[In the following excerpt, Undank traces the development of Beaumarchais's literary style and philosophies.]

How does it happen that in Beaumarchais, the energetic heir of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and scores of others—as if a predictable ripeness were not all—there appears a series of startling gaps and disabilities: effort without depth of principle, action emptying instead of filling and fulfilling the self, language hopelessly adrift. The very question is unorthodox and, if conscionable, raises others about the perils that had all along been incubating in those literary and ideological traditions Beaumarchais absorbed with the appetite of a self-interested, though intellectually complacent, disciple. The battle for men's minds was not yet won; nor were the corollaries of the new metaphysical, “scientific,” economic, or “natural” principles of the philosophes fully worked out in theory or application. But for Beaumarchais, who suffered (in other ways) from anxieties of influence and authority, those principles—or at least the small palette of truths from which he worked—were acceptably in place, if not, as he was bound to discover, without disturbing contradictions and inconsistencies. Like Voltaire, whom he worshipped, he hurled them as though they were stones, as solid and self-evident as the social and political conditions that provoked him. Everything, in short, appeared to Beaumarchais to be set—ideas, conditions, but also literary genres and language itself—waiting to be used, manipulated, or overcome with maximum efficiency. So much so that one critic has been able to write: “L'efficacité, voilà le mot-clef de la pensée et l'action de Beaumarchais.”¹ Ruled by strictly circumstantial and personal irritation, his style of reflection, a species of what Horkheimer calls “subjective reason,” hardly troubles to locate a philosophic ground or, rather, to rake over the packed earth it took to be one. It deploys itself instead as a pragmatic instrument of temporal advantage or adjustment, poking and reworking its objects to accommodate an imperious need or desire. And because of this, the acquired energies of Enlightenment thought, the then fashionable modes of feeling and expression, and more particularly the special issues he chose to engage—natural law, domestic virtue, mercantile freedom, the conspiratorial illusions of religion and social privilege—reveal themselves, more fully than ever, as implicated in strategies of power and control. Ramifying the alert, critical tradition that extends from Crébillon to Diderot and Laclos, he had easily and almost entirely converted these modes, and the issues as well, into commodities to be used against the manipulable obstacles of a changing and, one senses, an increasingly commercialized world. In the process he uncovered puckishly or subliminally—it is his finest legacy—the ways in which use and manipulation entail risks not only to the merchandise but to the user and to desire itself.

The best way of discerning a pattern of negotiations with resistant objects—though it is everywhere in his work, in the forms of that work, and in the characters inhabiting them—may come to us from the high ground of Beaumarchais' most successful decade, the 1770's, when the public figure and the private seem to coalesce, implicitly in the plays and explicitly in a publication like the Mémoires. Clearly, nothing here must be read literally; yet because this is so, his autobiographical projections impel us to discover recurrent designs and intentions, phantasms of triumph and muted obsessions with ways of channeling or directing time, language, desire, and all obstructive otherness. The most personal of these texts is one that hovers unexpectedly between the mirages of life and fiction, a relatively short sequence of letters from Beaumarchais to his (justifiably) petulant mistress, Madame de Godeville. Exhumed in 1928 by Maxime Formont, and published in a deluxe, paleographic edition of 400 numbered copies, these assembled parts of a “document littéraire,” which Ira Wade, three decades later, reburied with critical scorn,² have been wandering ever since like disturbed shades, attracting attention, as the publisher Alphonse Lemerre no doubt intended, for their thoroughly tameable scandalousness. (Beaumarchais' style, Formont warned, was “shameless” [vii].) In a larger, more generous context, the surprise of these letters comes in part from the way they struggle to constitute a single, episodic narrative to which all of Beaumarchais' other interests and activities are strenuously subsumed—in this not unlike the artful tracts devoted to the Goëzman affair or, for that matter, Beaumarchais' best plays, in which the primary action has constantly to fight down the interference of secondary ones. Exclusions of this kind are common enough, but not when, as in these letters, the entire relationship between the correspondents lives or dies by virtue of the effort or failure to dodge all contravening impulses, social, personal, and moral.

To write at all, Beaumarchais has to repress the claims of another mistress, Marie-Thérèse, the mother of his child; and though he can sporadically keep conscience at bay, a leitmotif of all the letters is the pressure of impinging circumstance—his business trips to Versailles, the distractions of friends, domestic affairs, and visitors, “ce tiraillement perpétuel que j'éprouve chez moi” (125)—the fact that he has as little time to see her as to write her. The letters come to us therefore, in their very furtive and hasty existence as well as in their dominant theme, as an embattled triumph of purpose and focus. Why then, in spite of its unquestionable authenticity, are we left wondering whether the correspondence is not some clever literary hoax? This far greater surprise is not unrelated to the first. So classically intense is the concentration of Beaumarchais' impossible “plot” to have and hold Godeville, so abstracted both from the realities surrounding him and the truth of her character, and so modulated are the psychological events leading to an inevitable climax and dénouement, that we find ourselves shifting uneasily between disbelief, literary reminiscence, and the wayward curiosity aroused by a historical “document.” If in fact this were a hoax, we would be privileged readers of an eerily reflexive drama in which the writer simultaneously portrayed and unmasked the blind, driving nature of lust as fiction or of fiction as a form of desire, the desire for mastery, above all. Epistolary traditions of libertine novels and echoes of Almaviva, Figaro, and Chérubin seem to combine forces here to produce a phantasmagorical effect of life duplicating art or of an artfulness so dogged as to summon life to imitate its rhythms.

Even the seasons conspire to obey. The letters begin, in the spring of 1777, with high spirits, wit, detachment, and gallantry, then move rapidly to a mood of incessant quarreling and provocation until they explode self-consciously, at summer's end, with the only letter Beaumarchais wants returned, a letter Godeville calls “mistifiante” (168) and in which Beaumarchais has asked her, but this time in detail, to write more salaciously: “la tendre maîtresse … se déshabille à chaque ligne” (160). He advises, metaphorically, that she unpin her dress in the first line and remove a ribbon in the second. But then: “Bandes en écrivant,” he dares to add, “et ta lettre me brûlera les doigts” (161). Though in the early fall he still explains and pleads, uselessly, his special needs,³ by wintertime he offers her a friend as his replacement; and, in the few remaining letters, which now symptomatically allow Godeville's financial difficulties to enter, love declines to friendship. Pathetically or sentimentally, in a cool January aftermath, she sends him as her replacement a dog, a bitch named Lisette, the fabulous embodiment of what Beaumarchais recognizes and quickly accepts, in the closing letters, as his ultimate love object—a lusty, serviceable, but marginal toy: “Je suis comme Frontin, moi; j'ai toujours aimé les Lisettes” (224).

The ironies and symmetries—of life?—are astounding. Not only does the progress of the correspondence trace the slow attrition of hope, if not desire, in the manner of Beaumarchais' trilogy; it demonstrates, as no other “document” could, his struggle to convert imaginatively whatever recalcitrant reality he hasn't eliminated, in this case Godeville herself, into a submissive and enticing agent of wish-fulfillment. The effort to coax her, as a playwright might his characters, into becoming “un peu putain” (171) so that he might receive “une émanation libertine par le canal de sa plume” (175); the urge, even as he writes, to arouse himself by enjoining her “par un doux effort de son doigt majeur” (189) to stimulate herself in his absence and so be ready to receive him—all of this offers a powerful comment on the mutually and habitually supportive relationship, in Beaumarchais' imagination, of purpose, desire, and language. The suspicion that the letters to Godeville may be a hoax arises because that imagination, in life as in art, hungrily appropriates and digests everything offered to it—literary genres and characters, real people, objects, or events—and constructs a series of willful projects in which the energies of life and art are determinedly confused. Aiming to override circumstance and to recover profit or pleasure, the imagination thrusts itself aggressively against all obstacles, hoping to transform them by word or deed (often word-deeds) and to bring about some readjustment of limits—necessarily transforming subjects as well as objects in the process. In fact, Beaumarchais' entire enterprise may be read as a dialectical effort to formulate or reformulate the fiction of an efficient self, adding and subtracting features and faculties as though they were forms of barter. In these letters he offers and holds to a compound of head and loins: “Entre la teste et la queue je conviens qu'il n'y a rien dans ma carpe personne; parce que je ne veux pas qu'il y ait quelque chose” (170). The willed suppression of feeling, which builds, as we know, upon a long aristocratic tradition—social no doubt before it became fictionally aporetic (in Marivaux, Crébillon, Rousseau, and Laclos)—exists, as part of the familiar eighteenth-century “inquiétude,” in the shadow of the heart's awesome persuasiveness and runs the risk of losing even the remnant of one (Constant, Lermontov). Beaumarchais wants to generate beyond himself, but onanistically, through his own agency, a contained, untroubled, and compliant heat—a heat that will circulate back to embrace him. To suggest this feverish paradox in the letters, he uses the image of a candle burning in the snow, the candle of his imagination, his “teste,” lit by physical desire, the burning candle of his loins, his “queue” (181-82). But is it possible? How long can the candle hold before it fizzles? Not only is Beaumarchais incapable of stemming the useless surplus of Godeville's sentiment, he longs for a display of wholehearted erotic passion that only sentiment can spontaneously grant. Does her possessive, vulnerable sentiment, forced to hide in the snow, ultimately have the greater resources? It is a problem Beaumarchais pondered, along with so many of his contemporaries. In any case, his metaphor, though he sets it down hopefully, suggests that a subject and object, the candle and the snow, are simultaneously melting and that would-be victories can only be local and momentary. In the end, the imaginary creatures of his letters and those of his more publicly theatrical fictions settle for much less than they had originally planned—for replacements, fetishes, and, in the exhaustions of time, the depleted longing for desire itself, “le désir du désir” (181).

“Deux choses en la vie: travaux et traverses.”

Notes et réflexions

It seems certain that for Beaumarchais and his male protagonists, difficulty not only results from enterprise but inspires it. Obviously Figaro wants to “renverser tous les obstacles,” and he is prefigured by the triumphant heroes of the Parades, Jean-Bête and the two Léandres, who eternally overcome Cassandre in order to carry off an eternal Isabelle. Their easy prey invariably lies blocked behind a petrified figure of authority so that the hindrance far outstrips their apparent object in terms of dramatic action and the intensity of expended effort. If, as Beaumarchais repeatedly wrote, desire is “augmenté par la contrariété” (NR, 102) and passion amounts to a desire “irrité par la contradiction” (LM, 167), his women (on or off stage) become valuable, in part, only to the extent that they quicken masculine invention and production, extending to their suitors the only ontological privilege available to them; a sense of being, developed through emulation and cunning. Men “know” themselves, feel themselves alive, when their quarry offers direct or indirect resistance and they can recognize themselves in their own creatively objectified effects. On stage, women must be surrounded by challenging obstacles; in life, it may be sufficient to imagine them: “Je prends un bloc de fille sans âme, je la forme, la crée, et nouveau Pygmalion, je tombe aux pieds de ma statue. Pour obtenir une femme qui le veut bien, il faut la traiter comme si elle ne le voulait pas” (NR, 184). In a century that reinvented the iconology of Galatea, here she is again (but in a totally original form) to suggest labor and not simply love but now the ambitious, self-gratifying labor of love—and even a work ethic that extends, in Beaumarchais' plays, to all forms of “industrie,” commercial (Les Deux Amis) and political (Tarare), promoting entrepreneurial zeal or an individualistic ideology of laissez faire. Despotism, “la mort de l'émulation” (NR, 40) is deplorable to the extent that it deprives us (men) of being, blocks movement and enterprise; but unwittingly and thankfully, it supplies, like authoritarian fathers, recalcitrant lovers, or distinctions of social class (“disconvenance sociale”), the inviting and necessary wall. Men live beneath the threat of turning to stone, of becoming reified like the commodities they shape into value or like the doltish, hoarding, merely possessive types (Cassandre, Bartholo) they challenge—old and unproductively fixed—unless they speculate, that is, continue to turn matter, indeed all otherness, into a means of salvation. Against this version of a death of the soul and even more organic parts or, quite simply, boredom, which, according to Figaro, “n'engraisse que les sots” (B, 192), Beaumarchais gladly pits the genius who knows how to “changer les obstacles en moyens” (NR, 30).

This, we might say, is where Beaumarchais' problems begin—problems that pursue their own dialectical chronology. But the clearest expression of doubt about “moyens” and “obstacles” will come at the end of his career, in the relentless wickedness of “the other Tartuffe,” Bégearss, the trailing sibilants of whose name announce the devil himself. Suzanne says, ironically, that she admires him as “un génie qui fait tout mouvoir à son gré” (M, 514); and to confirm her admiration he holds forth on ethics and politics, reserving goodness and truth for “les vertus routinières,” but investing everything else in “l'art de créer des faits.” A prefiguration of that other capitalist adventurer, Vautrin, and like him, built out of libertine fiction (or example?)—so that structures of finance and commodified sexuality coalesce—he too speaks as an artist or playwright, using “l'intrigue” and “l'intérêt” to score his “vastes et riches conceptions” (514), hoping to “dominer, en se jouant, les événements et les hommes.” Tartuffe is strenuously updated and shares with Beaumarchais' other Pygmalion-like protagonists the capacity, once again, to transform himself, his surroundings, and the people he has targeted. Already in the Parades, where Beaumarchais borrows copiously from the commedia dell'arte and Ghérardi's Théâtre de la foire, most obviously and traditionally the characters mask themselves as Turks, doctors, or merchants and, converting enemies into allies, carry off women and wealth. But echoing transformations occur at other levels and in the broader intention of these slight sketches as a whole. Language itself will not stay put by remaining true to its own laws or to the character mouthing it. It grows autonomous and plays with its own substance, clanking with alliterations and self-conscious puns, hissing and stammering with “cuirs,” elisions of z's and t's especially. Critics have already agreed that neither the characters nor their words are truly “natural.” Using a base of colloquial speech, Beaumarchais deforms and exaggerates its elements so that sounds, metaphors, grammar, and even spelling violently and indecorously explode. The characters alternately exploit these verbal resources, fitting them accidentally to their thoughts and designs, or they bumble along, carried off or entrapped by linguistic patterns they cannot tame: “De quoi z'est-il question de s'agir?” or “on a ma foi tort d'avoir raison de dire que …” etc. (LB, 89). They have the vague sense of a code, but they seem to be mimicking one that isn't theirs, the way secondary lovers in a comedy mimic their masters. Dispossessed, outsiders, they necessarily become parodists, exposed not only to the inflexible proprieties of language but to those who own it as a birthright, the audience, their betters. Bound to their roles by typological tradition, they must keep their place—as Figaro will his—and only the double-edged weapon of language and imagination, cutting them as it cuts their bonds, offers them an ultimately curtailed and tricky freedom to maneuver. The barriers of wealth and discourse that stand between them and the audience are reflected, within the plays, in the stratification of haves and have-nots—the “députés de la halle” at the gates of Le Normand's château d'Etioles, but also Léandre in front of Cassandre's hovel-fortress, even Gilles, Cassandre's servant, fuming at “ce vieux fou de Cassandre”'s inheritance (LB, 79). What allows gates and boundaries to shift or open is the forceful, imaginative play of signifiers and signifying objects, the surface of phenomena and its allusive strength; a pair of shoes that can be transformed into seven-league boots that give some sense of a limitless if imaginary space, the imposing babble of a doctor in his robe, the plays that Jean-Bête writes, perpetuating fictions, himself a fiction with a pedigree: “Je m'appelle Jean Bête, auteur de parades, fils de Jean Broche,” etc. (JB, 257). (Jean-Bête tells us, moreover, that his system of deceptive signs is ubiquitous; his cousins throughout the world occupy “les premières places” [258].) Speech, though shadowed by a conventional standard and, like the roles these characters play, by certain expectations, turns out to be a malleable substance, capable of releasing itself into unpredictable forms, of generating powerful illusions. And as speech braids and twists upon itself, it exposes the primitive and imaginative energies of its speakers as well as a morphogenesis of discourse itself, born out of struggle and desire. The have-nots have. What they have is a metamorphic process that threatens to destroy imposed restrictions and—without radically upsetting the staid economy of reference and privilege—to reveal and display what lies beneath. The audience, filled with amused condescension for these raggamuffins, warms itself vicariously before the heat of the anarchic and erotic impulses spectacularly displayed not only in their physical behavior but in the boisterous flow of their speech.

Beaumarchais pleasures the crowd as he pleasures himself with the creation and embodiment of liberated instinct—a primitive candle in the aristocratic snow. But unlike the transformations scored by his characters or by Bégearss' “art de créer des faits,” the melting here occurs within the chambers of fantasy and repression, repeatedly cooled by drafts of irony that keep identity and limits intact. In this respect, Beaumarchais' characters are less fortunate. They use irony on one another, but they are fully enlisted in a world of signs whose slightest readjustment entails real and extraordinary consequences. Even so slight a sketch as Colin et Colette revolves about this issue, since Colette thinks the bouquet of flowers Colin gathers for the Lord of the château is intended for her. And it is the reading of signs, their construction or misconstruction, the degree to which they attach themselves to being or drift about ambiguously, that weighs most heavily in the lives of these characters. In most of the Parades, they dress themselves, surround themselves, as we've seen, with borrowed signs, shedding what is for them their natural and socially accidental ones. The danger is that in the negotiation and transformation of surfaces—it is precisely this exclusive concentration on surface that characterizes the genre and marks it off from comedy—character itself, or a traditional, unified concept of it, is lost. Not simply lost, but experienced as a loss by the characters themselves. Arlequin, disguised and advancing yet once again upon the gullible Gilles and complimented by his master, Léandre, for “une telle métamorphose,” exclaims, “apeine pui-je me reconnoitre moi-même” (80). But the most fully developed, because most self-conscious, example is Jean-Bête—son, as he tells us, of Jean Broche, grandson of Jean Fonce, great grandson of Jean Logne, etc., a veritable landslide of theatrical presence and genealogy—who tumbles out of fiction, indeed as “auteur de parades,” writes the typological plays in which he appears, but insists, as I've said, that his family is everywhere in life, using “tartagèmes et déguisemens d'opéra” (256-57). To call oneself “Jean Bête,” even proudly, as he does, is to specify oneself as a merely functional and overused puppet, a mask without a face, a predetermined machine working superficial changes on other machines and, if not on oneself, then on one's appearance. In point of fact, true change, like the representation of true being or character, is out of the question; and Jean Bête locks horns with his audience the way unconscious drives strike against consciousness, each provoking but stalemating the other. The intertextual conventions of the parade leave about as much room to their authors and characters as social requirements allow for their aristocratic and upper-class spectators.

For the moment, I am deliberately avoiding the engaging problem of whether and how these same classes change once they are on stage, themselves characters. It is safe to say that the difficulty or impossibility of change, for all of Beaumarchais' characters, results, for some, in a sudden pause, a prise de conscience, which is also, as in Jean-Bête and Arlequin, an acknowledgment of loss and bewilderment. When it occurs—Figaro's monologue is the classic example—there is no startling revelation. It is as if a plumb line had, with great flourish, been dropped through layers of time and the debris of successive functions into a helpless, unnamable void. Most often, we never get that far. Before the peasants sing their usual, concluding couplets to Le Norman d'Etioles at the end of Jean-Bête, there is a highly suggestive scene in which Arlequin and Jean-Bête strip off their disguises and expose themselves—dressed as a bear and a Turk. Amidst this confusion, a shedding of “identities” that never uncovers a core, the usual devil of old French farces appears in the form of a Knight, displaced from a now missing Spanish interlude, where he had participated in a “scène des ombres” (268). Wrapped in a mesh stuffed with inflammable materials, he is set on fire as Arlequin the bear jumps on Gilles' back to announce that the parade “a fini chaudement.” If we read carefully, the devil's name is invoked in almost all of Beaumarchais' plays, and as a master of disguise he presides over them. (From Eugénie through Tarare, inchoate, shadowy, or primordial scenes occur with a deepening allusiveness.) But in Jean-Bête, the association of both an elusive identity (masks beneath masks) and a bricolage of fixed generic counters with the generation of a dark, diabolic heat that is also the heated animation of the play—Beaumarchais' candle—produces a moral irony that bears not only on the production of plays of this kind but on a point Beaumarchais will make most explicit in his Preface to Le Mariage de Figaro: the unchanging corruption beneath the shifting, inherited props and surfaces of culture, and in the uses made of them: “Les vices, les abus, voilà ce qui ne change point, mais se déguise en mille formes sous le masque des moeurs dominantes” (243). If particular identities and complexities of character are hard to come by, it is because the only differences among us crop up in the “thousand forms,” the masks that society and, in this instance, dramatic literature devise for our merely expedient purposes. Masks, without value in themselves, monopolize reality and signify, as money and art signify, by asserting themselves as manufactured materials, creations separated from their “natural” worth and from their creators and users, signaling only—when viewed at a reflective distance—toward the darkly diabolical stuff of our passions. The founding substance of desire, heaving toward its realization in a repetitive, phenomenal history, dissolves its source, its corporeal host, into little more than willful, visibly devious gestures.

In many ways, the transformations that Beaumarchais' characters work upon themselves confer temporary gratifications: the self, or at least the changing face of one, multiplies its possibilities, establishes new circumstances, overleaps social boundaries (without destroying them), and may succeed in coaxing reality into a complementary mutation or submission. Eugénie's beloved count (de Clarendon), who had mastered “cet art de persuader” and staged a mock-marriage, “tous les rôles distribués à chacun de nous, et joués”; Aurelly, who pretends not to be Pauline's father in order to place her with a respectable surrogate; Almaviva, first a cavalryman, then a “simple bachelier”; Figaro, who “par la force de [son] art” and his “calme,” become, as we initially see him, a dispenser of horse remedies, then human ones, but first and foremost a man of letters and songs, rewriting reality in order to stage precarious romances, Almaviva's and his own (in which “notre imagination est la feuille qui les brillante”⁴)—all these characters understand Bégearss' “art de créer des faits” and might say, with Bartholo: “Quand une chose est vraie! Si je ne veux pas qu'elle soit vraie, je prétends bien qu'elle ne soit pas vraie” (197). “Truth” is manufactured to fit circumstances and contingency; and given the fact that, as Figaro explains, “on fait comme on peut” (220), any convenient prop is seized upon—clothes, money, language—and converted into an efficient, expressive sign. If, for Bazile, a sack of gold always acts as “un argument sans réplique” (228), he handles words as though they were speculative investments, capable of creating new realities either from what is already available—“j'ai arrangé comme cela plusieurs petits proverbes avec des variations” (228)—or from what is not: “La calomnie, monsieur! … pas de conte absurde, qu'on ne fasse adopter aux oisifs d'une grande Ville en s'y prenant bien” (198-99).

Bazile's analogies, as we'd expect, are invariably musical—musical in form and diction—and in their musical persuasiveness they attempt to replace one set of facts by the imitation of another. Projected “events” become part of a thoroughly absorbing score in which, as Rameau's nephew would have understood, moral “dissonances” prepare for “l'accord parfait de l'or” (199)—money here transformed into a final harmonic chord. Bazile's aesthetic transformations of reality allow Beaumarchais to weave music, language, and finance into a telling homology that plays its way through the entire comedy. What all three have in common is the ability to adopt and adapt referents or to dispense with them altogether. They rely upon acquired traditions and work them into shapes that will accommodate some particular need or circumstance—in this, not unlike Beaumarchais the dramatist and lover. As Rosine discovers, when Lindor (Almaviva) asks her to sing a banal pastoral from La Précaution inutile, which is not only the subtitle of Beaumarchais' play but has a literary heritage of its own, the old words of the song have, nevertheless, their circumstantial “application” (216). First and foremost, she is free to substitute Lindor's name for the shepherd's. In Rosine's shepherdess heart, in the orchestra which “suit le mouvement de la Chanteuse” (217), in Beaumarchais' play, and in the springtime portrayed in the poem, “Tout fermente, / Tout augmente” (216)—all systems working their simultaneous variations on what is already in place. On the one hand, the entire situation is a dramatic commonplace to which Beaumarchais deliberately and ironically confines his characters, just as Rosine is enjoined by her music teacher, in spite of Bartholo's discouraging “Toujours la Précaution inutile” (215), to sing her now famous aria. On the other hand, the author and singer, by virtue of this very constraint and the self-consciousness it brings, must make it new—and more than coincidentally take delight in what is thematically at the heart of the play: difficulty (or precaution) overcome. Typically, subversion occurs from within a code by means of a transformative redirection of allusion that allows us at once to grasp a before and an after, a recurring motif or “reality” and its imaginative use or elaboration. The disparity between them is evident, often egregiously and comically so, as when Bartholo, another Alceste, preferring his “petit air” to Rosine's elegant one, substitutes “Rosinette” for “Franchonette” and compares himself sexually and favorably, but only in the dark, with Tircis of Virgil's eclogues (218). L'Eveillé, his young valet, is sleepy and dumb; La Jeunesse, his other servant, is old and fumbling. The currency of discourse, riding high and away from what it is supposed to represent—another text or a supportive referent—betrays its fragility in precisely those gaps we notice. Yet its status as currency, as representation, is precisely the source of its strength, so long as its fictions (seven-league boots, disguises, love, etc.) remain credible, effectively purchasing life, infusing, overriding, or overwriting it with fancy. Bartholo cannot sustain the comparision with Tircis, but Bazile is perfectly right about his plot to use slander—if he can carry it off.

If there is, then, in Beaumarchais the forecast of a Romantic concept of the creative power of language (and of signs in general), its power magically to transform, heighten, or even supplant reality, his trilogy ruefully performs the service of testing and undermining it. At first, in the Barbier, we are barely aware of this. Figaro, as usual, figures the artist-playwright, directing and coaching the count in every detail, correcting even his walk and the way he strums a guitar. “From, from, from …”—we hear the (self-fulfilling) prophesy of a sound Figaro prepares. And before Bartholo appears, his image swells imaginatively, rhythmically, musically, into an accumulated presence: “C'est un beau, gros, court, jeune vieillard, gris pommelé, rusé, rasé, blasé, qui guette et furette et gronde et geint tout à la fois” (186). Two associatively assonant, monosyllabic adjectives lead the pack, followed by another that breaks the harmony; then two adjectival phrases set in apposition, and another three adjectives, but expanded here to two syllables, each violently staccato and ending in the same sound; finally, a series of four verbs, the first two rhyming, the last two preceding a swift four-beat, adverbial fall. The deliberate impression of improvised virtuosity is strong—bodily energy forming patterns, breathing rhythms and rhymes in compelling sequences, breaking their repetition with musical dissonance. The same holds true for Figaro's portraits of Bazile and Rosine, the one suggestively filled with plosives and fricatives, the other with dentals, and both with a flexibly expansive scale of vowels and other consonants. In each case, it is a question not simply of exposition, of announcing the character, but of mastering and reducing him or her by “fixing” each with, variously, the noise of punches or concupiscent sounds that join the emotion of the speaker to a sense of the person described. Figaro whips himself into a passion as he represents his obstacles to himself or others; he becomes, as he says, the coals that glow as ill winds prevail against the count's love. Just to speak of that heat (or of anything that threatens opposition and so excites him) throws him into a fever (194). Fever in the snow. The count, for his part, knows how to build on Figaro's scenario and uses language with the same “constructive,” metamorphic strength. Pretending to be drunk, he plays with Bartholo's name until, from “Balardo,” to “Barque à l'eau” and “Barbe à l'eau” (202-203), he tricks a proper noun into becoming a pejorative imitation or description. A person is punned into a thing. We are not allowed to forget, throughout Le Barbier, that words erect illusions and celebrate repeated victories, that knowing how to work with them is not unlike handling a chisel—or a razor (220).

These examples of improvised sound and sense building on antecedent sounds and senses help confirm what I have already suggested about the musical and exploitive way Beaumarchais' characters harness their environment and themselves as instruments of a constantly adaptive design. The price they have to pay is already apparent in the first act of Le Barbier, when Figaro, after stressing his “intérêt” (185) and “utilité” (187), calls out, “Allons, Figaro, vole à la fortune, mon fils” (191), and divorces himself from his own person, becoming hijo de sus obras or obra de su hijo, as he will, increasingly, in Le Mariage. Just as phonemes and syllables slip partially from the weight of their own sound into new, often distant meanings—a linguistic parthenogenesis that half dispenses with the speaker, impelling him irresistibly to let the word spring forth—so Figaro's discourse comes to lose Figaro, or to generate another “Figaro,” in its own sensuous texture. What we witness in Le Mariage and then La Mère coupable is a complementary series of disjunctions that the success of Figaro's adventures manages to conceal in Le Barbier; people divided not simply against each other but against themselves, their acts, and their projects; social and historical boundaries that cannot be crossed; language, finally, detached, in striking ways, from effect and speaker. Beaumarchais' profoundest irony stems not merely from verbal and rhetorical structures but from this vision of a hopeful coupling dissassembled by time and, problematically, by nature.

As the curtain rises on La Folle Journée, we see “une chambre à demi démeublée”—a room not half-furnished, as we might expect, but half cleared; and at center stage, “un grand fauteuil de malade,” an adumbration of some further clearance. By contrast, the young Suzanne is trying on her headdress of orange blossoms, and the more practical but still youthful Figaro is measuring their space—between, as it turns out, the rooms of the aging count and countess. Scenic space is brilliantly converted into a temporal metaphor, and keeping one's space, youth, lover, in the face of what must be taken away becomes the play's most pathetic theme. By what artifice can Figaro keep Suzanne, whom he knows he may lose, even after he's kept her from Almaviva? How can Almaviva continue to love Rosine—or she, him—with the freshness of those “aguas frescas” that once gave their name to the château? Both the count and, as we'll discover in La Mère, the countess, struggle with civilization and its discontents, yield to natural lust, and long for its perpetuation as a source of regeneration, a reversal of time. In Beaumarchais' Notes, as in these plays, nature, which “nous ramène sans cesse à l'égoïsme qui est l'antipode de toutes les vertus sociales” (NR, 150), contends with virtue, which ought to be on its side—“Il n'y a point de vertu qui blesse la nature” (NR, 91)—but refuses. Since any display of desire that breaks with convention is forbidden, the count and countess revert to archaic forms of belief and, astonishingly, to popular superstitions that insist on recurrence and rebirth, a time without progress. Beneath the urgencies of “subjective reason,” contending with immediate circumstances, plotting a short-sighted future, and producing expedient signs, there stirs an irrational, unproductive impulse permanently to connect, to halt the flow, and to derive value and gratification from the immutable. With hindsight, we realize that this impulse informs all of Beaumarchais' “sentimental” work. But the contrast of a modern notion of practical time and reason—generating what critics have noticed, structurally, as a loosely or poorly knit series of changing situations at the expense of an overarching trajectory—with a primitive, organic, and timeless ethic comes to life most dramatically here. Not only are scenes more self-enclosed or waywardly self-indulgent, producing little or no effect on the positive action of the plot, they give rise to further sequestrations, monologues, or “arias” that baffle commentators who view them as unjustifiable displays or authorial intrusions.

Rosine and Almaviva, much like the audiences watching the Parades, warm themselves before the flame of lower-class energy which, dampened by time and convention, smolders in them as well. It is, literally, proximity that counts: their bedrooms will touch the bedroom of the newlyweds; more than this, Rosine wants Suzanne to be the first to speak to her on the morning of her honeymoon: “Le berger dit que cela porte bonheur aux épouses délaissées” (269); and Almaviva, invoking his seigneurial rights, a religious ritual reduced to superstition, gestures back through history and the ruin it has brought, to the youth of a world of privilege, which is also, symbolically, the perpetual youth of desire. (Desire arises, according to the Prologue to Tarare, without fixed object. The ghosts of unborn generations learn it blindly and empirically through pleasure: “En jouissant, je sens que je désire” (391). And, with consciousness and time, pleasure inheres in the very act of desiring—“En désirant, je sens que je jouis”—so that, as in the Godeville letters, desiring to desire, the yearning for a foretaste of pleasure and, more urgently, the sense of life it provides, like the seigneurial ritual, is sufficient.) Suzanne is transformed into a fetish, and throughout Le Mariage, fetishism and superstition, irrational but hopeful remedies, spread contagiously. From Figaro, in the first scene, rubbing his forehead for an idea, worrying that he may “fertilize” it into sprouting horns (268) and begging Suzanne to kiss him “pour m'ouvrir l'esprit” (269) to, progressively and more seriously, the exchange of dresses between Suzanne and Rosine in the final act, touching bodies, wearing the clothes, or carrying objects others have held or worn charges or recharges the deepest currents of being and feeling. Transformations that language, cunning, and disguise continue to accomplish superficially—prompting Suzanne in La Mère, for example, to think that Bégearss has some “talisman” to “dominer les esprits” (514)—here yield to a suggestive, animistic magic that is no doubt their ancient model. Chérubin, the image of indiscriminate, polymorphous desire, “tout entier à chaque événement” (265) and so also the expression of a constantly renewed present, heedless of consequences—as Figaro was on occasion in Le Barbier (“Qui sait si le monde durera encore trois semaines?” [219])—fastens on words and things that represent pleasure and therefore the pleasure of desiring. He calls out “amour” or “volupté,” and they make him tremble (276), or he sings wistfully about carving his lover's name on a tree (291). As soon as he appears, he envies Suzanne's privilege of undressing her mistress, “épingle à épingle” (275), and transfers his lust alternately to Suzanne and Rosine's night ribbon. It is, paradoxically, Rosine's ribbon, pin, and clothing that transmit her diaphanous presence from one end of the play to the other, stirring hearts, leading the action, even giving rebuke. All other signs and strategies are used to avert peril or to take what hasn't been given—“Recevoir, prendre et demander; voilà le secret en trois mots” (289)—but these induce euphoria as they are wafted to and from receptive characters. Chérubin does not, inexplicably, get to wear Suzanne's dress, as Figaro had planned; instead, he kneels for a lover's crowning in the style of Fragonard and receives the countess' bonnet. Her ribbon, tied to his arm, is now stained with blood—a wound caused by a horse, the perennial symbol of uncontrollable passion. Ribbons that have touched the skin of a loved one, he explains (295), have curative powers. And as erotic suggestions proliferate their concealed but deeply physiological meanings, Rosine wipes his eye with her handkerchief—the same that she will put to her lips (302)—and, lost in one of her frequent reveries, as if to indicate a steady, enduring inwardness untapped by all the events around her, she tucks the ribbon between her breasts.

These acts occur in a quasi-oneiric mood, which only the count, speaking of his “fantaisie” and “irrésolution,” articulates: “quand la tête se monte, l'imagination la mieux réglée devient folle comme un rêve” (315)—leading us to believe that the authentic action of La Folle Journée takes place at some irrational, subterranean depth, in spite of its outer and obvious bluster. In the swirl of his deep confusion, matched to be sure by the confusions he and others lucidly engineer, both gloriously mirrored in the anarchic darkness of the final act, he cries out “où suis-je?” (315). But the dream-story of the pin, the ribbon, and the dress is not yet over. Suzanne's note to Almaviva is accompanied by Rosine's pin instead of a seal, and he pricks his finger on it—Rosine's revenge? his conscience? And as he searches for it (since it alone must be his positive response to the rendezvous Suzanne pretends to arrange), Figaro, wondering why he bothers, comments ironically: “D'un object aimé tout est cher” (344). Does the count know whom he loves? Does desire have an object? Amazingly, it is the countess' hand that is graceful and soft, her arms firm and delicate, when he thinks he's holding Suzanne and actually holds his wife dressed in Suzanne's clothes. Love, he knows, is an illusion, “le roman du coeur” (358), and pleasure weaves its ephemeral plot. But desire, leaping up from what is felt to be a threatened source, reaching always for its own youth, and cherishing its own substance, searches for its mirror, or invents one. (Bartholo was perhaps not wrong after all to compare himself to Tircis and to reply that all cats were gray at night.) Meanwhile, Figaro's heart beats wildly, and Suzanne's hand burns as they pretend to be Figaro and the countess (361). As clothes become transformative fetishes in a world gone “mad” with dreams, the countess flings down her ribbon, pretending it is Suzanne's garter; and Chérubin, as the play ends, runs off with it. He too will suffer, as we know, from making his desire touch ground, from finding an object and slipping into time.

At this subliminal level of the play, it is as useless to speak of identities as it would be at its other level of shrewd and vigilant exchange. Particularities of form and experience evaporate, disclosing the universal “egoism” of lust (or “nature”) striving against the impositions of culture and toying with random objects, seeking in them the inspiration or instrument of its own renewal. Almaviva's wife has, in three years, turned, provocatively, to stone, and yes, like Pygmalion, he wants to “renew” her, to “ranimer … le charme” (359) in order to enliven his own heart or loins. Difficulties, as we've come to expect, only incense him; and the entire play may be viewed as an ironically and monstrously complicated effort—paralleled by the no less tortuous adventures of Figaro, Marceline, and Rosine—to retrieve and refurbish what was already his. Suzanne, toward the end, exclaims, “Ah! ce pauvre Comte! quelle peine il s'est donné …” and Figaro concludes, “Pour faire la conquête de sa femme!” (363). With Marceline, the incestuous or narcissistic ramifications are clearest; yearning for her youth in Figaro, she finds her son and gladly settles for the reminder and remainder of it. As Chérubin, flitting from female to female, proves, pleasure in its purest state is blind, careless of difference, and it confers upon its agent no particular shape or—the suggestion is slight but remarkable, given Chérubin's name and his hermaphroditic appeal—sexual identity. Nature, Suzanne sings, banally and dismissively, in her final couplet, “nous conduit, dans nos désirs, / A son but par les plaisirs” (372); yet in the erotic, excited night of Act V, beneath the burgeoning chestnut trees announcing the rebirth of love, as in so many rococo paintings, nature leads her flock through a phantasmagorical dance in which Chérubin unknowingly kisses the count and the count transmits his kiss to the countess, thinking she is Suzanne. Meanwhile, Figaro gets slapped, and instead of the yelp of pain the count expects, he hears a laugh—Suzanne's. In this deliberately disorienting vaudeville, alternating quintessential, untargeted, or misplaced passion and violence and so, in some sense, conforming not only to the count's formula for successful, abrasive love (love that is “piquant” or “agaçant” [359]), but to Figaro's also (Figaro who, when “il pleut des soufflets,” cries out that Suzanne's are jewels [363]), desire, like the countess' clothes, ricochets pleasingly if ludicrously, annihilating social distinctions or any distinctions at all.

Nature's (diabolical?) darkness plays, paradoxically, the role of another enabling and transformative cover or mask, pointing, within nature itself, to the necessity of illusion, accident, and distance—those things that darkness naturally provides as it releases us, literally, from sight and, figuratively, from rational or social and moral constraints. In the light of this darkness, it is not simply a question, however conscious and revolutionary, of artificial conventions and the injustice of adventitious circumstance that critics advertise—the haves and the have-nots, the productive and unproductive elements of society, inhibiting or abusive class distinctions, the political ideology of the play—but a perhaps more radical question of the impossibility and uselessness of any political solutions at all. If Le Mariage is Beaumarchais' crowning achievement, it is because the comedy seems to run away from him (just as it runs away from Figaro) and to take on a hidden life and depth of its own, one in which desire cannot work out a politics for its own salvation. If it could, as in fact it attempts to do, by control and manipulation, trapping lovers and advising them how to “act”—Beaumarchais' solution with Godeville or Almaviva's advice for women in general—it would lose the freshness, lawlessness, and spontaneity that are the conditions of its existence. How can art produce an eternally new and “natural” mistress? How can marriage, even to one's Galatea, avoid the repetitions that destroy desire: “elles nous aiment, nous aiment! (quand elles nous aiment)” (359)? There is no moral, rational, or social context that can contain its function: “Pour suivre l'ordre moral, on fait partout violence à l'ordre physique” (NR, 40). Is this why the plot of Le Mariage grows cumbersome, stalls, shuttles from track to track, from an explicit vision of purpose or warring purposes and schemes to one of unresolvable hopes and sighs, the dimness and confusion at the end of the tunnel? Though desire sets itself against convention, it is also set against its own conventionalization, its realization in anything but the impermanent, momentary collision of pleasure—and to this extent, against itself or the illusions of its practitioners.

Notes

1. Francine Levy, Le Mariage de Figaro: essai d'interprétation, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 173 (1978), 215.

   References to Beaumarchais' works are drawn, for the sake of convenience and uniformity, from the Pléïade edition, ed. Maurice Allem (1949), which is scheduled for a final rehauling this year. References to the Parades are, however, drawn from the edition of Pierre Larthomas (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1977) and those to the Notes et réflexions, from the edition of Gérard Bauer (Paris: Hachette, 1961). The following abbreviations have been used to indicate titles: NR, Notes et réflexions; JB, Jean-Bête à la foire; LB, Les Bottes de sept lieues; E, Eugénie; B, Le Barbier de Séville; MF, Le Mariage de Figaro; M, La Mère coupable; T, Tarare; LM, “Lettre modérée sur la chute et la critique du Barbier de Séville”; UM, “Un mot sur La Mère coupable”; EG, Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux. I would here like to acknowledge a number of insightful critics whose work on Beaumarchais, although unmentioned in these notes, is worth consulting either as an antidote or an adjuvant to my own: Guy Michaud, Jacques Schérer, John Hampton, Anthony R. Pugh, Jacques Seebacher, and Anne Ubersfeld.

2. Lettres à Madame de Godeville (1777-1779), p. viii. Writing in George R. Havens and Donald F. Bond, eds. The Eighteenth Century, vol. 4 of A Critical Bibliography of French Literature, ed. D. C. Cabeen (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1951), Wade said, “they have no great historical or literary value” (p. 69).

3. His sexual tastes, which increasingly (?) had little to do with copulation and everything to do (predictably) with his extraordinary Tongue, may be studied in letters reproduced in Renée Quinn's “Beaumarchais et Amélie Houret: une correspondance inédite,” Dix-Huitième Siècle, 7 (1975), 35-39.

4. In the discarded first scene of Le Mariage, Beaumarchais described Suzanne as one of those more or less precious diamonds we polish with our imaginations, then lovingly shape in our hearts: “l'amour est le metteur en oeuvre” (Le Mariage de Figaro, ed. J. B. Ratermanis, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 63 [1968,] p. 30).