SOURCE: “The Marriage of Figaro,” in The Attraction of the Contrary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 184-96.

[In the following excerpt, Rex discusses the unique role of The Marriage of Figaro within French literature.]

A. GAMES

Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro is a mixture of ingredients so perfectly combined, it would be almost perverse to strain out any single element and call it the essence. The play is everything at once: situation comedy, farce, comic opera, parade, comedy of manners, erotic comedy, social satire, drame bourgeois, comédie larmoyante, revolutionary indictment of the system,¹ plea for unwed mothers and women's liberation, and so on. The action shifts focus constantly, and each time a new strand comes by the audience must catch on as best it can. If we look behind the play to its literary “sources” we find likewise a pleasantly heterogeneous jumble of overlapping fragments.² Behind the character of Figaro stands a virtually endless line of impudent theatrical valets stretching from the plays of Marivaux, Dancourt, Regnard, and Molière all the way back to the comedies of Terence and Plautus.³ Count Almaviva, that jealous thwarter of young lovers, also falls heir to an abundant theatrical ancestry, going back at least to those hindering and slightly ridiculous fathers of ancient Roman times. Jacques Scherer reminds us that in the character of Suzanne we find something of the innumerable Dorines and Lisettes of Molière, Marivaux, and how many others in the eighteenth century.⁴ Plays by Vadé and Rochon de Chabannes may have suggested, in germ, the scenes between Chérubin and the Countess; the trial scene may look back to the Wasps of Aristophanes, or to Rabelais, or to Les Plaideurs of Racine, among other possibilities. When Chérubin hides in the Countess' cabinet, is he not reenacting the same situation we find in Scarron's La Précaution inutile and in Sedaine's La Gageure imprévue? The scene in which the Count makes love to his own wife, believing her to be someone else, may be borrowed from Dufresny's Le Double veuvage (1702) or Vadé's Trompeur trompé.⁵ As for the main plot of Figaro, W. D. Howarth has found records of no fewer than five plays antedating Figaro, all bearing the title “Le Droit du seigneur.” One of them is by Voltaire.⁶

Certainly it is helpful to know about literary antecedents such as these. Yet, when one gets through reviewing the “sources” of Figaro, perhaps the most striking conclusion one reaches is how far short they fall of Beaumarchais.⁷ Voltaire's Droit du seigneur resembles the plot of Figaro only in the most general and mechanical way, with innumerable differences of detail. There may be other plays in which a young page or écuyer makes love to an older woman during the absence of her husband; yet, in their cheapness, they only make us appreciate still more the gracious subtlety and discretion we find in Beaumarchais.⁸ Put all the valets of theatrical tradition together, even adding the Picaro progeny into the bargain, and how close are we to Figaro in his great monologue? Perhaps such a chasm between the “sources” and the emergent work is to be expected when one is dealing with a truly original author. Certainly the gap exists with Molière, as many scholars have observed.

We note, too, that for other plays by Beaumarchais literary sources are strikingly more important than they are for Figaro. La Mère coupable (1792), the last play of the Figaro trilogy, is literally dominated by Molière's Tartuffe, and Beaumarchais reminds us of this in the play's subtitle, L'Autre Tartuffe. Le Barbier de Séville (1775), the earliest of the Figaro trilogy, clearly looks back to the long line of comedies typified in Molière's Ecole des femmes. It is a conventional play in the best sense, bringing to a new perfection données that are quite traditional.⁹ In short, whereas the two other plays of the Figaro cycle fall rather neatly into recognizable literary traditions, Figaro would appear rather as an exception.

We reach curiously similar conclusions if we compare Figaro and Le Barbier from the standpoint of the unities: whereas in Le Barbier the traditional unities of time, place and action are observed to perfection, forming an integral part of the play's structure and actually intensifying the comedy, in Figaro they really are not. Even though the play conforms to the letter of the rules, aesthetically Figaro never achieves unity, at least not in the way Le Barbier does. The locus of the play actually shifts, from the bedroom at the beginning, to increasingly larger rooms in the château, and finally into the parc, impelled as it were by the gathering energy and excitement of a plot that simply will not be contained within four walls. In a sense, the play is breaking out of the unity of place. The same is true of the action: though the theme of Figaro's marriage may provide a pivot around which most of the incidents revolve, aesthetically one is hardly aware of any unity. The plot unfolds as an endless series of surprises, adventures, novelties, and incredible happenings, worlds apart from the centered harmony one experiences in a play by Molière. And then, the character of Chérubin—unless one goes to desperate lengths to allegorize him as Eros—does not really belong anywhere in the main plot, though he is probably the author's most inspired creation and a frequent object of our concern and delight. The unity of time is also stretched beyond the point of credibility on this frantically crowded day. In short, whereas knowledge of both literary sources and structural conventions is quite helpful in enabling us to enjoy some of the finer and more original qualities of the two other plays in the trilogy, with Figaro, on the other hand, such knowledge really has little to do with the play's unique qualities, and sometimes it may actually hinder us from enjoying them: if one embarked on a determined search for the unities in Figaro,¹⁰ in the same way one finds them in a play by Dancourt, one might be forced to conclude—quite wrongly—that Beaumarchais was a less successful author.

The truth is, rather, that we have not been looking in the right direction. For, despite Beaumarchais' worship of Diderot and Molière, literary traditions are not the key to this particular play. The unique comic spirit of Figaro is not literary; it is something far less learned and more spontaneous. What actually gives the play its special qualities, while at the same time underpinning much of its structure and provoking most of its laughter, is a whole series of children's games.¹¹ Of course, Le Mariage de Figaro observes the unity of place: it just moves from playroom at the beginning, to playground at the end. It observes the unity of action also, largely because, throughout the plot, the Count is “it.”

The “game element” in Figaro makes it virtually unique not only in Beaumarchais' trilogy but in the tradition of the French theatre before him.¹² In this connection, it is useful to observe as a point of contrast that in an author such as Molière laughter is usually associated with some insight the audience has into character: the blind infatuation we see in Orgon, for example, gives a sense of rightness, almost of inevitability, to the absurd line “Le pauvre homme!”¹³ Dorine's earthy directness, as against the vulnerable sensibilities of Mariane, is what makes “Vous serez, ma foi! tartuffiée” (II, iv) such a choice moment in the play. This is to say that Molière, in his great comedies, usually engages our maturity and our understanding while making us laugh: we are mirthful—in part at least—because we are wise about human character.

But let us now consider the first act of Le Mariage de Figaro, with Chérubin rushing to hide behind the chair as the Count comes in, and then the Count hiding behind the chair while Chérubin crouches on the seat underneath Suzanne's dress, and then the Count getting “caught” when he forgets to hide, and finally Chérubin getting “caught” too in the most droll and surprising way. Such terms as “comédie d'intrigue,” or even “lazzi,” are really quite inadequate to describe this situation, because the tension and laughter of this scene are the tension and laughter peculiar to a game of hide-and-seek: the suddenness of the movements, the daring and completely unexpected improvisations of hiding places, the complete seriousness of the players' efforts to escape the person who is “it,” the near-discoveries, even the ironic feeling of inevitability connected with the catch at the end—all these things belong specifically to children's games.¹⁴ In contrast to Molière, the identity of the players, or the individual qualities they may possess, are of relatively minor importance. Indeed, the same person can completely change character during the game, as the Count does when, having been the “seeker,” he turns suddenly into a “hider” and crouches in a rather undignified manner behind the chair, just as Chérubin had done, and for once actually gains a measure of sympathy from the audience. Nor are we here in the traditions of the farce: the coups de bâton, in fact all the punishments that bring on laughter when performed by clowns, have little to do with the universe of hide-and-seek. What causes the laughter in this scene of Figaro is simply the suspense connected with being caught, and when, finally, Chérubin is caught, the tension is broken and a new round can begin. Coups de bâton are not really the point of the game.

For Chérubin the game of hide-and-seek goes on throughout the entire play; he seems to be endlessly turning up in new and unpredictable hiding places: fleeing into the Countess' cabinet (II, xi), disappearing into the pavillon (V, vi), disguising himself as a girl (IV, v), or even jumping out the window when all else fails (II, xv). Occasionally, he becomes a chaser himself, running after Suzanne to snatch the Countess' ribbon, or to make her give him a kiss (I, vi). No one else is a game player to this literal degree in the play, but then, no one else, except his partner Fanchette, is so young.

The games Figaro plays with the Count are more sophisticated and slightly more adult. They are mainly verbal, whereas Chérubin's are not. For example, in act II, scene xxi, the Count backs Figaro into a corner with question after question concerning the incriminating officer's brevet that Chérubin had dropped while falling from the window. Figaro runs out of inventions and seems to be on the verge of revealing the truth, when, in the nick of time, whispered help is relayed from the other members of the team; Figaro learns the magic phrase “le cachet manque” and is made safe. Or again, in act III, scene v, the Count attempts to find out whether Figaro knows of his designs on Suzanne. This time, not only do his thrusts fail to hit home, but, in a series of “turnabouts,” they leave him wide open to half-disguised insults from Figaro. As critics have noted,¹⁵ there is a verbal fencing match going on in such places and, indeed, Figaro parries the Count's thrusts skilfully: “Jouons serré,” he says as the match begins, and then at the end: “Il a joué au fin avec moi; qu'a-t-il appris?” The Count, too, when he is alone, admits that a kind of match has taken place: “Le maraud m'embarrassait! en disputant, il prend son avantage, il vous serre, vous enveloppe … Ah! friponne et fripon! vous vous entendez pour me jouer?” (III, viii).

These last words are interesting because they suggest that the Count in some way is supposed to know that Suzanne and Figaro are in league against him, just as he strongly suspects that Figaro did not really jump out the window.¹⁶ But he is helpless to act on his knowledge. Whenever the situation is reduced to a sort of verbal guessing game, the symmetry of the game tends to make the players equal, and, just so long as Figaro is able to invent responses that literally satisfy convention, the Count has no choice but to accept them. In fact, merely by asking the question the Count has tacitly agreed to let Figaro go free if he can come up with an answer to his devinette. In the world of children's games both the hiders and the seekers obey the rules as law.

This is the reason the trial scene (III, xv) fits so perfectly into the general ambience of the play, although to critics looking for the conventional unities or for vraisemblance this part of the action has proved something of an embarrassment. It is true that the scene fits awkwardly into the main plot; moreover, it is entirely legitimate to wonder, as critics have done, why a person as familiar with real courts as Beaumarchais should deliberately create a “tribunal de fantaisie” quite unrelated to actual judicial procedure. The answer may be that, from the start, the audience never takes the trial seriously as a trial. Realistic details would only impede our enjoyment of such marvels as the legal wrangle over the copulative conjunction “et.” It is a mock trial, of course, the merest game of “courts of law,” with a pasteboard Brid'oison as judge, and everyone enjoying Figaro's inventiveness as he talks his way around the absurd evidence. There are occasional political overtones of a very serious nature in this scene, as there are in many other parts of the play; yet, precisely because they are held in suspension, diffused, so to speak, in the atmosphere of the games being played, they may deepen the tone, but they never become obtrusive. Johan Huizinga has pointed out that even real court procedures involve many “play elements,” and in the trial scene of Figaro, play simply becomes the essence.¹⁷

Reading the book on children's games by Iona and Peter Opie, one is tempted to conclude that the tension between the seeker and the hiders, between the one who is “it” and the others who are not, has a good deal of the tension between the old and the young about it: what is being played out by children in these games may be the fundamental contest between the parent and the child. In hide-and-seek the game's playful tone and the deliberately limited scope of the action imply that there can be no true heroes, or villains, among the players—even though the hiders have all our sympathies, since they are the ones who are vulnerable to being caught, while there is something almost inherently distasteful about the role of “it.”¹⁸ Likewise, in Figaro there is no truly heroic character, nor does the Count qualify as a truly unpardonable villain, even though he is certainly unpopular enough: feared by Chérubin, taunted and jeered at by Figaro, mocked by Suzanne, and deceived even by the Countess. The audience enjoys all this because it disapproves of both the Count's determination to press an unfair advantage and the promiscuity of his marital infidelities. Yet this is surely not the whole explanation, for in his own way Chérubin is quite promiscuous also, and when we learn in La Mère coupable that eventually the Countess is supposed to have a child by Chérubin, we may revise our feelings somewhat about the Count's suspicions of him in the earlier play. Pomeau remarks that Figaro is not really so innocent either, and, given the ambiguous character traits he inherits from Beaumarchais himself, we may conjecture that were he in the Count's place he would not behave any better than the Count does (p. 189). However, we are willing to forgive Chérubin and Figaro for practically anything they do, partly because they are so young, partly because they have so little while the Count, the establishment personified, has so much, and—perhaps most of all—because as hiders they are vulnerable to being caught, and the Count is after them.

But then isn't the play in many ways a celebration of childhood—with gay songs to sing (II, xxii; IV, x), a march to walk in step to (IV, iv), a “tableau vivant” to pose in (II, iv), costumes to dress up in and disguises to wear (IV, iv), and even a kind of seesaw as Marceline and Suzanne curtsey back and forth to one another (I, v)? At the end, during almost the whole of act V, there is a grand game of blindman's buff, held just as it is getting dark—the time when the best hiding games are always played—with several players exchanging clothes to deceive the “blindman,” the way real children do.

Actually, this last game is the most elaborate, and the entire cast takes part; even Marceline and Brid'oison get into the act somehow. There are three main rounds, with darkness serving as a blindfold: first Chérubin plays with the Countess, thinking he has caught Suzanne; then Figaro plays with Suzanne, thinking he has caught the Countess; finally, the Count plays with his own wife, thinking her to be a mistress. Thus, in rapid succession each of the three principal masculine characters has been “it,” and has managed in a very short time to flirt with the wrong lady. Once there is even an extra layer of confusion as Figaro discovers that the person he took for the Countess is really Suzanne, and then turns the tables on her by feigning to have designs on the lady whose costume she wears. In the world of children's hiding games such “turnabouts” may occur with almost magical speed, and in Figaro swift surprises such as these account for a good deal of the hilarity of the play's dizzy pace which gets faster and faster as it approaches the end. But with blindman's buff, to watch the person who is “it” mixing everyone up is only half the fun; almost the best part comes when at last the light of torches brightens the stage and, one by one, the characters emerge from the dark pavillons. Then the Count learns how blindfolded he really has been, while we, the audience, just like the other players, have the pleasure of watching his dumbfounded amazement when he learns the true identity of those he has been trying to catch. Virtually everywhere in Le Mariage de Figaro we find the unifying spirit of child's play.

Even in the play's eroticism childhood, or adolescence—and Beaumarchais does not clearly distinguish between them—seems especially important: the Countess' feelings for Chérubin are aroused precisely because he is a child as well as a man. On a more comical level, we find a mixture, too, in Marceline as her desire for Figaro gives way to feelings that are mostly maternal, and she embraces him in as motherly a fashion as she can. If Figaro sheds his first tears, it is because, though a grown man, he finds himself like a lost child brought home to his mother. How often the characters in the play fall momentarily into a kind of reverie:¹⁹ the Count (III, iv; III, viii) and the Countess (II, xxv) both experience this, the former for reasons of jealousy, the latter for reasons of love. Figaro's monologue is the most striking example, as we will see.

And yet, all this changes at the end, when the numerous pieces of the topsy-turvy plot return once and for all to their right places; the Count is beaten, the game is won, and the marriage really will take place. Meanwhile Chérubin, that timid little boy with his girlish complexion, has, almost miraculously, grown up and become a man. His game is ended too, and instead of running to hide, he now stands and faces the Count, even starting to draw his sword when he feels threatened by him. Seeing this gesture, one is tempted to infer that in the case of Chérubin, the beginning of manhood is symbolically a moment of revolution. One might say something similar about the character of Figaro and about the general spirit of this play, that in many senses ushers in a new age.²⁰

Cervantes, writing with poignant irony of the great analogy between the theater and life, has observed that the end of a play, too, has its counterpart in our existences—in death itself (Don Quixote, II, chapter 21). Perhaps this explains the tinge of sadness one feels during the final vaudeville of Figaro: the falling curtain is bringing to an end the part of life, and the time in history, when one knew the joys of hide-and-seek. There are other reasons, too, as the second part of this chapter will suggest.

B. THE MONOLOGUE

Though the character of Figaro may be seen as deriving from a variety of stock theatrical types, the single one he relates to most obviously is the “impudent valet” in the classic “guardian and ward” plot—which is always the same:²¹ a beautiful girl is being held under lock and key by a ridiculous old man, a dragon, bent on matrimony. Enter a handsome young hero, who is smitten with love at the mere sight of her, and who then uses the devices of his ingenious valet to out-fox the old guardian, and get the girl for himself. This kind of play, as ancient as the Greeks and Romans, had crystalized into a sort of perfection in the modern Classical period, in Molière's hilarious farce, Les Fourberies de Scapin. When we first meet Figaro, in Beaumarchais' Barbier de Séville, he, too, is behaving rather like the wonderfully brash valet of Molière's comedy. Indeed, Beaumarchais' valet in the early play is so winningly clever he almost steals the first act of Le Barbier for himself. From then on, however, the Count comes more and more to dominate the action, and Figaro's function is reduced to the traditional one, that of conjuring away by his clever inventions the numerous impediments that keep the lovers apart. When Rosine's elderly guardian has been outsmarted, the play ends, naturally, in matrimony—an indispensable ingredient of the traditional plot. For in essence this play always celebrates the permanent triumph of love over the external hostilities that threatened it, even as youth wins out over old age. In one version of this ancient play, the impudent valet was actually a god in disguise.

If the valet's dominant trait was, typically, inventiveness, the lovers, by contrast, were at best characterized by near helplessness, and at worst by mental deficiency. The first pair of lovers in Molière's Scapin are a good example: their passion has apparently paralyzed their intellectual capacities, and their breeding has rendered them so exquisitely sensitive, so utterly lofty, that they can no longer cope with real life. This is why, in the classic situation, only a servant could help them, for by definition a servant is disengaged from true passion (a great help to his mental powers), and, theoretically at least, he has never done anything else in life but untangle its baser realities. The disparity between the elevation of the lovers and the dubious morality of the valet was translated also in the width of the social gap separating the two. Thus in Scapin the lowliness of the valet was counterbalanced by the wealthy bourgeois origins of his masters. In Beaumarchais' schema, such as we find it in Le Barbier de Séville, the gap was wider still, since the master was so pointedly a nobleman. And indeed, perhaps this plot, though it can exist in any period, was most at home in an aristocratic environment where the separation of functions, with feeling and nobility on one hand, and practicality and intelligence on the other, can be imagined most easily as reflecting the structure of society. No doubt this was why, having achieved such a lively perfection in the theatre of Molière and Beaumarchais, it became one of the temporary casualties of the French Revolution.

Le Mariage de Figaro is a far more complexly conceived play than Le Barbier de Séville; nevertheless it still features part of the classic plot: Figaro is still behaving very much like a traditional clever valet as he devises stratagems to bring off a marriage. Moreover, one of the results of his inventions is that, at the very end, the Count will be reunited in love with the Countess—no doubt a vestige of the classic situation. But of course the fact that the main matrimony Figaro is so busily improvising is his own completely upsets the original balance, leaving the traditional plot dangling in incompletion, in fact lacking the essential half that had always given it, morally, a sense of fulfilment: in the classic situation the audience gladly tolerated any amount of impudence, wiles and deceits on the part of Scapin, not merely because we all secretly envy someone who can so charmingly disregard the restrictive laws of society, but because his dubious activities at the same time are fully counterbalanced in the plot, indeed they actually help preserve the finer and more noble qualities we enjoy in the hero and heroine. Because he is so clever, they can remain pure. So it was absolutely inevitable that, despite all his fourberies, Scapin would finally be invited to join in the banquet at the end of Molière's play: everyone knew that it was only thanks to him and his dubious stratagems that virtue had won the day.

What we find in the first four acts of Le Mariage de Figaro, on the other hand, is a great deal of impudence and devious devices by the valet, tricks and games of all sorts, but morally there is no counterpoise: instead of a noble hero we are given a corrupt Count, almost a villain. And the valet de chambre we are left with in these early acts clearly does not yet fill the bill as hero. Though he is constantly measuring himself against the Count, and sometimes besting him in their verbal fencing matches, he is still, in essence, behaving according to type, as the impudent valet. Moreover, these skirmishes are minor affairs, the main one, over the Count's attempts to seduce Suzanne, still remaining unresolved. Even the revolutionary implications of these contests may not, so far as we can tell, go beyond those we find in the first act of Le Barbier de Séville: for all we know, they may eventually fizzle out, submerged in some larger dramatic situation, just as they had done in the earlier play. Meanwhile, as we watch the progress of the action, our interest wanders almost at random from the romance between Figaro and Suzanne, to Chérubin's getting caught, to the Countess' unhappiness over her husband's negligence, to Figaro's lawsuit and the Marceline subplot, and so on. The play doesn't have a dramatic centre, and in a sense the many scholars who have criticized it for not being unified were quite right. But then, one could hardly expect the action to have much focus so long as the play lacked such a key piece as its hero.

Le Mariage de Figaro gets a hero and finds its centre only in act V, during Figaro's great monologue—a unique moment in eighteenth-century theatre, if only for its extraordinary length. No other monologue in a “regular” comedy even approaches its size. To find monologues so gargantuan in proportions, monologues that contained such astonishingly diverse elements they are virtually whole plays in themselves, as this one is, one has to look back to the pièces en monologue of Piron's time, and these, to be sure, since they were the direct result of a rather peculiar sort of theatrical oppression, were devised to serve other purposes and had a very different cast to them.

Figaro's monologue is outlandish in a way all its own. In this connection, it may be useful to report that in actual Parisian performances, the monologue sometimes becomes not merely an incidental mishap, but a general catastrophe that does in once and for all the entire production. The play is already so long—again breaking all eighteenth-century records for comedy in France—that to bring the action to a dead halt so near to (although it actually turns out to be so far from) the end, just so that this valet can indulge himself in streams of consciousness, rambling thoughts about one thing and another, broken by all those pauses, musings and vague ideas that finally decide not to go anywhere after all, leaving us with trois points de suspension … this is a strategy fit to strain the patience of even the mildest gods of retribution. It may be an act of self-preservation to grope for the exit without waiting for the end.

Obviously the monologue demands the kind of superlatively great actor that Dazincourt might have been, someone whose skill can make an audience oblivious to the midnight hour and charm them into finding him alone to be just as enthralling as a whole stageful of characters, someone worth breaking the momentum of the action for. And since there is, dramatically, so much at stake in Figaro's monologue, one can easily understand why it can lead to total déroute, as well as—I presume—to exhilarating success. For in this enormous scene the play either creates, or fails to create, its hero. That is the possibility—or the problem. There don't seem to be any other Classical comédies constructed in quite this way, although certain tragedies, notably the famous ones by Corneille, also have monologues, moments of deep reflection like this one, in which the budding hero determines whether he will, or will not, achieve his essence. In these plays by Corneille he always does; and, in retrospect, the right decision was inevitable, because, even though he did indeed have free choice, it was a question of remaining true to a nobility that was a birthright, and hence an inherent part of his character. 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.

Sagacious Diderot once remarked that, in effect, the notion of identity in an individual depends totally on knowledge of the past (or memory): if we had no idea of who we had been, we wouldn't have any idea of the kind of person we are. Perhaps Beaumarchais was thinking along these lines as he composed his monologue, for, as he reinvents Figaro, refashioning him to be a three-dimensional human being, he endows him with a long and diverting past, full of drama and incident, and this serves first of all to deepen our sense of his identity. He also gives him a many-faceted personality, displaying him as someone capable of expressing a wide range of emotions, from impudence and good-humored defiance to deepest melancholy; someone whose picaresque life—in and out of jails, knocking about from pillar to post—takes on new seriousness as we realize Figaro's keen sense of social injustice.

Now, Figaro is recreated here, not merely as some vague reflection of the author's own personality, as so many critics have maintained, but according to strict principle, and one that illustrates the attraction of the contrary to a kind of perfection. It is as if the intensity of this historic moment on the eve of the Revolution had imbued the familiar phenomenon of contrariness with all the potential force it had been accumulating in so many authors during the century. In this play the dynamism of opposition generates, momentarily, something like an explosion.

We have already been aware of the long theatrical tradition that represented noblemen and their valets as opposites—sometimes even to the advantage of the latter—but now Beaumarchais pushes this classic opposition to its extreme limits, so that it becomes a true antithesis. Figaro is triumphantly reconstructed to be an anti-nobleman: quite precisely everything that, according to the traditional stereotype, noblemen never are. Since noblemen by definition have noble lineage, Figaro has no family background at all—his wit replaces his genealogy; since they—as their noble particles imply—always come from a given place and are geographically fixed, Figaro comes from nowhere, constantly changes location, and is all the freer and more effective for not being tied down; they were never gainfully employed, therefore Figaro masters a dozen skills and occupations—clear proof of his superiority; they were pillars of the Church, therefore Figaro devotes himself to attacking religious abuses; they were hostile to freedom of the press and economic reform, therefore Figaro champions both, and becomes everyone's hero; they were soft and decadent, therefore Figaro is strong—vitality and youth personified.

This is no minor matter, for Figaro's energetic negations of nobility amount to a liberation: simply by coming into being as an antithesis he has denied the old order, deliberately cancelled out the ancien régime, and, in the freshness of his strength and intelligence, he embodies all that is most joyous in the Enlightenment's idea of life's possibilities. Since this emergent hero in his monologue has succeeded in imposing the values he represents, now in his triumph he threatens to take on all the aristocratic prerogatives of the character he has supplanted. The tables are turning decisively, the renversement, the Revolution is on its way to completion. In short, Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro doesn't have a hero, it acquires one, and with him the play gains not only the shape and dramatic focus, but the revolutionary significance it lacked before.

Hopefully this interpretation will seem plausible and consistent, for it certainly is part of the message the author is seeking to convey. And yet, staggering thought, it is by no means the whole story. For in addition to all the taunting defiance and impudent self-assertiveness, this monologue also contains one moment of self-doubt so problematic as to bring all the rest, everything that has been asserted, into question. The fact is that just a few lines before the end of the monologue, we see our newly formed hero, his plumes barely dry, on the verge of losing confidence completely. The famous anti-aristocratic principle that, even a moment before, had given such zest to the recounting of his life, now wears so thin it just spins in the air, barely able to sputter, while the tale of his adventures, as it reaches the present, ends in something very much like meaninglessness. Coming down in his narration to the here and now, he discovers that his existence has no more illusions, that everything is worn out. Instead of achieving a new identity through his negative outbursts, he realizes he does not even know who he is.

As the play is performed today, these are the merest hints, unexpected touches of seriousness that serve to heighten the dramatic tension, even as they contribute to the suspense surrounding the final scenes (will Figaro revive his sense of purpose in time for the happy ending?). And of course, even underplayed, they add most tellingly to the psychological richness of the character, supplying—more intensely here than elsewhere—a counterpoise to Figaro's customary brittleness. Originally, Beaumarchais had intended to give far more stress to this mood of depression and self-doubt. In an earlier version of the text, Figaro was to lose confidence to such an extent that he actually despaired of life, sinking in his depression into a symbolic kind of death. It was a question of his own identity and being, as well as of the meaning of life in general. Beaumarchais decided to cut out the following:

Vais-je enfin être un homme? Un homme? Il descend comme il est monté … se traînant où il a couru, … puis les dégoûts, les maladies, une vieille et débile poupée … une froide momie … un squelette ah et puis rien (Il laisse tomber sa tête sur sa poitrine) rien … (Revenant à lui) Brr! En quel abîme de rêveries suis-je tombé comme dans un puits sans fond. J'en suis glacé. J'ai froid. (Il se lève) Au diable l'animal. Suzon, Suzon […]²²

Even in the original performances, where these lines were excised, Figaro apparently acted out this symbolic death:

[Figaro] se laisse aller sur le banc, et demeure enséveli dans la plus profonde douleur.²³

But what an extraordinary glimpse this moment gives of the precariousness of the personality behind all the wisecracks (whether one sees this as Beaumarchais or Figaro), and of the precariousness, too, of this whole enormous dramatic enterprise that has so unpredictably, within sight of the end, jolted to a stop, the text turning out to be as hollow and vulnerable to cessation as the hero (or the author), the stage going silent, perhaps even the page going blank.

Ironically, particularly for the reader of the first version, nothing could be further from what actually transpires in the play than these fearful surmises. On the contrary, this crisis of anguish and despair is what—somehow, through some mysterious process of recreation—stores up and then unleashes the extraordinary explosion of fun and laughter we experience in the final scenes. Not only is the riotous game of blindman's buff all the more hilarious for being set against this somber point of contrast, but it is as if Figaro's spiritual death were, paradoxically, just what brought the end of the play to life. Indeed, in this instance the tension of opposition against this “point mort” forms a generating force within the structure of the play itself, the cessation of the action making the rebirth and continuance possible.

The scandalous circumstances under which the play was originally put on, the incredible drama of Beaumarchais' efforts to get his comedy publicly performed in spite of, or because of, the King's interdiction, the mere fact that the great Revolution was only six years away, all this rightly politicizes our view of this work, for Beaumarchais was quite aware of how combustible the situation was in which he was so heedlessly striking sparks. Yet at the same time the exhilarating, giddy timeliness of Le Mariage de Figaro should not blind us to the strength of its ties to the past. This was the last great pre-Revolutionary, the last great Classical, comedy anyone would produce in France. And in the beautiful costumes so carefully indicated by the author, in the flirtations in the Countess' apartment, in the clever impudence of the valet, in all the things making up the lovely idleness that is the very stuff of Beaumarchais' play, we are enjoying the aristocratic pleasures of the social structure the author himself was helping to bring down.

Notes

1. See introduction to Le Mariage de Figaro, ed. Annie Ubersfeld (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1957).

2. Jean Fabre, “Beaumarchais,” in Histoire des littératures, ed. Raymond Queneau, III (Paris: Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, 1958), p. 784.

3. See T. E. Lawrenson's edn of Lesage, Crispin rival de son maître, pp. 26-33, and E. J. Arnould's edn of Le Mariage de Figaro (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), pp. xxxvi-xxxvii.

4. La Dramaturgie de Beaumarchais (Paris: Nizet, 1954).

5. These and other sources are reviewed in René Pomeau, Beaumarchais (Paris: Hatier, 1967), pp. 168-77. A useful bibliography of this question and other problems connected with Figaro will be found in John Hampton, “Research on Le Mariage de Figaro,” French Studies, 16 (1962), 24-31.

6. “The theme of the ‘droit du seigneur’ in eighteenth-century theatre,” French Studies, 15 (1961), 228-39.

7. See Pomeau, Beaumarchais, pp. 169-70.

8. Pomeau, Beaumarchais, p. 171.

9. I intend no disagreement here with the informed and subtle discussion in Robert Niklaus' Beaumarchais: Le Barbier de Séville (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), pp. 21-4; it is rather that I am approaching the question from a different direction.

10. Most critics, from Sainte-Beuve and Francisque Sarcey to Arnould (edn, p. xxxiii), have found the structure defective from the standpoint of unity.

11. I am not aware of any other commentator who has used the present approach in analyzing the play. However, Philippe Van Tieghem has made some pertinent remarks about the game spirit in Beaumarchais (especially jeux d'escrime and jeux d'esprit) in Beaumarchais par lui-même (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960), pp. 32-7.

12. Marivaux is to some degree an exception; however, games in Marivaux' plays almost never exist in the pure state they do in Figaro.

13. Tartuffe, I, iv. Cf. Gaston Hall, Molière: Tartuffe (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), p. 20.

14. For such observations I am indebted to Iona and Peter Opie, Children's Games in Street and Playground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

15. E.g., Pomeau, Beaumarchais, p. 180.

16. See his words at the conclusion of the scene of Chérubin's brevet (II, xxi): “(A part) C'est ce Figaro qui les mène, et je ne m'en vengerais pas? (Il veut sortir de dépit.)”

17. Homo Ludens: A Study of Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), chapter 4, “Play and Law,” pp. 76-88. Cf. Arnould, edn, p. xxxiv.

18. I. and P. Opie, Children's Games, pp. 18-25. Children instinctively shun the role.

19. Cf. Scherer, pp. 161-3.

20. See the concluding remarks of the chapter on Beaumarchais by Robert Niklaus, The Eighteenth Century (1715-1789), in vol. III of A Literary History of France, gen. ed. P. E. Chavet (London: Benn, and New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967). Some of the most interesting research on Beaumarchais currently being done is by the art historian, Thomas E. Crow. See, for example, his Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, pp. 223ff. One hopes this author will do a full-length study, for undoubtedly Beaumarchais' politics in particular have been badly misinterpreted; it is time for a whole new evaluation. On the other hand, I do not accept the implications of his statement (p. 223) about the politics of Le Mariage de Figaro, for in fact the revolutionary message is built into the structure of the play (not only Napoleon, but apparently Louis XVI saw it quite clearly). Professor Crow, exceptionally, fails to keep track of the chronology on this issue. His statement that “Beaumarchais was far from being a symbol of political dissent in the 1780's, … he stood instead in the public mind for the forces of reaction and despotism” creates a false impression because it does not take into account the shifts in public opinion during this volatile period. Beaumarchais was anything but a symbol of reaction and despotism at the time of the creation of Le Mariage de Figaro. He may have become so, in the eyes of many, shortly thereafter.

21. A convenient résumé of this tradition will be found in the introduction to T. E. Lawrenson's edition of Crispin, referred to above.

22. Text of the Comédie Française manuscript reproduced in J. B. Ratermanis' critical edition, SVEC, 63 (1968), 439A-441A.

23. Text found in three early pirated editions (Amsterdam, 1785; Paris, 1785; Lausanne, 1785), act V, scene 3, based on a hasty transcription taken down during actual performances of the play. However, the manuscript tradition referred to above makes it seem likely that in this instance the scribe correctly noted the stage action.