthful, who is old, but Bazile of course, and above all Bartholo. This reactionary bourgeois doesn't try to conceal the horror he feels for his own times: ‘What have they produced to make them praiseworthy? All kinds of nonsense: freedom of thought, gravity, electricity, religious tolerance, inoculation, quinine, the Encyclopedia and new-fangled plays.’ He is by no means a fool. Foxy, quick-witted and intuitive, he is a formidable opponent for Almaviva, Rosine and Figaro. His intelligence enables him to thwart all their attempts to dupe him and gives the comedy its source of tension. If Almaviva is no match for Molière's Dom Juan, though he does resemble him, Bartholo has more judgement and personality than Arnolphe has. He also accepts his defeat with great dignity, and that too strikes me as something new in the traditional vein of tiresome old men.

But enough of these trifles! They are taking us away from our subject. The quick style, the brilliant construction and Bartholo's character don't explain the magic of The Barber. If it weren't for Figaro would we even be discussing the play? As a character, he is undeniably necessary to the action; but oddly enough it is what he has to say outside the action that gives the comedy its quality, its resonance and, I repeat, its magic. If you were to entertain yourself by cutting Figaro's great speeches altogether, you would see that the structure and the dynamics of The Barber wouldn't suffer in the slightest. In fact you'd end up with a better play. But it wouldn't be a masterpiece. The appearance of Figaro marks a decisive turning-point in French literary history. With Figaro, the author comes on to the stage for the first time. Writers such as Montaigne or Rousseau expressed themselves directly, and in the first person, by means of reflexion or confession. Beaumarchais, in both The Barber and The Marriage, enters his work by stealth, and his unexpected presence disturbs the action and confuses the issues. From that moment on our interest as spectator or reader is diverted towards the fascinating stranger, and without our realizing what is happening, the intruder captures all our attention. On the stage there are two Figaros, the barber and Beaumarchais, just as in Remembrance of Things Past there are the narrator and Proust. In 1775 this irruption of the author among his characters seemed scandalous, though the age was expecting that particular scandal—the memoirs had laid the foundations for it. After the prodigious success of these four texts, Beaumarchais realized that he was at his best when writing about himself.

In the French theatre, in which servants feature prominently, three valets are really up in arms against the system: Molière's Sganarelle, Beaumarchais's Figaro and Hugo's Ruy Blas. To my mind, it is wrong to think of Sganarelle as a clown. Superstition isn't his only character trait. The judgements he passes on Dom Juan are often pertinent and at times virulent. But he never dares to attack his master to his face. Also, his morals are those of a conservative, and he doesn't speak for Molière, who if anything is on the side of Dom Juan. Ruy Blas, on the other hand, is an unrestrained and arrant rebel. But still less is he the author; at best he is a pawn on Hugo's dramatic chessboard, a nobody. We are left with Figaro between the pusillanimous Sganarelle and the nonexistent Ruy Blas. Figaro may still call his master ‘Your Excellency’ or ‘My lord’, but he does so only to conform with custom. In other respects he doesn't keep his distance, but closes in to thrust straight and hard.

Almaviva: … I recall that in my service you were not especially obedient.

Figaro: The poor have their weaknesses like everyone else, my lord.

Almaviva: Lazy, argumentative …

Figaro: To judge by the virtues demanded of a servant, does Your Excellency know many masters who are fit to be valets?

None of which is very kind to Almaviva, and it was even less kind to the Comédie Française audience, which I believe included few servants at the time.

‘I have a lackey's coat but you have a lackey's soul,’ Ruy Blas would say much later. When writing this line, which is very reminiscent of Figaro's, Victor Hugo was running no risk, save that of offending his maid. Hugo merely goes visiting among the poor like a charitable beadle. Nine times out of ten he deals with them in a frock coat, wearing a countenance to match. Beaumarchais laughs at misfortune, because he is used to it. He hastens to ‘laugh at everything lest [he] be obliged to weep at it’. To laugh and to bite:

Almaviva: I didn't recognize you. Just look at you, with your pot belly and your double chin …

Figaro: That's poverty for you, my lord!

This line lashes like a whip, yet it is generally understood the wrong way round. The point is that Almaviva, too, has a do-gooder's preconceptions—the poor are supposed to be skinny!

In the short quotations I have just given, the person speaking is still the character. Beaumarchais hasn't yet taken Figaro's place. He doesn't really make his entry until the ‘republic of letters’ speech, five minutes after the curtain has gone up. Up to then there have merely been a few furtive allusions, winks to the knowing few in the audience. But then suddenly comes the big surprise—Figaro is transformed into the author:

Almaviva: … But you haven't told me what made you leave Madrid.

Figaro: My guardian angel, Excellency, seeing that I have been fortunate enough to meet my old master again. Realizing that the republic of letters in Madrid was in the hands of the wolves, for ever fighting among themselves, and that all the insects—gnats, midges, critics, maringoons, journalists, booksellers, censors—and all that clings to the flesh of the unfortunate authors, driven to contempt by this ridiculous squabbling, were tearing and sucking at the little bit of substance that remained; tired of writing, bored with myself, sickened by others, riddled with debts and short of money; convinced in the end that the useful revenue of the razor is preferable to the pointless honours of the pen, I left Madrid; and, with my bags on my back, strolling philosophically through the two Castilles, La Mancha, Estramadura, Sierre Morena and Andalusia; welcomed in one town, imprisoned in another, and everywhere above the fray; praised by some, reprimanded by others, helping along good times and putting up with bad; making fun of fools, standing up to villains; laughing at my poverty, and cocking my razor at everybody; here I am with my home in Seville, and ready to serve Your Excellency anew in whatever way he may please to command me.

An odd valet, and an even odder barber, I think you'll agree. So Figaro is a writer. Hmm. But who are these insects? These maringoons? Quesaco? That's right! And these booksellers? Poor Lejay! ‘Riddled with debts’, well, well. The 1775 audience cottoned on immediately. From then on it wasn't Figaro they were listening to, but Beaumarchais. ‘Welcomed in one town, imprisoned in another, and everywhere above the fray’—the audience had no difficulty in following him from London to Vienna. But for their rejoicings to be complete, he had to add this little phrase: ‘Praised by some, reprimanded by others.’ Beaumarchais added these six words a few days before the play opened. As can be imagined, the censors would have felt duty bound to ‘suck’ that little bit of substance! The tirade ends with the announcement that Figaro, back in Seville, i.e. Beaumarchais back in Paris, is ready to serve His Excellency anew. Which Excellency? Almaviva or Louis XVI? Almaviva and Louis XVI. Most extraordinary of all is the fact that a modern audience, who know nothing of all this—they have never heard of Marin and don't know that Beaumarchais had received an official reprimand—react to this speech wonderfully well, although much of it is double Dutch to them and although it slows down the action.

One further example. Were you aware that at one time Beaumarchais wanted to call Bazile by the name of Guzman? He dropped the idea shortly before the first night, probably because he thought it too obvious, but he must have felt some regrets, for Brid'oison in The Marriage is called Don Gusman Brid'oison. So Bazile stayed as he was. However, the day before the first night, Beaumarchais wrote in a single, hurried sitting the extraordinary ‘slander’ tirade, which immortalized the councillor even as his name was removed from the dramatis personae. This Goyaesque character makes the audience laugh, but a hollow laugh. Bazile is patently a character from a nightmare. In modern parlance, he is traumatic. Yet if we reread The Barber we find that Bazile is merely a rogue, who sells his services to the highest bidder. How then can we explain the impact of his appearance in the play? The way he is dressed? Come now, behind Bazile there are all Beaumarchais's misfortunes, i.e. Councillor Goëzman, or the devil. The audience don't know this, because they don't even know who Goëzman was, but they guess. The tirade itself, which is dramatically pointless, is so far removed from the subject in hand that Bartholo has to point out how absurd it is:

Bazile: Slander, sir! You don't know what you're pooh-poohing. I have seen the most honest of people almost overwhelmed by it. Tell yourself there's no blatant unkindness, no horror, no absurd fable that a man can't get adopted by the idle folk of a large city if he goes about it in the right way—and we have people here who are very, very clever! To begin with, a mere rustle, skimming the ground like a swallow before the storm, whispers pianissimo along and shoots the poisoned arrow as it goes. Some mouth or other takes it in, and piano, piano, slips it niftily into your ear. The evil has been done; it sprouts, it creeps, it crawls, and rinforzando from mouth to mouth it goes like the devil, then all of a sudden, don't ask me how, you see slander rear up, hiss, swell and grow before your very eyes. It rushes, swoops, loops, surrounds, uproots, carries off, bursts and thunders, and becomes, glory be to heaven, a general outcry, a public crescendo, a universal chorus of hatred and proscription. Who the devil could resist that?

Bartholo: What in the blazes is all this drivel you're blethering, Bazile? And what has your piano-crescendo got to do with my situation?

Obviously, Bazile cannot reply. But Goëzman has suddenly moved across the stage, as he was intended to. Once again the purely dramatic logic of the play runs counter to the hidden logic of art.

At the end of the first act, after a rip-roaring scene with Almaviva, Figaro begins to exit, but is called back by the count, who reminds him opportunely that he keeps a barber's shop: ‘But where do you live, you scatterbrain?’

Figaro: Oh, good heavens, I've quite lost my head! My shop, only a step from here, blue front, leaded windows, three pallets for a sign, an eye in a hand, Consilio manuque, Figaro.

Is he a barber (blue shop front, three pallets for a sign) or a clockmaker (an eye in a hand, leaded windows like those in the rue Saint-Denis)? Consilio manuque, Figaro: signature and confession. Long before I thought of writing this book—or any book, for that matter—I felt that Figaro must represent fils Caron. To my joy, I discovered much later that Jacques Scherer, a scholar of high repute, felt the same as myself. It seems that other specialists disagree with M. Scherer, but their quarrel is an academic one, and their main argument doesn't strike me as being particularly convincing. They say that in the early versions of The Barber the name was written with a ‘u’, Figuaro. Figuereau, Bigaro, Durant—what does it matter? Beaumarchais loved playing with names, as we have seen. Considering that he had already turned his own name inside out in London and Vienna, I cannot imagine him baptizing gratuitously the character whom he intends to make his spokesman. And I cannot conceive of a man who had been dogged all his childhood and youth by a name pronounced ‘Ficaro’ choosing a name like Figaro merely by chance.

The Barber contains a very furtive reference to a daughter of Figaro's. There was much speculation at the time about this little girl, as there has been since. In 1775 the author merely joked when asked who this child was, where and when she had been born and who her mother was. It was thought that he might explain the situation in The Marriage, since he was well aware of his public's curiosity, but strangely enough he chose to avoid the issue once again. The Marriage was completed in 1778, and it was given its first performance six years later. In 1777 Marie-Thérèse Willermawlaz had given him a daughter, so there could be no question of joking about the little girl of Figaro's who had slipped into The Barber by mistake, so to speak. Beaumarchais is an odd fellow, you have to admit. He adores talking about himself and turning the clock back. Then at times he smilingly turns the hands in the other direction, so that he can mention his daughter two or three years before she is born!

Let's return to our mysterious epigraph. ‘And I was a father and I could not die!’ There is no mystery about how writers choose the phrase or lines of verse that they quote as a motto at the beginning of their book. More often than not, it is not so much a deliberate choice as a choice made for them by a chance encounter, an immediate infatuation. The words themselves are often more important than their meaning; a writer who underlines or jots down a little phrase from Zaïre, for instance, doesn't always know why he has done so. The imagination frequently bypasses consciousness altogether.

So much for generalities. Now to the point. I spent a long while trying to solve this riddle, and my efforts ranged from the sublime (allusion to his dead son; two statements, a and b) to the ridiculous (father = author: his work makes him immortal). It was Loménie who eventually put me on to what I think is the right track. After quoting a speech of Figaro's that Beaumarchais cut between the first and the second performances (‘Not to mention the fact that I have lost all my fathers and mothers; I have been an orphan of the last of them since last year’), Loménie notes: ‘It is rather odd that Beaumarchais, whose excellent qualities as a son, a brother and … a father are now known, should have allowed himself to be led astray by his systematic intention of creating a type of universal braggart, to the point where he makes Figaro utter mocking remarks about a type of sentiment that even comedy generally respects.’ Since I am, possibly, less squeamish than my illustrious predecessor, I admit that Figaro's snide remarks about his family don't shock me overmuch, in fact I quite like them. The point is that you can love your father and mother and still cast doubts on the value of blood relations per se. As I wrote at the very outset of this book, Beaumarchais was the son of the clockmaker Caron and he was the son of a nobody. Loménie's surprise urged me to take this line of reasoning a little farther.

In his famous Moderate Letter on the Fall and the Critical Reception of The Barber of Seville, Beaumarchais gives the plot of an absurd tragedy that he might have written instead of his comedy. Figaro, abandoned by his father, who is none other than Bartholo, is stolen from his mother (Marceline!) by a band of gipsies while he is still a child. ‘By changing his condition without knowing it, the ill-starred youth changed his name without wishing it; he brought himself up under the name of Figaro; he lived.’ Once he'd discovered the truth about his birth he might have turned his razor against himself and/or have achieved, thanks to Bartholo's marrying Marceline, a state of ‘happiness and legitimacy’. This astonishing outline was to yield, of course, not a tragedy but a second comedy, The Day of Madness, or, The Marriage of Figaro. For the moment, the point I want to pursue is that Figaro's mystery is the mystery of his birth. And (‘forced to travel the road that I took without knowing it’) Figaro's secret is Beaumarchais's secret—a fundamental obsession, hidden, buried or, in modern parlance, repressed, an obsession that can be expressed only by the indirect means of laughter. I repeat, the magic of The Barber depends on its veiled overtones, its indefinability. What an extraordinary situation, when the lightest, clearest, most light-hearted playwright that France has ever had turns out to be the darkest, the most obscure and the most disconcerting man imaginable! (This doesn't of course alter the fact that his two comedies will remain what they always have been—lively and brilliant. It would be madness to upset the audience with our commentaries. In the theatre you need only enjoy yourself with Figaro. But in what is commonly known as a biography we are obliged to take a closer look at things, even if it does mean spoiling the fun at times.)

All the same, the signs are there for those who wish to see them, even in the play itself. As Beaumarchais jokingly (of course) points out in his preface, Figaro is a model son. When asked whether he knows Bartholo he replies, ‘Like my mother’, because, as Beaumarchais pretends to explain, ‘every man draws his comparisons from whatever interests him most’. On one level this line is merely funny, but on another level it links up with what I am trying to explain: Beaumarchais, who knows, makes Figaro, who doesn't know, say that he knows Bartholo like his mother, addressing himself to an audience who don't know either that Bartholo is in fact … But I am labouring my point. The hands turn, and we read the hour, but who cares about escapements and springs, apart from a clockmaker?

‘I was a father and I couldn't die.’ I couldn't die because I loved my son; but I ought to have died, because to give life is absurd. ‘What a strange sequence of events! Why these things and not others? Forced to travel the road that I took unknowingly, just as I shall leave it unwillingly.’ Forced: I couldn't die. Bartholo cannot recognize Figaro, and Figaro cannot imagine that the doctor is his father. When Marceline, in The Marriage, asks him whether nature hasn't told him a hundred times that Bartholo is his father, he replies bluntly: ‘Never.’ His relationship with his mother is just as false, just as faked, but Beaumarchais knows only his obsession—as the son of a nobody, some day in his turn he too will be a nobody for his child: he will be a father and he won't be able to die. And all of this goes on simultaneously with the affection that we know he felt for old M. Caron and with his violent longing to be a father. ‘Become fathers; you must,’ he wrote after the birth of his daughter. Two contradictory attitudes: need and refusal. Isn't it odd that a conflict of this order, and one that was never resolved, should have produced two comedies, one at least of which is all surface, all mirrorlike polish? Glancing at it, André Gide saw nothing but glitter; he hadn't looked properly. Was it in spite of this conflict, or because of it, that Beaumarchais turned his life into one great adventure? What makes Figaro tick? If he was to survive a Protestant had to turn his coat, and a Barber had to serve the designs of his master—that was the law. But Beaumarchais-Figaro decided to break the law by rebelling, by acting, and by challenging the system. I cannot be myself except against my father and against the king, who, the one by weakness and the other by force, have decided that I shall be another. Ultimately Beaumarchais was to discover that every man is born a Protestant but promptly undergoes compulsory conversion. You are my father, and you are also Bartholo. I don't want to become Bartholo in my turn. I want to remain Figaro, a Protestant, but if I fail to do so I shan't make a tragedy of it: ‘What gave you such a cheerful philosophy?’ ‘Being accustomed to misfortune. I hasten to laugh at everything lest I be obliged to weep at it.’ We need to remember that without this laughter we should have neither Figaro nor Beaumarchais.

Old M. Caron, about whom we had a few harsh words to say a few moments ago, could not and would not die. Scandalizing his family, he impenitently insisted on marrying, at seventy-seven, for the third time. The apple of his eye was a wily spinster only a few years younger than himself called Suzanne-Léopolde Jeantot, with whom he had been triumphantly living in sin for the past few months. This Jeantot woman, who made M. Caron's old legs cut a frisky caper, followed him to the altar on 18 April 1775 with an enthusiasm that was justified by the marriage contract, which unfortunately we haven't heard the last of. To achieve her ends she had merely to fan the old man's ardour beyond his strength. As she was by no means backward in coming forward, M. Caron led her to the heights of ecstasy by dying six months after the wedding. Bartholo says of Rosine, ‘I'd rather she wept at having me than that I should die from not having her.’ Between old André and old Léopolde, things were rather different: she didn't weep at having him; he had her and died from it. On the day of the wedding, which his father had kept from him, and on the day of his death, the news of which reached him too late, Pierre-Augustin was in London once more, grappling with a lady who wasn't much younger than Léopolde, and who, like her, knew a bargain when she saw one. …

THE REST IS LITERATURE

Relaxation, for Beaumarchais, always took the form of a change of activity. ‘His way of life,’ writes Gudin, who witnessed it from day to day, ‘was as varied as his genius. He rested from one task by turning to another. He had the ability, which characterized him perfectly, to change his occupation unexpectedly and turn his attention as intensely and as exclusively to the new activity as he had to the one that it replaced, without any lingering fatigue or distracting preoccupation. He called this process “closing the drawer on an affair”.’ This ‘closed drawer’ technique partly explains how Beaumarchais could tackle a dozen or more ventures simultaneously and still steer them to completion. It is the method of a craftsman, the acquired habit (precise and time-conscious) of a clockmaker. All the same, Beaumarchais would never have accomplished anything had it not been for passion, which was the real mainspring of his life. ‘I want to know why I get angry.’ The phrase is that of a man who got angry frequently.

During his American period (1776-83), Beaumarchais opened two new drawers. He attended to them only in his spare time, yet they would have sufficed in themselves to make him famous. They involved setting up the Society of Dramatic Authors and the publication of the complete works of Voltaire. However, these monumental undertakings were by no means his only passions alongside the great American adventure. Before turning to ‘literature’, therefore, I think it would be enlightening to list some of his other assignments during this period. Needless to say, the list will not be exhaustive.

To give some idea of Beaumarchais's parallel activities, I shall merely cite the titles of the files from one box opened by Loménie in the 1850s: Outline for a Textbook in Comparative Criminal Law; How to acquire Land in the Scioto Region; The joint Owners of the Enclosure of the Quinze-Vingts; The Civil Rights of Protestants in France (more later); Plan for a Loan of equal Utility to the King and to the Public; Prospectus for a Mill to be built in Harfleur; Plan for Trade with India via the Isthmus of Suez; The Conversion of Peat into Coal and the Advantages of this Discovery; The Planting of Rhubarb; Prospectus for a Finance Transaction or Loan in the Form of a State Lottery; Plan for a Bureau of Trade and an Accumulation Fund; Plan for a Bridge at the Arsenal; and so on. All these matters were mooted during the period we are discussing. Most of them remained theoretical during Beaumarchais's lifetime—the building of the Suez canal, for instance, did not begin until almost a century later. Few men have attracted new ideas as magnetically as Beaumarchais did: engineers, financiers, architects, inventors, dreamers and madmen of every kind knocked at his door and eventually obtained an appointment, advice or assistance. (The spongers knocked, too, and were rarely turned away, even when they were former enemies like Baculard d'Arnaud.)

He was fond of saying, ‘How is it that everything being done or planned ends up on my desk?’ False modesty, vanity. If the world of research and adventure hadn't come to him, Beaumarchais would have gone looking for it. What demon drove him to carry to the font the Caisse d'Escompte, nowadays known as the Bank of France? And to finance the Périer brothers' tremendous Chaillot fire pump? And to restrict the privilege of the fermiers-généraux? On the other hand, we can easily understand why he got angry in order to defend the Calvinists of south-west France against ‘barbarous fanaticism’. He took a similarly determined stand in favour of the Jews, not contenting himself, like his fellow-writers, with adopting positions of principle, but involving himself directly in their fight against religious discrimination and weak-headed intolerance. To save a Jew in Bayonne, he ‘wept kneeling’ before Vergennes—and succeeded. The fine writings and petitions of the intellectuals have their usefulness—they give their signatories an easy conscience. But anyone who really wants to help the victim of a repressive system has to fight, or scheme, or plead. The rest is literature. Beaumarchais was always available to help the oppressed, i.e. all those against whom the majority and the government had set their minds in virtuous jubilation. Some of his biographers have berated him for having considered at one time becoming involved in the slave trade. But he dropped the idea very quickly. Once he had seen his first Negro, and understood what it was to be black, he immediately became the champion of the non-white minority. He always wanted to know why, and for whom, he got angry. Abstraction had less appeal for him than a face. Never did any man's suffering leave him indifferent, even if that man was his worst enemy.

The most oppressed of all minorities in those days was perhaps the brotherhood of playwrights. I'm only half-joking. Oddly resigned to their fate, the playwrights submitted to the yoke of the actors. The members of the Comédie Française, tyrants among the despots, exploited their authors shamelessly, almost majestically. Since the days of Quinault, who was a playwright as well as Lully's librettist, the authors had obtained the right, after much moaning, to be paid on a percentage basis. The generous actors had granted them a ninth of the profits if their play had five acts, a twelfth if it had three. Theoretically, this was a splendid offer; in practice, however, it meant next to nothing. The actors had craftily invented the iniquitous notion of net receipts. Like Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera, who tears strip after strip off a singer's fabulous contract until all that's left is the fellow's signature, which he triumphantly pockets, the members of the Comédie Française began by subtracting from the gross takings an arbitrary 1200 livres, representing ‘ordinary performance expenses’, and a further sum in respect of ‘extraordinary performance expenses’. They then knocked off the cost of season tickets, complimentary tickets (which amounted to whole rows of seats), the poor tax, and what they called the ‘author's personal expenses’—the glass of water drunk during rehearsals, the candles provided for him to correct his text and so on. And that wasn't all. The actors had also decided that if the net takings came to less than the 1200 livres set aside for ordinary expenses, the play came ‘under the rules’ and became the property of the company. Need I add that the net receipts rarely amounted to 1200 livres. An example is worth more than a long paragraph, so I shall cite the instance of a very popular author of the day, Louvet de la Saussaye, who, hearing that his comedy La Journée Lacédémonienne had sold out three evenings running, promptly started dreaming of a place in the sun and asked for his account. The theatre's accountant informed him by return that ‘as his play had brought in 12,000 livres over five performances, the author, in respect of his rights on the net takings, owed 101 livres 8 sous 8 deniers to the Comédie’.

The beggared playwrights (and all other writers, who were at the mercy of the booksellers) had no choice but to seek their livelihood from the high and mighty of their day. In such conditions, a man of letters had to be very brave indeed if he was to remain independent-minded. At the height of his fame Beaumarchais reckoned that his influence might serve to put an end to these annoying and harmful practices. After writing an open letter stating that he preferred a man of letters ‘to live honestly off the avowed income of his works rather than chase after sinecures and pensions’, he decided to take up the defence of the playwrights, and began by lobbying the Duc de Richelieu, who, as lord chamberlain, had the responsibility for actors. As a gesture to Beaumarchais, Richelieu asked him to look into the matter, to arrange discussions with the actors and report back to him. I shan't go into the details of the discussions that the author of The Barber of Seville entered into with his actors—the whole affair was a mixture of tragedy and farce. His discussions with the members of the Comédie Française, some of whom were his friends, led him to conclude that the only solution would be to form an authors' union that could stand up to the common front of the actors. What a pipe dream! At the very first meeting the writers squabbled and almost came to blows. Here, too, I shall spare you the details. They are much the same today: ‘If X comes, I won't. If that bounder Y signs, I won't.’ Writers have always had chips on their shoulders, jealousies, aversions: they are past masters at huffing and puffing.

By dint of diplomacy and determination, Beaumarchais none the less managed to get the leading lights in the profession together. Twenty-three playwrights met at his home in rue Vieille-du-Temple on 3 July 1777, dined heartily at his expense, drank several cases of his champagne and parted without having murdered one another. It was a miracle, and the sequel, no less miraculous, is the beautiful house on rue Ballu where the descendants of those twenty-three meet and administer a fortune in performing rights. After dinner, euphoric and rather tipsy, already dreaming of their percentages, the twenty-three had to elect four executives. Beaumarchais, Sauvin, Sedaine and Marmontel were elected by a large majority. Before the vote, it had been agreed that the executives would hold office permanently. After the vote, the minority, egged on by the four defeated candidates, attempted to go back on the issue of permanent office, claiming that the men elected ‘wouldn't fail to turn the prestige of their position to their personal advantage.’ At this, Beaumarchais grew angry, and the surprised minority withdrew their objection. But the battle was only beginning. Hercules himself would have flung up his arms in despair—compared with the theatres, the Augean stables were a model of order and cleanliness. In the end, he won.

On 13 January 1791, fourteen years later, after innumerable absurd lawsuits, grotesque dramas and farcical squabbles, the National Assembly, at Beaumarchais's behest, recognised the principle of copyright and abolished the exorbitant privileges of the actors. There were a few subsequent incidents, but the revolution had been accomplished. Sure of their rights, ‘reintegrated’, as we might say today, thanks to Beaumarchais alone, the writers were at last able to lord it over their masters. And over Beaumarchais himself. For example, the present honorary president of the French Society of Dramatic Authors, whose depth of thought is known to all, wrote in 1954 of the works of his illustrious predecessor: ‘Not one shudder announces the forthcoming mal du siècle; no awareness, no anguish concerning the condition of mankind.’ Could it be that playwrights belong to a different species? What was Figaro's opinion again? ‘Midges, gnats, maringoons …’ Writers are the oddest of insects, whether they are lice, cockroaches, or superb butterflies.

Beaumarchais was in Marseilles with Gudin when he heard that Voltaire, the king of the French butterflies, had died on 30 May 1778. Gudin, who had just been elected to the Académie Provençale, jumped at the chance to pronounce the first eulogy in memory of the great man. Having learned to their indignation that the clergy had refused to bury him and he had been interred in a disused chapel, the two friends thought of returning to Paris and asking Maurepas to transfer the remains of the author of the Henriade to the foot of Henry IV's statue in Paris, after a memorial ceremony from which the clergy would be banned. The imminence of his lawsuit with La Blache forced Beaumarchais to drop this generous but crazy plan. It is hard to imagine Louis XVI agreeing to snub the Archbishop of Paris simply to please Beaumarchais, who in any case soon hit upon another way of rendering a superb homage to Voltaire. I am not referring to the line in The Marriage (‘And Voltaire will never die’), but to the exhausting venture into which he sank a fortune and his spare time—the publication of the complete works of his fellow-writer (and fellow-clockmaker) M. de Voltaire.

It was no easy undertaking. Two-thirds of Voltaire's works were banned in France. Anyone selling or importing certain titles risked imprisonment, and any copies seized were burned. To publish an author in France in such circumstances was a challenge. It was a further challenge to print eighty or more volumes at one go. In addition, the rights in the published works were held by several different publishers. And finally, Panckouke, the owner of a powerful publishing concern, had had the same idea as Beaumarchais, and had two considerable advantages over him: he held all the unpublished manuscripts, and he had the backing of Catherine the Great, who had offered him large sums of money and the use of the St Petersburg presses. To publish the greatest French author in Russia was the same as condemning him a second time; and it would have made the French, who had lionized Voltaire during his lifetime, look both ridiculous and inconsistent. So Beaumarchais got angry and went to see Maurepas, who was both liberal and sceptical in his opinions, ‘to demonstrate what a disgrace it would be to let the Russians print the works of the man who was the greatest glory of French literature’. Figaro, as we have seen, wasn't exactly European-minded. Maurepas, like Beaumarchais, called France France and Europe nonsense; he promised to help him as much as he could, providing that he made the matter his sole responsibility. Beaumarchais hesitated. ‘Once I've laid out all my capital,’ he told the prime minister after due reflection, ‘the clergy will sue, the publication will be stopped, the publisher and his printers will be crushed, and the disgrace of France will be made complete and even more obvious.’ Maurepas gave the matter some thought in his turn, and promised to issue secret instructions to the post office to allow the complete edition to be dispatched throughout the kingdom without let or hindrance. This was merely the promise of an old man, who might die or be dismissed any day, but for Beaumarchais it was enough. In his vocabulary, reflexion didn't mean retreat.

No publisher ever displayed as much passion for an author as Beaumarchais did. Only the best would do for Voltaire. Having admired in England the type known as Baskerville, he bought several complete founts of it in different sizes at a cost of 50,000 francs. He wanted the finest Dutch paper. Finding that none was available, he paid a man to go and find out how it was made and bought three paper mills in the Vosges. But he still needed a location for his presses, which had to be outside France but sufficiently close to Paris to cut transport overheads. Hearing that the Margrave of Baden wanted to cash in on his massive but obsolete fort at Kehl, Beaumarchais offered to rent it. The margrave agreed, then went back on his word, or rather insisted that he should cut every passage in Voltaire's texts likely to offend morals in general and God and margraves in particular. Beaumarchais promptly sent his royal lessor an extremely insolent letter lecturing him and threatening to set up his press in another margravate ‘a few yards away from yours’, where his noble venture might function without hindrance. The margrave must have had a thick skin, or an empty pocket, because he gave in unconditionally.

Just as he had started Rodrigue, Hortales & Co. for his war in America, so he set up the Philosophical, Literary & Typographical Co. (plt) to defend Voltaire and his works. Officially, he was merely the Paris agent of plt; in fact he was its brain, its executive and its financier rolled into one. (As his lieutenant in Kehl he employed a brilliant but impetuous young man called Le Tellier. The proofs were read by Decroix. Condorcet wrote the notes.)

The ‘company that is I’ bought from Panckouke and a score of publishers scattered around Europe the rights in Voltaire's unpublished and published works for the considerable sum of 160,000 livres. Beaumarchais decided that there would be two editions: a de luxe, original edition, octavo, in seventy volumes; and a second, duodecimo edition in eighty-two volumes. Each would have a run of fifteen thousand copies. As early as 1780 he had a prospectus drawn up to attract subscribers. He expected thirty thousand advance orders, this being the figure required to cover his outlay (there was never any question of his making a profit on the venture), but he got only four thousand. In 1781 he knew that Voltaire was going to ruin him, or at least to lose him a fortune. Anyone else would have promptly gone out of business to limit the extent of the disaster. But the idea never even crossed his mind. The death of Maurepas, his accomplice, gave him an opportunity to close down, but he didn't do so.

The first volume came off the press in Kehl in 1783, the 162nd in 1790, making an average of twenty-three volumes per year, a considerable feat considering their bulk and their extremely high quality. Their lack of success was due, I think, to the fact that most great writers, except those who die young, go through a phase of neglect after their death that lasts for about twenty years. André Gide called this period of disaffection an author's purgatory. (His own books are just beginning to re-emerge, a quarter of a century after his death.) The French turned their backs on Voltaire in 1780, and Beaumarchais's hassles, as his publisher, with the Church and parliament didn't become widely enough known to create publicity. The clergy's imprecations against the “forge of iniquity’ in Kehl fizzled out like a damp squib. It is only fair to add that Louis XVI's ministers kept the promise given by Maurepas—the post office allowed Satan and his works to pass through without hindrance of any sort. So Beaumarchais financed and steered this admirable undertaking single-handed, with unfailing passion, concerning himself with the smallest of details, demanding and obtaining perfection. In so doing he rendered France a great service by preventing Voltaire from falling into the hands of the Russians, as well as delighting the bibliophiles of yesterday, today and tomorrow. For once, he got something out of what he did. Even though the venture left him virtually ruined, it gave his reputation a great fillip. France has accepted, without disdain and even with good grace, this royal gift made to her by M. de Beaumarchais.