SOURCE: “The Currency of Exchange in Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro: From the ‘Master Trope’ Synecdoche to Fetish,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, Fall, 1991, pp. 57-84.

[In the following essay, Pucci argues that Beaumarchais's use of changing values and the loss of aristocratic privilege in The Marriage of Figaro transforms the play from a mere light comedy.]

The importance of the droit de seigneur in Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro lies in its staging as an avowed anachronism and simultaneous translation from ritual act into an economy of monetary exchange. Such transformation is introduced from the very outset in the opening remarks of the play. In Act I, scene 1, Suzanne, first lady-in-waiting of Count Almaviva's wife, apprises her fiancé Figaro of Almaviva's designs on her in an allusion to the “ancien droit de seigneur.”¹ Indeed, Suzanne reveals the conversion of this “former” ritual in the metaphor of its new economy: “Et bien, s'il l'a détruit, il s'en repent; et c'est de ta fiancée qu'il veut le racheter en secret aujourd'hui” (174, my emphasis).²

The custom that granted the seigneur of a manor first right to bed any woman in his domestic entourage is explicitly displaced in the Mariage de Figaro by an economy based on a medium of exchange there where previously aristocratic birthright was by definition self-sufficient. Through this new equivalence, the Count endeavors to preserve the feudal rights that he had formally renounced upon marrying the Countess and, in the sequence of the play's events, that he explicitly denounces.³ In effect, the Count's renunciation of this aristocratic privilege is evoked as an event having already taken place, according to Figaro, who recounts that it had been the Countess' precondition of their marriage (Act I, sc. x, 194). Thus, Almaviva's relinquishing of the droit de seigneur has preceded his marriage, which full ceremony supposedly took place after the end of the Barbier de Seville and before the Mariage de Figaro.⁴ In other words, the Count's renunciation of this feudal privilege is from the outset represented as equivocal in its relegation to an unwritten past situated in the interstices between the two comedies. During what precise historical periods the droit de seigneur functioned as an empirical practice is irrelevant to its transformation in Beaumarchais' play from the symbolics of seigneurial privilege to the contracts and conventions of a monied society.⁵ In effect, the consequences of entering into this new system of monetary exchange surpass the Count's expectations, bringing instability to the very objects of desire he endeavors to retain and to appropriate. Far beyond merely dressing an old habit in new clothes, his investments begin to take on independent and, as will be illustrated, indeed arbitrary value, as they are liberated from a stable and univocally predetermined set of intersubjective symbolic relations to fluctuate within another signifying system that restructures them.

What is at stake in the declared shift, in the offer of gold to Suzanne—a purse that would secure her and her husband's future? Within this other economy, money can always be reappropriated, reassigned. Not so the privilege of the seigneur, which remains fixed in value and affixed to the birthright of aristocratic lineage. In order that money have currency, it cannot be exclusive to one or a few individuals, but rather, by definition (from the Latin currens, currere), must run, circulate throughout a given society to work an exchange through agreed upon conventions of equivalence between object and value, a solely contractual exchange between its members. Thus, money renders the question of ownership an open one because it can pass from one pocket to another: from the Count to Figaro's pockets, from the Countess to Suzanne, to Marceline, to Figaro. Indeed, upon hearing of the Count's scheme, Figaro immediately enters himself into the equation: “Ah! s'il y avait moyen d'attraper ce grand trompeur, de le faire donner dans un bon piège, et d'empôcher son or!” (174).

The Count is thus obliged to enter into conventions where others may wield a similar power, albeit a lesser one. He certainly is provided with more wealth than the other characters in this play; nevertheless, the fact that others can and, historically speaking, indeed at all levels of society, even the peasants, did enter into the game of appropriating money for themselves, changes irremediably the characteristics of power inherent in the droit de seigneur.⁶ Everyone can become a player, anyone can enter into negotiation and can initiate activity previously reserved as an exclusive and innate right for a particular social-political individual and class.

The value of the gold that functions in Le Mariage de Figaro to tantalize Suzanne and Figaro is thus the same value that allows them to escape the Count's renewed obstacles to their marriage. For if the Countess' aging governess Marceline can, under the tutelage of the Count, insist on claiming either the money owed her by Figaro or on his marrying her—this based on a contract signed by Figaro himself—Suzanne can also come into possession of the funds necessary to buy out her competitor. Alternately, Suzanne and Figaro can decide that the Count's gold does not have the value to buy her favors.

Money then must operate according to the contract and conventions that endow gold like any other legal tender of exchange with value. And this value does not inhere in the object itself, nor in the intersubjective and/or symbolic relations, such as between seigneur and vassal of pre-capitalist societies. According to Jean-Joseph Goux:

C'est une des caractéristiques du rapport capitaliste que d'avoir, pour la première fois, établi un clivage entre les rapports intersubjectifs et ce qui fonctionne depuis lors comme fonction économique. Dans toutes les sociétés pré-capitalistes, qu'elles soient tribales, asiatiques, antiques ou féodales, le rapport social dominant était aussi un rapport intersubjectif.⁷

And again, “la monnaie titrée … implique un détour législatif et un rapport d'échange, mais en même temps, d'une évidence énorme, un rapport désaffecté, a-signifiant, entre des individus abstraits qu'aucun rite symboliste ne désigne l'un à l'autre” (Goux, 147, my emphasis).

This essay will demonstrate how the principle of fluctuating, abstract, indeed arbitrary, value subverts the exclusive signifying authority of seigneurial privilege and in analogous fashion how it functions to disrupt and thus to reformulate the symbolic and representational system coextensive with the ancien régime. For, despite the Count's efforts, there can be no direct translation of aristocratic privilege into a guiding metaphor of monetary superiority. An irrevocable change produces a shift to a distinctly different notion of value itself that shapes a new relation between master and servant and articulates another context, a new economy within which dramatic action and language signify:

C'est dans la société capitaliste que pour la première fois, la dimension signifiante de la production et de l'échange est forclose. Autrement dit, le libidinal, l'intersubjectif, le sémantique se trouvent complètement clivés du rapport économique dès lors découvert comme tel.

(Goux, 148)

I will maintain, moreover, that such a different process of signification and symbolization is precisely what defines Le Mariage de Figaro as other than an exclusively light, elegant, and witty eighteenth-century comedy. This process is responsible for producing a different sense of dramatic organization, as well as for creating the liberating and even inflammatory reaction elicited in audiences from the play's very first performances.⁸

The world which Beaumarchais' characters inhabit, its follies, injustices, and passions, is staged through the tensions between fixed symbolic value represented in the codes of seigneurial privilege and in the shifting, unfixed signifiers of arbitrary value inherent in the economy of monetary conventions. The fixed value of Count Almaviva's privilege, charted through the notion of blood lines, of lineage, becomes unraveled in another kind of value that this text clearly bestows on the play's other central intriguer, Figaro. Money must necessarily pass from one owner to another, having no final or ultimate proprietor, no stable assignation—a third, independent entity, so to speak, that intervenes or arbitrates in a new kind of abstract exchange between two individuals and therefore that redefines the intersubjective as well as symbolic relation of count and valet. Thus Figaro, lacking not only lineage but even a family name, circulates (runs) throughout the classes and professions of his society, defining himself as a product and a function of disparate, heterogeneous experiences, passing from one profession, from one métier, from one identity to another.

In the court scene (Acte III, scene xv), Marceline demands either her money lent to Figaro or Figaro himself in marriage; Doublemain, the court clerk, opens proceedings by introducing the plaintiff and defendant, all of whose Christian names are announced: “Barbe-Agar-Raab-Madeleine-Nicole-Marceline de Verte-Allure, fille majeure contre Figaro … Nom de baptême en blanc?”(261). Figaro responds, “Anonyme” (261), a term which is immediately echoed in Brid'oison's dim attempt to construct a patronym: “A-anonyme! Què-el patron est-ce là?” (261). Figaro's lack, like the parody of Marceline's lengthy list of unknown, common names, points out in both verbose and laconic anonymity the discrepancy between the syntax of inherited right and the metonymic aphasia of the commoner's plight.

As a legal or social entity, Figaro has no fixed value. The aristocratic name as patronym is valorized by its position within a genealogy or signifying chain (syntagm) linking one generation, one family line (lineage) with another. A former valet in the service of the Count, Figaro appears in the Mariage to occupy a position simultaneously of manager, of major-domo and valet at the château Aguas-Frescas. His anonymity, his lack of determination within a given social, legal system beyond that which the Count chooses to bestow upon him, functions on the one hand as a mark of shame; on the other, this blank patronymic space of the white page bestows on Figaro the virtuosity of several diverse social positions and of plural, unstable values attributable to the multiple functions and roles he variously plays.

No sooner than the name or lack thereof has been pronounced, the clerk asks, “Contre anonyme Figaro. Qualités?” (262). Figaro gives the surprising answer, “Gentilhomme”—to which Count Almaviva, astonished, reacts with “Vous êtes gentilhomme?” (262). And Figaro retorts, “Si le ciel l'eût voulu, je serais fils d'un prince” (262). Certainly, there is much comedy in the notion of Figaro the gentleman, who at the very moment he speaks is in the process of wresting his fiancée from the clutches of the seigneur and of attempting to avoid paying his debt to Marceline while dodging his contractual obligation to marry her. Figaro's allusion to being a gentleman or to the possibility of having been born one runs counter to the facts. Clearly, this possibility does not seem to be in the cards, nor written in the heavens by fate, by Fortuna. Even the always half-inebriated Antonio, gardener of the castle and uncle of Suzanne, shows prejudice against this hero for his lack of surname, of patronym, of origin. Scene xix of the same Act III illustrates Antonio's disdain for one he pronounces a social nobody. In a strong peasant accent and in heavy dialect, Antonio's prejudice gives comic testimony to the absurdity of the nevertheless all pervasive social snobbery: “Irai-je donner l'enfant de not'soeur a sti qui n'est l'enfant de personne?” (276).

Yet another register to this apparent blatant comedy involves a redefinition of the lack of a fixed value usually attributed to the importance of a name—that indeed liberates the value of an individual from his/her own name and from the predetermined notion of origin and birthright. The blank space next to the name Figaro signifies both a black mark against the cheerful intriguer and at the same time presents in its very whiteness, emptiness or transparency, a kind of tabula rasa on which any name might be written, even, as Figaro boldly suggests, that of a nobleman.

Both in the Barber of Seville, the first play of the trilogy that features Figaro, the Count Almaviva, and the Countess Rosine, as well as in the Mariage, Figaro dwells on his varied life through the recounting of difficulties he has had to overcome and which stand in the place of his origins to construct an identity⁹: from baby in swaddling clothes stolen by the gypsies, to student of chemistry and surgery, to horsedoctor, playwright, writer of economic theory, and journalist, to apothecary, barber, and valet.

Yet if Figaro cannot be defined in terms of his antecedents, neither is he a sum of the series of his experiences. Contrary to the picaresque hero who comes up through the ranks of all trades and professions from social nobody, often as a bastard, to a position of social and political legitimacy and authority, Figaro's multiple experiences do not lead up the ladder of success; nor do they forge a coherent social entity, usually the end product of a picaro's peregrinations and adventures; instead, they remain heterogeneous events, unassimilable into an identity of any fixed status. A particular role or profession does not confer any permanent social, moral, or ontological identity. Figaro's celebrated autobiographical monologue evolves into a discourse of non self-recognition in which, as opposed to the gay madcap account of his wanderings in Le Barbier de Seville, he describes himself here as merely a loose aggregate of diverse experiences and roles. Indeed, Figaro himself becomes like the currency he endeavors to appropriate—passing from one owner and profession to the next, without any ultimate proprietor or stable assignation—an independent entity.

Figaro raises this question of identity in the celebrated tirade of Act V, which comes at the end of the long, nearly frantically paced enumeration of former roles and follows the manifestation of his bitter anger towards the Count, to whom he addresses the first part of his invective: (“vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus” [304]).

O bizarre suite d'événements! Comment cela m'est-il arrivé? Pourquoi ces choses et non pas d'autres? Qui les a fixées sur ma tête? Forcé de parcourir la route où je suis entré sans le savoir, comme j'en sortirai sans le vouloir, je l'ai jonchée d'autant de fleurs que ma gaieté me l'a permis: encore je dis ma gaieté sans savoir si elle est à moi plus que le reste, ni même quel est ce moi [Beaumarchais' emphasis] dont je m'occupe: un assemblage informes de parties inconnues; … maître ici, valet là, selon qu'il plaît à la fortune.

(307, my emphasis)

In the public première, this tirade (199-202) shocked the audience. Such a reaction stemmed not only from the explicit challenge to the aristocrat's right to privilege. At stake as well is the very definition of the individual as conceived in pre-revolutionary society, released here from the strictures imposed by the fixed value of birth, lineage, and social position.

Figaro's self-description disconnects each profession and métier from a specific social station. Each of his experiences is defined exclusively according to the rules, contracts, and conventions that constitute the particular profession rather than with respect to the individual social identity that subtends, that fulfills them. The retrospective coherence of the picaro's completed experience, recounted from the safe distance of a narrative past, here breaks down at several moments in a narrative that splinters Figaro's long disquisition into isolated, random events of a present tense which denies self-construction in resisting temporal closure.

The individual as represented by Figaro in Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro no longer constitutes a link in the patronymic chain, nor an entity unto himself, a social, ontological origin from which actions emanate. Indeed, each profession as well as dramatic act and utterance tends to retain the value endowed it within the localized specific context of its respective social, moral, and linguistic conventions. Thus Figaro is not inscribed as one of those marginal eighteenth-century figures—either socially as a picaro or culturally as a foreigner—whose audacious description and judgment of contemporary society is tempered by his/her difference and distance from it. Rather, it is precisely the ways in which new values, a new economy, (re)construct an individual entity within society that Beaumarchais' comedy becomes both innovative and subversive. The personage of Figaro introduces a new system of valorization through which a different, even troubling, notion of the individual coincides with the “bizarre” society under examination.¹⁰

Note that one of these fantastic events to which Figaro alludes is his imprisonment, precisely because of the economic treatise he authored on “the theory of value and its relation to the net product of national wealth” (200). Though Figaro's economic theory is developed at greater length in a manuscript variant, the issue at stake still remains the question of how to determine economic value.¹¹ The notion of value is posed as a question, in this case with respect to the net or real wealth of a nation. Of course, Figaro may very well be transcribing Beaumarchais' real financial questions concerning the economic system in France at the time; what is more, however, the notion of economic value and of value itself is consistently being placed into question to coincide with many levels of the play's structure. Herein lies precisely the discrepancy between value as inherent in the notion of money as object and value as it fluctuates with respect to money. Asking the question implicit in theory of how value is to be determined clearly proved unsettling to the reigning establishment that threw Figaro in jail.

Indeed, the question or theory of value wages a pitched battle throughout this play between, on the one hand, the fixed, permanent signifieds of privilege by blood and birthright as conceived, specifically, within the genealogy and lineage of syntactical meaning; and, on the other hand, the destabilization of these values through the play, the fortuna that dismantles the syntactical structure of logical cause and effect, thus contributing to the fluidity, the arbitrary nature of character identity in the course of a proliferation of seemingly unrelated theatrical events. The notion of fortuna itself, integral to the play's events and to the series of coincidences where lack of, or mistaken, identity abounds, receives a new meaning, one that is at odds with the notion of Fate in the world view of the aristocracy. According to Max Weber, Fortuna is a quality of life proscribed by the bourgeoisie in favor of steady rational progress to be achieved through work, family sentiment, and careful planning as well as systematic, prudent reasoning. Also for Pierre Szondi, the workings of Fortuna pertain exclusively to an aristocratic world view.¹² But like Fortune, in its sense of economic wealth that operates in the Mariage de Figaro to destabilize the notion of fixed value, Fortuna acquires new connotations at odds with those traditionally associated with the aristocracy as well as with respect to Weber's notion of its proscription within bourgeois ideology.

Fortuna operates here not to enthrone a prewritten, predetermined, though always in the present instant, unknown script of life or of a play. Rather, in the Mariage de Figaro, the open-ended value of money, of fortune, like the unseen, unprepared event of Fortuna, works to liberate the strictures defining reality as a stable linear entity.¹³ The seemingly unpredictable events and experiences that constitute Figaro's life, the Fortuna that seems to be in charge of defining or rather of not defining or determining this persona, parallel the series of unforseen events and coincidences that also constitute the “coups de théâtre” which knot and unknot, or rather, which unravel the central plot of this comedy.

In Act IV, scene i, Figaro remarks on the uncanny coincidence that he is, as it turns out, the son of Marceline and Bartholo, gaily alluding to this new turn of events that effectively removes the obstacles Count Almaviva has set in the path of Suzanne's and Figaro's marriage. Yet, this reconciliation between long lost son and parents actually serves to challenge the significance of fixed identity. First, the text qualifies such a discovery as the stroke of chance, the coup de théâtre that, despite its felicitous outcome through subverting the Count's designs, has also disrupted Suzanne and Figaro's well-laid plans. Alluding to this new disclosure, Suzanne notes that “Aucune des choses que tu avais disposées, que nous attendions, mon ami, n'est pourtant arrivée” (279). And Figaro responds: “Le hasard a mieux fait que nous tous, ma petite. Ainsi va le monde; on travaille, on projette, on arrange d'un côté; la fortune accomplit de l'autre … tous sont le jouet de ses caprices” (279, my emphasis).

The discovery of Figaro's origins is not inscribed within a restored syntactical order of either noble or common lineage but as the stroke of chance whose significance is to be almost exclusively measured as an element of the constantly changing fortuitous context of (dramatic) events. Yet another inscription of Figaro's newly discovered origins as a mere element of chance appears in his long monologue as one event among many others defined as a “bizarre suite d'événements” (306). In fact, the supposed moment of discovery is defined in terms of a baffling series of pronouns terminating in a negative and then interrogative assertion of identity: “Prêt à tomber dans un abîme, au moment d'épouser ma mère, mes parents m'arrivent à la file. On se débat, c'est vous, c'est lui, c'est moi, c'est toi, non ce n'est pas nous; eh! mais qui donc?” (306). Figaro's discovery of his origins then is reminiscent of their initial lack, because it fails to (re)establish a lineage of coherent syntactic development. On the contrary, disclosure of the patronym, of the paternal origin, functions paradoxically within this comedy to break the linear continuity of the master('s) plot.

It has often been remarked that Le Mariage de Figaro unleashes such a series of complicated events as to render their sequence and sometimes their outcome difficult to recall coherently.¹⁴ The celebrated last act with its dizzying exchanges of costume, voice, and identity between Suzanne, the Countess, Figaro, and Chérubin, which baffle not only the characters but at moments the spectator as well, is only one among many such series of events that make up the rich weave of the play. And it is the looseness of the textual fabric, the space or lack of link between one dramatic thread and the next, between one identity, disguise, one event, one intrigue, one object or one witty exchange and another, that constitutes the focus of our study.

Suzanne's and Figaro's remarks above call attention to the analogy between the chaotic Fortuna of life's events and their staging in the theatrical twists and turns of Beaumarchais' plot that undermine the play's dramatic unity and linear progression as well as the strategies of individual characters. Beaumarchais' Mariage consists of a series of loosely related, isolated events as well as repliques that remain thoroughly resistant to an overall unity of action or character. Specific situations such as the standoff between Figaro and Bazile, which closes Act I in a rapid fire of witty exchange, are not pursued at the outset of the subsequent act, thereby denying potential links between one dramatic unit and another. In fact, these witty rejoinders often have no impact on the flow of events or development of character.¹⁵ Even within the remarks of the various characters, as Gabriel Conesa has noticed, there tends to be a lack of linking elements: “un manque de liant dû à l'absence d'éléments enchaînants” (21, my emphasis).

Moreover, verbal play often appears to disregard the defining boundaries of an individual, positioning him/her outside of his/her specific role and psychological identity. For example, the Count—both unaware of and unconcerned with the plight of the women of whom he consistently takes advantage—nevertheless becomes for a moment totally sympathetic as he readily concurs with Marceline's justification of her sex as victimized by men (Act III, xvi). Or the strange apathy with which all of a sudden the Count views the seduction of Suzanne, even as he frantically attempts to strategize victory (Act III, sc. iv). Of great interest to the thesis of this essay is the analogous way in which theater and language appear to resist a totalizing organization, manifesting a tendency to remain so many linguistic flourishes, so many discrete dramatic and/or comic elements that, like the Fortuna of events and individual identity, subscribe to the workings of a different structure of value that we have identified as manifest in the system of monetary exchange.

Nowhere is this structure more accessible than in the circulation of certain material objects, or stage props, throughout Beaumarchais' play. Accessories such as the Countess' ribbon, her pin, or the Count's seal to be affixed to Chérubin's passport take on different value depending on the changing context in which they are presented and on the diverse characters who appropriate the object at any given moment along its devious trajectory.¹⁶

The famous “ruban de nuit de la comtesse” is introduced in the very first act (scene vii) when Chérubin, the young page enamored of the Countess (as well as of every other woman) snatches it from the Countess Rosine's garments being carried by Suzanne. A material sign of the Countess, to be found in proximity to the lady's hair by its attachment to her night bonnet, the ribbon becomes for Chérubin a synechdoche of his cherished idol (says the page in the thrall of this “night ribbon”: “Quand un ruban … a serré la tête … ou touché la peau d'une personne … [214]”). This accessory takes on value as an erotic part of the woman herself in the luxurious fabrics that clothe and, as we see most explicitly in the last act, are made to stand in (exchange) for the female body and identity. The economy of erotic desire in the Mariage is structured in a manner homologous to that of the monetary and social systems as well as of theatrical practice. For what is specifically defined at one moment in the play as the property of a particular individual becomes detached and detachable from him/her in the same manner as his/her lineage, name, or personal character traits.

Once snatched from its place around the Countess' nightcap, the ribbon immediately becomes a pretext for Chérubin's attempt to flirt with Suzanne. As she remarks: “vous croyez parler à votre Fanchette. On vous surprend chez elle, et vous soupirez pour madame; et vous m'en contez à moi par-dessus le marché” (Act I, vii, 185). Indeed, at the end of the scene, Chérubin, all the while refusing to return the ribbon, uses it, nevertheless, as a pretext for attempting to kiss Suzanne (“on ne l'aura, vois-tu qu'avec ma vie. Mais si tu n'es pas contente du prix, j'y joindrai mille baisers” [186]). So much for the fixed value of this fetish.¹⁷

In fact, the peregrinations of this object from one person and context to the next trace an irregular itinerary throughout the comedy. This merely decorative ribbon is persistently and provocatively unfastened from each context that through metonymy lends it an erotic connotation—from the Countess' night bonnet (Act I, sc. vii), to Chérubin's bare arm (Act II, sc. vi), to the bosom of the Countess (Act IV, sc. ii, iv), and to Suzanne's dress worn by the Countess (Act V, sc. xix), and to her suggestion that it become the “jarretière de la mariée” (329) before once more falling into the hands of Chérubin (329). The ribbon and the pin (“épingle”), which (un)fasten Rosine's dress and which (un)seal the letter sent by Suzanne/the Countess and received and sent by the Count, constitute a series of motifs that through their constant circulation and intricate trajectory also tie together characters, actions, and scenes.

The relation between the Countess and Chérubin is prohibited by the ruling jealous desires of the Count, which also dominate the play's central thematics. Yet the trajectories of the ribbon, the pin, and the passport form so many autonomous subplots, each with its own history and economy, that threaten the cohesiveness of the central intrigue by undermining the master plot. The Count, often confounded as well as confused by the complexities of these extraneous but dangerous subplots, acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining his controlling interest in the very metaphor of unraveling that permeates all allusions to the text's seductive material: “Le fil m'échappe. Il y a dedans une obscurité” (245).

After being stolen by Chérubin (Act I, sc. vii), the ribbon is reappropriated by the Countess in whose possession it changes value (Act II, sc. vi). For in Act II it now signifies the Countess's own illicit longings, becoming for her a synecdoche of the body of the young page, who indeed has stained it with his own blood and wears it on his bruised arm under his clothes. Appropriated initially as a fragment of the Countess' own body, the ribbon now becomes detached from its place of origin, this time becoming an even more explicit synecdoche—but this time of Chérubin's body—for the Countess. The very fact that the accessory takes the place of prohibited linguistic and social intercourse and exchange, at once falling short of and transcending words, allows this object to remain an independent entity that fluctuates in value.¹⁸

The object changes according to whoever appropriates it, thus constantly separating from the matrix or the whole out of which it is cut. But in such a manner the stability of the figure synecdoche is precluded. For to insist on taking an accessory—the ribbon or the pin—as a part of the whole, as standing for the “essence” of the person from whom it derives, there must be continuous association with the same whole that this part has been enlisted to represent. On the contrary, each time the object of the ribbon or pin (and in several scenes of the last act the Countess's dress, even her speech or hand) is reappropriated, it shifts contexts, thus acquiring a different and ultimately arbitrary value. The ribbon ties together different characters in a sexually prohibited involvement and subplot; but the manner in which it circulates puts into question and constantly dissolves its status as synecdoche, which is lost and repeatedly reconstituted within another new and just as transient configuration of the whole. The ribbon is restored to the status of a free-floating object that in its very potential to shift value functions promiscuously.

The striking paradox of these objects, these stage props as they are figured within the Mariage, is that their importance derives exclusively from the particular origin from which they are nevertheless repeatedly detached. Indeed, the text emphasizes the persistent unfastening of these pieces, these accessories, from the precise context where they are plucked. The dizzying dance of mistaken identity that informs the comic motif of the last act of the Mariage, where both the Count and Figaro (mis)take their respective wife and finacée as the other, depends precisely on the valorizing of a piece of her clothing, a part of her anatomy. The apparent attempt to valorize the whole by focusing on a part and by forcing this part to signify as a synecdoche is thus undermined. The part that is separated from the origin that at one level generated it acquires value as a failed synecdoche, in other words, as a fetish.¹⁹

Indeed, the pin that the Countess unfastens from her dressing gown to seal the note for the Count, which will be mistakenly construed by Figaro as well as by Count Almaviva to have been written by Suzanne, is thus, like the handwriting itself, also detached from its supposed place of origin. Instead of performing the function of link, of tie, to assure the relation between the part and the whole, these props, themselves constituted by the property of conjunction, illustrate a movement in the opposite direction, uncoupling the part from the whole, untying (liberating) the henceforth fetichized signifier from a fluctuating signified, dismantling, finally, the relation obtaining in the ancien régime between ownership and identity.²⁰

As I have been demonstrating, the objects or props that at one level belong to the various characters—a ribbon, a pin and, in Act V, the dresses, voice, and even the hand of the Countess/Suzanne—stand in exchange for the identity of the person herself because in effect these objects have been (mis)taken to signify in the capacity of synecdoche.²¹

For what belongs to an individual, be it Suzanne, the Countess, Figaro, Chérubin, or the Count himself, does not necessarily define or identify him/her. Beaumarchais' comedy demonstrates that someone else can always (re)appropriate the object or attributes to other signifying ends, as we have seen in the circulation of money, the ribbon, and the pin that acquire diverse values as well as owners. Or conversely, as alternatively staged in the Mariage de Figaro, what apparently identifies or defines the individual does not necessarily belong to him/her.

In the park of the château Aguas-Frescas, the carnival of repeated mistaken identity played in the flitting shadows of dusk evokes in Act V an ambiance that Walter Rex has qualified as that of the children's game “blind man's buff” (Rex, 189).²² Yet this display of adolescent eroticism that fetishizes an attachment to the illicit love object and that follows on long established comedic conventions of midnight frolic and mischief in the garden (such as in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and throughout Italian comedy) shouldn't blind us to the unfolding here of the adult drama of disinvestment and disappropriation which is at work throughout Beaumarchais' comedy.

The Countess' dress (on which Figaro and the count hang their identification of Rosine as opposed to Suzanne) is not the Countess; she has exchanged it in Act V for Suzanne's attire in order to catch her husband the Count in the act of philandering. Suzanne's dress is thus also distinguishable, separate from Suzanne, not a constitutive part of her. Even the Countess' speech (like earlier Suzanne's handwriting in the letter to the Count that is dictated by the Countess) constitutes a property that does not necessarily belong to or define her because it can be imitated, appropriated by another, in this case by Suzanne (Act V, sc. viii). Yet, the Count as well as Figaro commits the error of synecdoche, (mis)taking these “belongings,” these “properties” as constituting a part of the person in question, confusing them with identity.

Particularly revealing is the allusion to the Countess' voice, which is borrowed by Suzanne to complete her own disguise for the benefit of deceiving Figaro. Beaumarchais' stage directions (315) signal the shift in Suzanne's usual tone to that of the Countess and the subsequent change in Suzanne's voice as she switches back to her own idiom and expression (316). Even the personal attribute of a voice which, in contrast with such objects as dress, ribbon, etc., indeed does belong to, inhere in, the individual, is here abstracted from the body and spirit of the Countess, since the voice is constructed out of social, conventional qualities (in this case of the aristocracy) that are iterable and thus appropriable by others. As in the case of Figaro's distinctive feature of “gaieté” (“Je dis ma gaieté sans savoir si elle est à moi plus que le reste, ni même quel est ce moi dont je m'occupe,” 307, author's emphasis), character traits supposedly intrinsic to an individual identity, be they physical or psychological, become so many arbitrary indicators just as likely as not to be attached to the wrong person, and just as necessarily to signify promiscuously.

A distinguishing characteristic such as voice figures in the same capacity that in Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro a person's name or social role of playwright, economist, valet, even gentilhomme, count and countess can be variously invested or imitated. Throughout this very detailed and complex weave of events, character portrayal and linguistic flourish, Beaumarchais' gesture situates the social, psychological, physical, and ontological attributes of (male) identity in a position analogous to that of the play's unusually important (female) stage props—as so many non-exclusive, extrinsic and arbitrary fetishized accessories.

How radical is this gesture, which appears after all to be constructed on a traditional and dubious gender distinction? For it is obvious that those accessories on which the above analogy depends are for the most part valorized as feminine. The ribbon, pin, dress of the Countess or of Suzanne, and even their voices as well as the Countess' hand, provide the paradigm for detachment and fetishization that we interpret as also operative in the comedy's willful deconstruction of (“male”) origin and identity. Woman from the outset of the Mariage de Figaro is exclusively defined by and confined to her garments, appearance, and age; she is a mere accessory herself to the male entity who (mis)takes her.²³

Marceline the aging housekeeper, in love with Figaro and attempting to trick him into marriage until she discovers that he is her son, shows that it is impossible for a woman to define or fashion her own condition and identity. Marceline delivers a disquisition on women's role in response to the moral blame heaped upon her by Bartholo, Figaro's father and the very man who had taken sexual advantage of Marceline as a young girl:

c'est vous qu'il faut punir des erreurs de notre jeunesse; vous et vos magistrats, si vains du droit de nous juger, et qui nous laissent enlever par leur coupable négligence, tout honnête moyen de subsister. Est-il un seul état pour les malheureuses filles? (271-72).

Woman, as an accessory, a mere victim of man's irresponsible treatment, has no real condition (“état”) of her own; and a fixed social, moral, or ontological identity has never been nor can ever be conferred upon her.

In certain respects, therefore, Figaro's characterization as bereft of a fixed social station, lineage, and patronym takes its very model in woman. In fact, the above scene effects a specific connection between Marceline's condition and Figaro's own lack of genealogical and social definition. For at the precise moment in which Figaro can now, apprised of his origins, (re)construct a patrimony, his father refuses to legitimate him. And this time Figaro's reaction derives specifically from the model proposed in Marceline's own complaint: “Mais que nous font, mon fils, les refus d'un homme injuste? Ne regarde pas d'où tu viens, vois où tu vas” (272, my emphasis).

Marceline's advice to relish this lack as a starting point for an independent self-created identity does not reflect back on her own ability to forge a role or an identity for herself. Figaro's enthusiasm and ability to create new, even though changing, unstable options in a dynamic process of becoming that knows no final teleology is not mirrored in Marceline's acceptance of her own lack of “état.” Figaro's renunciation of the patronym, of an origin (“j'irais me tourmenter pour savoir à qui je les [quelques chétifs trente ans] dois! Tant pis pour qui s'en inquiète,” 272), is designed on his mother's pattern with a difference. Marceline and women in general provide a model which, like a one-way mirror, reflect the empty forms that constitute the social, sexual, and ontological lack in both sexes but whose arbitrary signifying images have the power to liberate man alone.

Yet Figaro is not the only case of a male identity whose integrity (in the etymological sense of wholeness) is threatened. As we have already suggested above, the Count himself is caught up in this movement from the outset of the play, where he attempts unsuccessfully to translate his aristocratic privilege directly into an economy of money—a move which effectively transforms his exclusive birthright into an advantage that henceforth can, in this new realm of exchange, be appropriated by others. In fact, Count Almaviva's privileged authority is concretized in and relegated to the object of his seal, “le cachet,” which bears resemblance in its devious circulation throughout the play to the arbitrary signifying capacity of female accessories.

In one sense, this stamp represents the Count, standing in for him as the very mark of his authority and thus of ownership and identity. An emblematic figuration of the proper name as in a coat of arms, the aristocratic family patronym in the form of a wax seal or stamp is valorized as the necessary mark to be affixed to all official château documents. Even though Almaviva is unable to destroy the marriage plans of Figaro and Suzanne, though he remains incapable in one scene after the other of outsmarting the devious strategies of his wife or those of Chérubin, in other words of practically all those in his household, he nevertheless possesses supreme authority in the form and shape of an object which when superimposed on a document brooks no interference, tolerates no extenuating circumstances. Reference to the Count's “cachet” at intervals throughout the play alludes then to the very mark of authority and of property even as we see the master plot unraveling.

For though the “cachet” figures as the direct opposite of the white or blank page signifying Figaro's lack of identity, an increasing discrepancy is asserted between the Count's seal and the person, as his attempts to retain an ebbing authority become more frantic. What is more, that repeatedly mentioned intact emblem that represents, stands in exchange for, his identity is also always missing (“le cachet manque,” 237) from the place where it “belongs.” At repeated intervals throughout the play, various characters evoke the “cachet” needed on Cherubin's passport to authorize his departure as ordered by the Count himself. Yet, as first the Countess (Act II, sc. vi) and then Suzanne and Figaro note (Act II, sc. xxi), it is missing from the document. It is this lack explicitly restated in scene xxi by the Countess, Suzanne, and Figaro that in exposing the discrepancy between authority and its representation allows Chérubin to linger at the altar of his master's wife and to pursue various other loves once exclusive to the patriarch of château Aguas-Frescas.²⁴

Yet again this accessory is mentioned in another context, this time by Suzanne who comments on the Countess' use of the term “cachet.” Following the Countess' directives, Suzanne writes a note (Act IV, sc. iii) to the Count suggesting a rendez-vous at dusk in the garden, thus setting the trap to be sprung in the final act. Suzanne asks, “Avec quoi cacheter?” (283). And the Countess takes her “épingle” to seal the note to be sent back by the Count as his affirmative response. She tells Suzanne to write on the back of the note, “Renvoyez-moi le cachet” (283), which brings forth the following from Suzanne: “Ah! le cachet! … Celui-ci, madame, est plus gai que celui du brevet” (283). The Count's cachet, missing yet again, and this time from the love note in contrast with the more “serious” document of Chérubin's passport, is exchanged here for another seal, a different accessory. The pin, which in being detached from the Countess' bosom lets fall the infamous ribbon now stained with Chérubin's blood (284), substitutes the sexually charged and explicitly prohibited desire of the Countess as well as of the Count for his missing authority and identity.

In this folle journée,²⁵ sexual difference is denied on the one hand by the erection of a male paradigm in which the female figures as mere accessory: not merely in what has been made to signify as synecdochal parts of ribbon, pin, dress, voice, etc., but in the whole of the Countess and Suzanne now appropriated by the Count, by Chérubin (if only in thoughts or sentiment), by Figaro—a history of appropriation and/or rejection that Marceline recounts as the sole possible trajectory of a young woman's life. Yet sexual difference is also denied from another direction, not merely in the sense of a male phallic model where female is qualified as so many albeit shifting “properties,” but from the perspective in which man's identity, his “being,” is cut out of and draped in the cloth of qualities as detachable and thus as arbitrary as those accessories mistakenly serving to define women. (Male) identity is then ultimately derived from an (in)vestment in (female) accessories and thus is staged in Le Mariage de Figaro as a cross-dressing that serves to uncover the fetish as the basis of identity.

In the example of Chérubin, the arbitrary value of sexual identity itself becomes explicit. A sensitive and sentimental boy, Chérubin the young page at the château is not yet old enough to constitute a threat to his would-be competitors, the Count and Figaro; and yet, as a little Count Almaviva in the making, Cherubin weaves back and forth between the erotic “objects” of many women young and old, always indeed shadowing, preceding, or following the Count in his own adventures. And in keeping with the importance of clothes as accessories and as constitutive of identity, Chérubin materializes at different moments throughout the play, now in the garb of a young male page (Act I, sc. vii), now dressed in Suzanne's attire where his “female” beauty becomes a topic of pleasantry and sexual innuendo (Act II, sc. v, 213), now again as a young peasant girl (Act IV, sc. iv and v), and finally transformed as officer of a regiment (Act V, sc. vi). But even when Chérubin attempts brazenly in the style of Almaviva to steal some kisses from the Countess (the lady he thinks to be Suzanne), he succeeds only in planting a kiss on the cheek of the Count (310).

In other words, even (and particularly) the distinctions between male and female do not obtain in the character of Chérubin, whose persistent presence at every romantic meeting of the other players signals the subtle and yet not so subtle erosion of sexual differences, just as the shifting identities of Figaro's roles occasion in the Mariage de Figaro a subtle yet not so subtle erosion of social and political class difference.

How does one read the political significance of this play with respect to its predominant structure of an economy based on an avowed arbitrary value of the signifier? It is not enough to establish the limits of interpretation and of Le Mariage de Figaro's revolutionary import by exclusively attempting to gauge its impact on eighteenth-century contemporary society, for in the enterprise of reconstructing past public opinion many ambiguities and conflicting responses render a judgment very difficult indeed.

Thomas Crow, for example, has recently conveyed the opinion that Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro, though a success, was not appreciated by the pamphleteers and radicals of the time.²⁶ After the public production of this play, Beaumarchais, according to La Harpe, was reviled by radicals of good standing and was thus almost unable to appear in public (226). From Crow's reading of pamphlets (e.g., Bergasse, Gorsas, and the Correspondence Littéraire of La Harpe and Grimm):

Plays with meaning, the nuanced terrain of humor and sexuality, “les tons variés,” no longer appealed to a public which had arrived at a precarious political consciousness. … The politically-aware element of the Parisian populace now indeed believed that the “language of virtue cannot allow, in the direct construction of its sentences, any vague and uncertain nuances. …”

(pp. 225-26)

But what was construed by a certain “politically-aware” public and perhaps by Crow himself as reactionary or decadent aristocratic qualities in this play overlooks among other things the “volatile” historical moment of mercurial shifting public opinion, as Rex suggests (p. 245, n. 20).

My own argument throughout this essay specifically does not measure political implications in terms of the “direct construction of its sentences.” On the contrary, I conceive the radical politics of Beaumarchais' text as a measure of the break in the concept of patronymic lineage and in the social, psychological, ontological, and dramatic syntax of the ancien régime. Indeed, the (mal)function in this comedy of the trope synecdoche as demonstrated above provides another important indication of a rupture in the linear or syntactical entity of pre-revolutionary thinking and modes of representation.

Following Hayden White, the historical thought and narrative of the Enlightenment promoted and justified “belief in the possibility of a human community conceived in the synecdochic mode.”²⁷ As a fundamentally “integrative” form, the trope synecdoche implies that the parts can always be integrated within a whole “qualitatively different from the sum of its parts and of which these parts are but microcosmic replications.”²⁸ Such is the reason why Kenneth Burke, before White, had elaborated the “master trope” synecdoche in terms of the eighteenth-century philosophy of optimism.²⁹ Thus, in the synecdochal mode, seemingly heterogeneous human, natural, and supernatural events and attributes inhere or are intrinsic to and capable of being integrated into a whole, as Frederick Keener illustrates in his discussion of Voltaire's Candide. For Keener also, the philosophy of optimism in the eighteenth century is conceptualized in a synecdochal mode.³⁰

But Figaro's “optimism” precisely does not ensue from confidence that all events of the physical and metaphysical realm as well as all social and certainly individual attributes are potentially integratable into a coherent and significant whole. On the contrary, optimism has evolved into Figaro's distinguishing characteristic of “gaieté,” which, as we have seen in his long monologue in the Mariage de Figaro (“encore je dis ma gaieté sans savoir si elle est à moi plus que le reste,” 307, Act V), constitutes precisely the juncture where personal attributes become explicitly detachable from a recognizable human identity.

The “language of virtue,” according to the reigning radicals of Beaumarchais' day, did at moments willfully exclude the “nuances” of the folle journée, replacing the playful and graceful leisures of the aristocracy with the “direct” and moralizing discourse of an evolving bourgeois ideology. Yet Beaumarchais' subtleties, in terms of the new codes of signification that we have uncovered in his comedy, do not appear to constitute, certainly not exclusively, the sins of aristocratic pleasure and decadence. To signify promiscuously is not solely a trait of a decadent aristocratic culture but can be, as I believe it is in this case, a function of a different system at work that empties older structures of their value in favor of a new economy of signification—of which Beaumarchais in his dealings with and for the crown of France was at some level acutely aware.³¹

If according to Beaumarchais' comedy something is always lost in the aristocratic agenda of attempting to translate the genealogical structure of privilege into the currency of a rapidly growing bourgeois economy, what can be said in extended terms about the agenda of the Enlightenment? For, on the other side of the coin, does the project of a bourgeois enlightenment attempt an inverse translation of money and property into another sort of genealogy where optimism functions through the “master trope” synecdoche to secure cohesive universals of fixed values? Nevertheless, this fluctuating exchange brings along with, and in spite of, its own ideology the liberating and destabilizing effects implicit in the growing capitalist economy of value.

In effect, the last play in Beaumarchais' trilogy, La Mère coupable, and the only one labeled drame in the spirit of Diderot's drame bourgeois, carries the exchange of currency to new dizzying levels. Suffice it to say here that the play explicitly enacts an exchange of sentimental, intimate domestic relations among family members for the former genealogy of aristocratic privilege. This transformation, however, also threatens the very elements constitutive of the bourgeois family. For the roles of mother, daughter, son, and father have by the end of this play become independent, completely detached and always detachable from biological origins. Even incest, that taboo which demarcates family lines through its very interdiction, becomes in La Mère coupable ambiguous and unstable. The Count, the Countess, and the fruits of their younger illegitimate loves represent the parental and sibling roles that bind family members together synchronically as so many shifters which also disrupt the syntax of inheritance and blood lines.

Beaumarchais' comedy leads to a questioning of the notion that the French Revolution and its ensuing cataclysmic social change derived uniquely from endowing the bourgeoisie with new, fixed value. Rather, it might be asked whether social change did not more importantly arise from a destablization, a devaluing of value itself within the new economic and representational modes of the arbitrary. Beaumarchais' economy of fetishism as it operates in his plays seems to indicate a rewriting of the relationship between representation and power. Can it be inferred that synecdoche, a “master trope” of Enlightenment thought, maintains, notwithstanding its seemingly disparate parts, a continuous unbroken relation to the origin and genealogy of fixed universal meaning? Fetishism, as we have traced its operation in this new system of value, would displace the genealogy of inherited power, privilege, and meaning through the increasing separation it effects between identity and ownership and through the increased value of its representative function.

Notes

1. Le droit de seigneur or droit de cuissage provided a literary theme of the period, appearing as the title of comedies both of Voltaire (1762) and Desfontaines (1783) as well as of Beaumarchais. See J. P. Beaumarchais, ed. of Théâtre de Beaumarchais (Paris: Garnier, 1980), p. 446, n.55. This critic at least does recognize the paradoxical nature of this motif in Le Mariage: “Mais l'importance ou l'ambiguïté du Mariage de Figaro est qu'il dénonce à la fois le privilège aristocratique du cuissage, et sa permanence à travers une forme moderne d'oppression: l'argent.” All references to the text of Le Mariage de Figaro (141-333) will follow this edition.

2. There are other references throughout the play to the fact of the count attempting to buy Suzanne's favors, for example, in Act II, sc. i. Suzanne reassures the Countess that her husband didn't attempt to seduce her; instead, “il voulait m'acheter” (202).

3. The importance of money as an increasingly acknowledged substitute for nobility's privilege was all the more a sensitive issue in eighteenth-century France, in that the aristocrat continued to glean money from dependence on unearned annuities granted by the king—a system which also necessitated the continuing exploitation of the farmer. Following R. Chaunu (La Civilisation de l'Europe des lumières [Paris: Flammarion, 1971, repr. 1982], pp. 286-287), “Le repli de la noblesse sur la rente, le maintien d'une petite exploitation paysanne aboutissaient à la scission artificielle de l'élite … Elle [la noblesse] polarise, contre un privilège injustifiable, les revendications des roturiers riches et éclairés …”

4. The Mariage de Figaro is the second in a trilogy of plays written by Beaumarchais that included the Barbier de Seville (1) and La Mère coupable (3). All three plays center on the characters of Figaro, the Count and Countess, Suzanne appearing in the second and third. What constitutes at least the thematic coherence of these three plays lies in the chronology that begins in the youthful romantic courting days of the Count and Countess (Le Barbier), moving to the responsibilities and betrayals of marriage in the second (Le Mariage) and finally to the consequences of these betrayals (La Mère coupable).

5. What in empirical practice actually constituted the customs as well as the laws unwritten and/or written concerning le droit de seigneur as a vestige of feudal, seigneurial power and privilege is not at issue in my essay. Following Frances E. P. Litvack (Le Droit du seigneur in European and American Literature [Birmingham, Ala.: Summa, 1984]), the question of this practice remains truly controversial, with scholars, historians, and others divided as to its scope and even, strangely enough, its reality (pp. 1-23). Fundamental to my study, however, is the importance of this privilege and myth to the representation of aristocratic privilege in eighteenth-century texts. Whether in the plays of Voltaire, Desfontaines, Beaumarchais, Olympe de Gouge, or in the writings of Restif de la Bretonne, “le droit de seigneur in the Enlightenment becomes a symbol of an inhuman system of power and privilege …” (p. 39). The situation becomes more complex, however, when this privilege as anachronism is translated in the text of Beaumarchais' play, into a new and different system of privilege.

6. This textual thematic is clearly borne out on a historical level as well. From the early eighteenth century to about 1775, France underwent a period of economic growth termed by G. Duby and R. Mandrou “la révolution économique du XVIIIe siècle” (Histoire de la civilisation française [Paris: A. Colin, 1968], vol. 2, pp. 75-107). During this period commercial enterprise flourished, and the use of money in urban trade, the stock market, and even in certain limited banking activity extended even to the provincial capitals where landed gentry often lived and spent the fruits of their land and annuities on goods of all kinds. This period of relative wealth in the beginnings of the capitalist era extended also to the peasant class: “Des campagnes aux villes, les liens se renforcent, se multiplient aussi: le monde paysan utilise de plus en plus la monnaie, entre dans les circuits commerciaux diversifiés à son usage” (p. 85).

7. Jean-Joseph Goux, Les Iconoclastes (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 154.

8. There are varying opinions as to the political position of Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro, both as concerns the historical context of eighteenth-century critical reaction as well as contemporary literary critical interpretation. We will take up this question further on; however, the vigorous reaction of both public and private audiences to the comedy and the near stupor of the audience with regard to Figaro's long monologue in Act V seem to be beyond dispute. See for example, R. Pomeau, “Notice sur Le Mariage de Figaro,” Théâtre de Beaumarchais (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1965), p. 104.

9. See Figaro's monologue in Act I, sc. ii of the Barbier de Seville (47). Both comedies emphasize the series of professions and métiers variously practiced and left behind by Figaro. The very shift from one role to another reinforces from one play to another the concept of changing identity and even picaresque social fluidity.

10. Figaro certainly can also be seen as a figure of difference that informs the conventions of society from a position of exteriority. Following Jean Starobinski (“Exil, Satire, Tyrannie,” in Le Remède dans le mal [Paris: Gallimard, 1989]), p. 94: “L'insolence bénéficie de l'immunité que l'on accorde à quiconque vient du dehors, libre de tout lien et de toute obligation. (Çavait été la fonction du fou de cour, c'est encore au temps des Lettres persanes, celle d'Arlequin; ce sera celle de l'Ingénu et de Figaro).” Yet Figaro's difference and distance is precisely what is valorized in the comedy as a principle of social and individual identity and is the principle that endows meaning at several other levels of the text. Thus an exteriority becomes an interiority.

11. This particular subject received more detailed attention in a variant of the text which decries the discrepancy between the growth of inflation and cost of living with the supposed economic well-being of the people. “Le peuple qui avait 20 millions il y a 20 ans, et payait le pain 2 sous, était aussi riche qu'il l'est avec 40 millions s'il paye le pain 4 sous. … Donc cherté n'est pas richesse, donc la doctrine en produit net, etc. Reste en pure perte pour la nation la peine qu'elle s'est donnée à doubler ses fonds. Mon livre ne se vendit point, fut arrêté, et pendant qu'on fermait la porte de mon libraire, on m'ouvrit celle de la Bastille …” (Beaumarchais, 470). Money introduces the lack of fixed value and the accompanying arbitrary fluctuations.

12. Following Peter Szondi (“Tableau and Coup de théâtre: On the Social Psychology of Diderot's Bourgeois Tragedy,” New Literary History, XI, 2, 1980). “The unforseen really was proscribed in the middle-class society of the eighteenth century” (328). Also, “The rational conduct of life, which Max Weber analyzed as the fundamental trait of capitalism in his epoch-making essay on the ‘Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' aimed at the elimination of chance. Fortuna was the lodestar of that traditionalism which, according to Weber, capitalism supplanted” (328).

13. Note that Beaumarchais brings up the question of Fortuna in La Mère coupable explicitly to redefine it in terms of these new principles at work. Though this play was written several years after Le Mariage de Figaro (the latter performed publicly in 1784, La Mère in 1792), it nevertheless dwells on the strange events that have governed the characters in their later years similar to the series of theatrical coups that abound in the former play. Figaro raises the question through an opposition between the terms “hasard” and “destin”: “Hasard! dieu méconnu! les anciens t'appelaient Destin! nos gens te donnent un autre nom” (Beaumarchais, 375). The difference emphasized between these two terms concerns the specific objective implied in “destin”; events occur in view of a particular objective which in retrospect makes sense of the seemingly fortuitous event at the moment it happens. A person's destiny is already written and fulfilled along the way. With “hasard,” this “other name,” a particular outcome of an event is no longer justified with respect to any specific end. The process itself is explicitly denied any teleological design. “Hasard” plays a role analogous in La Mère coupable to the term and concept “Fortuna” in Le Mariage, both opposed to the notion of aristocratic fate as well as to what Weber, Szondi and others have considered a bourgeois outlook.

14. See Walter Rex, The Attraction of the Contrary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987) who discusses the play's lack of “dramatic centre” (p. 192). While agreeing with the criticism of many others who make judgment on the lack of dramatic unity, Rex does locate it in the creation of Figaro as a center, a hero who is converted from the valet of classical comedy into a serious contender for power: “With Figaro, in contrast, it is a question of turning a servant—someone often associated with clowns in theatrical tradition as we have seen, almost a sort of puppet in the eyes of his master—into a hero, even a man” (p. 193). As I will discuss a little further on, though Figaro becomes a central figure in this play, the paradigm he constitutes opposes the very notion of hero as a central and centering persona in the context of events and characters of Le Mariage de Figaro.

15. See Jacques Schérer, La Dramaturgie de Beaumarchais (Paris: Nizet, 1954), p. 57, in which he describes the last scene of Act I as “inutile” as concerns dramatic action. See also Gabriel Conesa, Trilogie de Beaumarchais (Paris: P.U.F., 1985), pp. 143-44, who shows through close analysis of Beaumarchais' écriture how “le désir d'exploiter un effet comique” goes counter to the demands of dramatic action: “Ensuite, ces mouvements à caractère ludique n'entretiennent le plus souvent aucun lien avec la situation dramatique …” (p. 144). See also Jack Undank, “Beaumarchais' Transformations,” Modern Language Notes, v. 100/no.4 (Sept. 1985), 829: “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”; also, see Undank, 844.

16. As Undank says, “‘Truth’ is manufacturerd to fit circumstances and contingency; and given the fact that, as Figaro explains, ‘on fait comme on peut,’ an convenient prop is seized upon—clothes, money, language—and converted into an efficient, expressive sign” (840).

17. Undank refers to “clothes [which] become transformative fetishes in a world gone ‘mad’ with dreams,” 846.

18. According to Christiane Mervaux (“‘Le Ruban de Nuit’ de la Comtesse,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France 84 (5) [1984]: 722-33): “L'examen des variantes du manuscrit montre clairement que Beaumarchais a pris le parti de la suggestion et que c'est ce ruban jamais décrit, mais toujours présent, qui est chargé de laisser entendre ce qui ne sera jamais dit” (725). See also Jacques Schérer's comments on the importance of the “trois instruments de l'amour insatisfait qui, faute de réalités, ne peuvent se repaître que de symboles” (Le Mariage de Figaro, édition avec une analyse dramaturgique (Paris: SEDES, 1966), p. 83. These symbols, which go as Mervaux has said “au delá du langage” (725), also facilitate the changing value of these objects but particularly once they enter, like any other commodity, into circulation.

19. Freud enlisted the term “fetish” in psychoanalysis to describe one of the pathological aberrations of sexual conduct in which emphasis is placed on the degree of independence of the part from the whole: “The situation only becomes pathological when the longing for fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condition attached to the sexual object and actually takes the place (author's emphasis) of the normal aim, and further, when the fetish becomes detached (my emphasis) from a particular individual and becomes the sole sexual object” (Three Theories of Sexuality in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953, repr. 1981), vol. VII, 154. Also see J. Undank, 834: “In the end, the imaginary creatures of his [Beaumarchais'] 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.’”

20. Following J. J. Goux, “Il faut qu'existe un objet dont l'unique fonction (ou fonction principale) soit officiellement de représenter une valeur, au lieu d'avoir de la valeur, pour que la notion de valeur économique se dégage des autres notions de valeurs, des autres notions valorisantes” (p. 151, author's emphasis).

21. Indeed, in his discussion of tropes, Fontanier makes a distinction between synecdoche and metonymy along the lines of what belongs to the particular entity, what is propre to it: the difference between “métonymie de la chose” and a “synecdoche du tout” resides in these two examples: “les chevaux du char pour l'attelage: ‘Le char n'écoute plus ni la voix ni le frein.’ Puisque les chevaux, même attelés au char, ne font, sans doute, en aucune manière partie du char, et que le char subsiste en entier, indépendamment et séparément des chevaux” (Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du Discours [Paris: Flammarion, 1968], p. 86). A synecdoche whether it be what Fontanier terms a “synecdoque du tout” as would be the mistake in the above example or a “synecdoque de la partie,” the defining element in identifying this figure is that the part belong to the whole or, vice versa, the whole can be identified according to its own part(s).

22. Rex's notion of game and specifically “hide and seek” informs his interpretation of Le Mariage de Figaro throughout. This perspective coincides in part with my own to the extent that any notion of game involves a series of conventional rules and moves that are arbitrary with respect to the specific individuals playing.

23. Act III, sc. xvi formulates the question of women as accessories to men. Marceline says: “Est-il un seul état pour les malheureuses filles? Elles avaient un droit naturel à toute la parure des femmes: on y laisse former mille ouvriers de l'autre sexe” (272). So within the play itself there already appears a critique of the manner in which gender distinction is represented in Le Mariage and with the same metaphor of accessories, here termed “parure.” Note that the entire last part of this scene, everything that relates to Marceline decrying men's use of women to their own purposes, was censored for the performances of Le Mariage during the eighteenth century (271, note a.). The fact that this scene was excised as opposed to others, for example the long explicitly seditious monologue of Figaro, is a significant reminder of the importance in a paternalistic society of subverting the gender question, more explosive even than that of political difference.

24. This scene specifically centers on articulating such a lack in the dialogue which begins with the Count who, having been given Chérubin's passport found in the garden by Antonio, now asks Figaro to tell him if he (Figaro) really did jump from the Countess' window (which he did not), and what he supposedly dropped. With help from the Countess and Suzanne, Figaro is able to identify the paper as the “brevet de ce malheureux enfant” (237). Why did Figaro have it, asks the Count: “Il n'y manque rien” (237, my emphasis). The Countess whispers to Suzanne, “le cachet” (237), and Suzanne relates to Figaro, “Le cachet manque” (237). Thus the Count seems all too anxious to deny the lack of which he remains at least on an explicit level unaware. Figaro indeed underscores the relevance of this lack by alluding precisely to the seal's inability to represent the count's authority. In response to why the passport was in his possession, Figaro says: there is a custom “D'y apposer le sceau de vos armes. Peut-être aussi cela ne valait pas la peine” (238).

25. This is the subtitle of Le Mariage de Figaro.

26. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), p. 226. Crow cites the Correspondance Littéraire of La Harpe (Paris 1801, IV, 122-4, 227-32) as well as the Correspondance Littéraire of Grimm (XIII, 517-25, 542-45) to back up the perspective of contemporary thinkers on Le Mariage de Figaro. In general, “The play was a success, but contemporary commentary emphasizes the sexual ‘immorality’ displayed by the characters almost to the exclusion of its political content” (pp. 225-26).

27. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), p. 48.

28. Ibid., pp. 34-35.

29. Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” A Grammar of Motives (1945; rept. New York: Prentice Hall, 1952), p. 508. “The ‘noblest synecdoche,’ the perfect paradigm or prototype for all lesser usages, is found in metaphysical doctrines proclaiming the identity of ‘microcosm’ and ‘macrocosm.’ In such doctrines, where the individual is treated as a replica of the universe, and vice versa, we have the ideal synecdoche, since microcosm is related to macrocosm as part to whole, and either the whole can represent the part or the part can represent the whole. (For ‘represent’ here we could substitute ‘be identified with.’).”

30. Frederick M. Keener (The Chain of Becoming [New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1983], pp. 203-211) discusses Voltaire's Candide in terms of the trope of synecdoche: “The grand architects of synecdoche in the tale [Candide], however, are the philosophical optimists; ‘All are but parts of one stupendous whole,’ Pope had written” (p. 203).

31. See J. Undank (830) who employs the metaphor of a commercial economy to address Beaumarchais' strategies: “Ramifying the alert, critical tradition that extends from Crébillon to Diderot and Laclos, he [Beaumarchais] 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 commercial world. In the process, he uncovered, puckishly or subliminally—it is the finest legacy—the ways in which use and manipulation entail risks not only to the merchandise but to the user and to desire itself.” As I have been demonstrating, this wisdom of commodification is precisely what structures Le Mariage.