SOURCE: “Tarare” and “La Mere Coupable,” in Beaumarchais and the Theatre, Routledge, 1995, pp. 196-220.

[In the excerpt below, Howarth, a noted Beaumarchais scholar, places Tarare and La Mère coupable in the context of Beaumarchais's writings as well as the eighteenth century literary world.]

Beaumarchais's next—and penultimate—dramatic work was already on the stocks well before the production of Le Mariage de Figaro in 1784. Although Tarare was not to be performed in public (at the Opéra) until 1787, its original conception dates from the 1770s, and a prose version of the opera libretto was apparently completed, and the composition of a verse version well under way, as early as 1775. The project of an opera was inspired by the Paris performance of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide, and the composer's visit to Paris, where he met Beaumarchais, in 1774. Both were keen, it seems, to work together on an opera; but by the time Beaumarchais's libretto was finished in 1784, Gluck, now aged 70, considered himself too old to take it on, and instead proposed his pupil and friend Salieri as a replacement: master and pupil had worked together on Les Danaïdes, which had its première at the Paris Opéra on 26 April 1784, the day before the first performance of Le Mariage de Figaro at the Comédie-Française.

Tarare enjoyed a genuine success, with thirty-three performances during the theatrical season 1787-8. It was to be revived at the Opéra in 1790 (with the addition of the ‘Couronnement de Tarare’, also the work of Beaumarchais and Salieri), 1791 and 1792; in 1795, adapted to the political climate of the day by Beaumarchais's friend Framery; in 1802, with further modifications, 1819, 1824, 1825 and 1826; it was performed in London in 1825, and at Hamburg in 1841. Altogether, a more than honourable record; but the libretto, shorn of its musical accompaniment, makes sorry reading for those of today's students who are determined to explore the totality of Beaumarchais's dramatic output, and the most interesting feature of the playwright's authorship of Tarare is likely to be judged to be the substantial prefatory letter (twelve pages in the Pléiade edition) ‘Aux abonnés de l'Opéra qui voudraient aimer l'opéra’. Similar in style to the prefaces to Le Barbier and Le Mariage, trenchant in its opinions and familiar in its style, ‘Aux abonnés de l'Opéra’ is an idiosyncratic analysis of the aesthetics of the genre: ‘Il s'agit moins pour moi d'un nouvel opéra que d'un nouveau moyen d'intéresser à l'opéra’ (136).

Beaumarchais's premiss is that the balance between opera's constituent parts has been lost: music has been allowed to predominate over the literary component, the poet has yielded precedence to the composer, and the result is as had already been described in a letter of Voltaire's in 1732 from which he quotes:

L'Opéra n'est qu'un rendez-vous public, où l'on s'assemble à certains jours, sans trop savoir pourquoi; c'est une maison où tout le monde va, quoiqu'on pense mal du maître, et qu'il soit assez ennuyeux.

(137)¹

The public's adverse reaction to opera, suggests Beaumarchais, is due to ‘la réunion mal ourdie de tant d'arts nécessaires à sa formation’ (138); and an early paragraph seeks to restore a proper relationship between the different arts concerned:

La véritable hiérarchie de ces arts devrait, ce me semble, ainsi marcher dans l'estime des spectateurs. Premièrement, la pièce ou l'invention du sujet, qui embrasse et comporte la masse de l'intérêt; puis la beauté du poème ou la manière aisée d'en narrer les événements; puis le charme de la musique, qui n'est qu'une expression nouvelle ajoutée au charme des vers; enfin, l'agrément de la danse, dont la gaieté, la gentillesse, embellit quelques froides situations. Tel est, dans l'ordre du plaisir, le rang marqué pour tous ces arts.

(139)²

The root of the problem, the reason why opera has become no more than a ‘puéril amusement’, is identified as the tradition according to which the spectator is not expected to understand, or even to listen to, the words of the libretto:

Lassé, dans l'opéra, de n'entendre point les paroles, il se tourne vers la musique: celle-ci, dénuée de l'intérêt du poème, amusant à peine l'oreille, le cède bientôt à la danse, qui de plus amuse les yeux.

(140)³

French opera, declares Beaumarchais, is overburdened with ‘trop de musique’; and he quotes the ‘expression naïve’ of his mentor Gluck, for whom opera in the French manner ‘stinks of music’. What Gluck had argued for, and what Beaumarchais claims to have achieved in collaboration with Salieri, is the restoration of a proper balance, making of the genre a music-drama fit to be taken seriously. The musical component, deprived of its autonomy, should serve the purpose of developing plot and dialogue, and all the constituent elements should work together in harmony.

Such ideas were much in the air in the Europe of the Enlightenment. Not only Gluck, but before him Benedetto Marcello in 1720, Rousseau in his Lettre sur la musique française of 1753, the Encyclopedists in France, Metastasio and Algarotti in Italy, all called for a move away from the seventeenth-century Italian manner, which made of opera ‘a series of disconnected vocal pieces tied together by the dramatic story’.⁴

Arias were sung for their own sake rather than in order to promote the dramatic action, the final result being that the drama existed only for the music and in order to provide the singers with the opportunity of demonstrating their vocal skills. The music was not particularly dramatic and often not suited to the action portrayed. Indeed, the very opposite was often true, since the florid vocal music which developed was frequently out of keeping with the nature of the actions and situation.⁵

Instead of the florid cadenzas and the da capo style of repetitive elaboration—what Beaumarchais and his contemporaries called ‘fredons’—Gluck demanded simplicity in the interests of dramatic effect:

This is the aim which I seek to attain: always as simple and natural as possible, my music merely strives to achieve the fullest expression and to reinforce the poetic declamation. That is the reason why I do not employ the trills, passages or cadenzas in which the Italians revel.⁶

Beaumarchais himself had already launched an even more telling attack on the Italianate style of contemporary opera in the ‘Lettre modérée’ which had served as Preface to Le Barbier de Séville in 1775:

Notre musique dramatique ressemble trop encore à notre musique chansonnière pour en attendre un véritable intérêt ou de la gaieté franche. Il faudra commencer à l'employer sérieusement au théâtre quand on sentira bien qu'on ne doit y chanter que pour parler; quand nos musiciens se rapprocheront de la nature, et surtout cesseront de s'imposer l'absurde loi de toujours revenir à la première partie d'un air après qu'ils en ont dit la seconde. Est-ce qu'il y a des reprises et des rondeaux dans un drame? Ce cruel radotage est la mort de l'intérêt et dénote un vide insupportable dans les idées.

(141)⁷

In the ‘Lettre modérée’, he had imagined himself saying, as spectator at the performance of an opera:

Eh! va donc, musique! pourquoi toujours répéter? N'es-tu pas assez lente? Au lieu de narrer vivement, tu rabâches! au lieu de peindre la passion, tu t'accroches aux mots! Le poète se tue à serrer l'événement, et toi tu le délayes! Que lui sert de rendre son style énergique et pressé, si tu l'ensevelis sous d'inutiles fredons? Avec ta stérile abondance, reste, reste aux chansons pour toute nourriture, jusqu'à ce que tu connaisses le langage sublime et tumultueux des passions.

(142)⁸

Now, twelve years later, the opera-going public had the chance to judge how Beaumarchais was able to put these ideas into practice in the new-style opera for which the ‘Lettre modérée’ had coined the neologism ‘mélodrame’, or music-drama. It seems clear that the collaboration between librettist and composer was a close and harmonious one. Salieri lodged with Beaumarchais for this purpose, and looking back on their relationship several years later, he was to pay tribute to the older man's guidance:

Towards ten o'clock, M. de Beaumarchais would come to my room, and I would sing for him those parts of our great work that I had just written. He would applaud and encourage me, and would offer me fatherly advice. Everything was peace and harmony.⁹

Beaumarchais, for his part, speaks in ‘Aux abonnés de l'Opéra’ of the ‘plaisir délectable’ of this evening recreation, and praises his musical collaborator for his readiness to fall in with his own reforming ideas. Though familiar enough in Italy, it seems certain that the name of Salieri was almost unknown elsewhere in our own day—except, perhaps, to musicologists specialising in the eighteenth century—until the Shaffer play Amadeus, and especially its cinema version, gave his relationship with Mozart a certain (largely fictional) notoriety. However, Beaumarchais's ‘Lettre’ reminds us that in contemporary eyes he was by no means lacking in qualifications for the task:

Ce grand compositeur, l'honneur de l'école de Gluck, ayant le style du grand maître, avait reçu de la nature un sens exquis, un esprit juste, le talent le plus dramatique avec une fécondité presque unique. Il a eu la vertu de renoncer, pour me complaire, à une foule de beautés dont son opéra scintillait, uniquement parce qu'elles allongeaient la scène, qu'elles ‘alanguissaient’ l'action; mais la couleur mâle, énergique, le ton rapide et fier de l'ouvrage le dédommageront bien de tant de sacrifices.

(143)¹⁰

In spite of these somewhat extravagant claims for the work's originality, analysis of the libretto of Tarare gives no more than a scant indication of the possibilities of a musical drama combining in a new and challenging manner the resources of literary text, musical score, spectacle and choreography. However, it is certainly not impossible to appreciate the ways in which theme, plot and dialogue combine to express, albeit in the simplistic terms appropriate to an opera libretto, some of the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment. A word should first be said about the title of the opera: ‘Tarare!’ is—or was in the eighteenth century—a dismissive interjection expressing disbelief or scorn; the equivalent, possibly, of our ‘Fiddlesticks!’.¹¹ A short story by the Comte d'Hamilton, L'Histoire de Fleur d'épine, published in 1730, had given this name to a character; Beaumarchais alludes to this source, claiming on the one hand to have chosen it for his own hero's name as a sort of ‘gageure’:

J'ai voulu … voir si, lui donnant un nom insignifiant, je parviendrais à l'élever à un très haut degré d'estime avant la fin de mon ouvrage

(144)¹²

—and on the other hand, to have sought a name with connotations of triviality in order to lighten the tone of the work:

Sans le nom de Tarare, mon opéra ne serait pas gai, ce mot seul égayera le ton souvent un peu sombre que l'intérêt m'a forcé d'employer.

(145)¹³

Whatever effect the implications of such a name may have had on contemporary audiences, however, there can be no doubt of the overall seriousness of Beaumarchais's opera; such light relief as is to be found is provided by a sub-plot which does not concern the hero Tarare himself. Tarare, ou le Despotisme: the projected subtitle¹⁴ indicates as clearly as that of Voltaire's tragedy of 1742, Mahomet ou le Fanatisme,¹⁵ the author's intention to tackle one of the favourite themes of the pre-Revolutionary Enlightenment; while the concluding couplet of the libretto:

Mortel, qui que tu sois, prince, brame ou soldat,
                    Homme! ta grandeur sur la terre
                    N'appartient point à ton état:
          Elle est toute à ton caractère

(146)

is no more than a transposition from a domestic to a political context of the Enlightenment optimism that we have already commented on in the case of Le Mariage de Figaro—a transposition foreshadowed, perhaps, in Figaro's contribution to that play's vaudeville:

Par le sort de la naissance
L'un est roi, l'autre est berger;
Le hasard fit leur distance;
L'esprit seul peut tout changer.
De vingt rois que l'on encense,
Le trépas brise l'autel;
Et Voltaire est immortel …

(147)

In fact, the theme of ‘le sort de la naissance' is illustrated in the Prologue to Tarare in which La Nature, one of a pair of supernatural spirits, invites her companion Le Génie du feu, whose cooperation is necessary to the creation of human life, to choose between two inanimate forms waiting to be born, to decide the rank of each in their earthly life:

                    Que sont ces deux superbes ombres,
Qui semblent menacer, taciturnes et sombres?
—Rien; mais dites un mot; assignant leur état,
Je fais un roi de l'un, et de l'autre un soldat.

The Génie is hesitant, since so much depends on his choice:

Mon oeil, entre eux, cherche un roi préférable;
          Mais que je crains mon jugement!
          Nature, l'erreur d'un moment
          Peut rendre un siècle misérable!

(148)

The choice having been made, Atar becomes a despotic ruler, while the virtuous Tarare becomes a successful general in his service. Atar hates him for his simple happiness:

Qui? moi? je souffrirais qu'un soldat eût l'audace
D'être toujours heureux, quand son roi ne l'est pas!

(I,i)

He asks his chief eunuch, Calpigi, what can be the source of this happiness:

                                        Cet homme est mon supplice.
Où trouve-t-il, dis-moi, cette félicité?
Est-ce dans le travail, ou dans la pauvreté?
—Dans son devoir. Il sert avec simplicité
Le ciel, les malheureux, la patrie, et son maître.

(149; ibid.)

If these are the simple clichés of the didactic literature of the age, the plot and its setting are equally reminiscent of a whole stream of imaginative works, serious and lighthearted. The harem offered eighteenth-century readers and spectators, from Montesquieu's Lettres persanes of 1721 through to Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail (1782), the attractions of the exotic, and of a mild eroticism, as well as providing a vehicle for anti-despotic and anti-clerical propaganda (here, the tyrannical Atar is predictably seconded by his high-priest Arthenée, described as being ‘dévoré d'orgueil et d'ambition’ (150)). The detail of the plot—the foiling of Atar's attempt to destroy Tarare's happiness by kidnapping his wife Astasie and installing her in his harem—is unimportant: what is more significant is the contrast between the evil tyrant, who can force his subjects to obey him but not to love him, and the loyal Tarare who, when the people invite him to depose Atar and become their king, reminds them of their duty to their legitimate ruler:

                    Arrêtez! soldats, arrêtez!
                    Quel ordre ici vous a portés?
                    Ô l'abominable victoire!
On sauverait mes jours en flétrissant ma gloire!
                    Un tas de rebelles mutins
                    De l'État ferait les destins!
                    Est-ce à vous de juger vos maîtres?
                    N'ont-ils soudoyé que des traîtres?
Oubliez-vous, soldats, usurpant le pouvoir,
Que le respect des rois est le premier devoir?
Armes bas, furieux! Votre empereur vous casse.

(151; V, vi)

Such sentiments may have been unexceptionable in 1787, and perhaps not too dangerously reactionary at the time of the opera's reprise in 1790. However, in Framery's revised version performed in 1795, it was evidently thought prudent that the virtuous Tarare should persist in refusing the throne even after the death of Atar (who kills himself in despair at the courage and constancy of Astasie):

                    Le trône, amis, qu'osez-vous dire?
Quand, pour votre bonheur, la tyrannie expire,
                    Vous voudriez encore un roi?
          —Et quel autre sur nous pourrait régner?
                                        —La Loi!
Sachez jouir d'un bien que le Ciel vous prépare;
                    Affranchis d'un joug détesté,
                    Conservez votre liberté.
                    —Vive à jamais, vive Tarare
                    Qui nous rend notre liberté!

(152)

On the other hand, in the ‘Couronnement de Tarare’, added for the 1790 revival of the opera, the author had already taken the opportunity to give evidence of his Revolutionary ‘civisme’ by pronouncing on the iniquity of forced monastic vows:

De tant de retraites forcées
Que les barrières soient brisées …

(153)¹⁷

—on the acceptability of divorce (quaintly illustrated in the following stage direction):

Danse pittoresque, peignant le sentiment d'un divorce, ou de gens qui se fuient et prennent d'autres engagements

(154)¹⁸

—and also (much more controversially) on the question of slavery. A ‘député du Zanguébar’ offers the new ruler a ‘tribut d'esclaves’, but Tarare declares:

                    Plus d'infortunés parmi nous.
Le despotisme affreux outrageait la nature;
                    Nos lois vengeront cette injure.
                    Soyez tous heureux, levez-vous.

(155)

Whereupon a negro spokesman eulogises him in pidgin French, and there is yet another ‘danse pittoresque’.¹⁹

There could be no clearer reflection of the taste of the times than the finale to the ‘Couronnement’, which was very much in the spirit of the ‘Fête de la Fédération’ of July 1790 and the other public spectacles of the early Revolutionary years.²⁰ In its 1790 version, the opera closes as follows:

Pendant que [la marche générale] passe sur le devant du théâtre, on élève un trône au fond, sous un riche baldaquin. Le livre de la Loi est mis au sommet sous une grande couronne d'or. Tarare et Astasie sont au-dessous. L'assemblée mêlée est assise autour d'eux, le peuple en bas; l'autel de la Liberté est flamboyant sur le devant.

Danse des premiers sujets dans tous les genres. Au milieu de la fête, un coup de tonnerre se fait entendre. Le théâtre se couvre de nuages, on voit paraître au ciel, sur le char du soleil, la Nature et le Génie du Feu.

Le Génie du Feu:
                    Nature! quel spectacle imposant et funeste!
                    Le soldat monte au trône et le tyran est mort!
La Nature:
                    Les dieux ont fait leur premier sort,
                    Leur caractère a fait le reste.

Le tonnerre recommence, les nuages s'élèvent, on voit dans le fond toute la nation à genoux, son roi à la tête, disant tous:

                    De ce grand bruit, de cet éclat,
                    Ô ciel! apprends-nous le mystère!
Le Génie du Feu et La Nature, majestueusement:
          Mortel, qui que tu sois, prince, prêtre ou
soldat,
                    Homme! ta grandeur sur la terre
                    N'appartient point à ton état:
                    Elle est toute à ton caractère.

Ces vers se peignent en feu dans les nuées pendant qu'on les prononce. La nation est prosternée. Les trompettes et le tonnerre terminent tout. La toile tombe.

(156)

All in all, while Tarare is certainly no neglected masterpiece, it shows, as do all Beaumarchais's dramatic texts, the author exploiting to the full the taste of his times. This product of Beaumarchais's and Salieri's combined talents was inevitably subject to the constraints of the age they lived in; and however interesting we may find the ideas expressed in ‘Aux abonnés de l'Opéra’ concerning a new genre of music-drama, it would be quite unrealistic to look for the sort of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ that was to be realised in Wagner's Ring cycle. For the taste of the 1780s was not yet ready for the audacities of a Wagner—and this does not apply merely to the innovations of Wagner the composer: where the poet's recourse to Nordic myth enables him to express the ambiguities and contradictions of human nature in memorable form, Beaumarchais's libretto shows him to be a prisoner of the simplistic ideals of his age. Atar is a villainous tyrant, and that is all there is to it; while Tarare and his faithful wife embody the virtues of self-abnegation and constancy: a manichaean view of things in which the dice are loaded, for the virtuous and against the evil, by the optimism that provided such a strong current of Enlightenment thought. The reassuring happy ending of the optimistic philosophers will soon give way to the defeat of virtue at the hands of self-seeking cynicism, producing the didactic melodramas written for the popular audiences of the post-Revolutionary period; but the simplistic polarisation into black and white is still the same. Few playwrights were able to transcend the manichaean banalities of the age and create rounded, three-dimensional figures; and the more evident the didactic intention, the greater the tendency to rely on black-and-white stereotypes. In La Mère coupable, which once more shows virtue triumphing against villainy, the author's didactic purpose is again too strong for him to be able to resist the melodramatic clichés; and we should be all the more grateful that in Le Mariage de Figaro he had managed to avoid being dominated in this way by the prejudices of his age.

.....

A note at the end of Delon's Mariage de Chérubin (1785), one of the sequels to Le Mariage de Figaro referred to in chapter 13, reads as follows:

To take the same characters, and to make them speak and act in the same way that they speak and behave in Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro: that has been the goal of perfection that the author of Le Mariage de Chérubin set himself. The reading, or the performance, of his play, if any theatre manager should see fit to put it on, will show how near the author has come to achieving this end.²¹

Fidelity to the characters of the two earlier Figaro plays was also no doubt an important criterion when Beaumarchais himself came to write La Mère coupable, the third play in the so-called Figaro ‘trilogy’, which was performed for the first time in 1792; but it was by no means the only consideration. This sequel to Le Mariage de Figaro had been referred to in the Preface to that play, written for the first edition in 1785, though with no indication at that point of any link between the proposed subject and the story of the Almaviva and Figaro families; Beaumarchais there calls it ‘un des sujets les plus moraux du théâtre’, and declares his intention to ‘faire verser des larmes à toutes les femmes sensibles, [élever] mon language à la hauteur de mes situations, [prodiguer] les traits de la plus austère morale, et [tonner] fortement sur les vices que j'ai trop ménagés’ (157). In a well-known passage from the Preface to La Mère coupable itself (‘Un Mot sur la Mère coupable’), he writes in similar vein:

Peut-être ai-je attendu trop tard pour achever cet ouvrage terrible qui me consumait la poitrine et devait être écrit dans la force de l'âge. Il m'a tourmenté bien longtemps! Mes deux comédies espagnoles ne furent faites que pour le préparer. Depuis, en vieillissant, j'hésitais de m'en occuper: je craignais de manquer de force; et peut-être n'en avais-je plus à l'époque où je l'ai tenté! Mais enfin, je l'ai composé dans une intention droite et pure: avec la tête froide d'un homme et le coeur brûlant d'une femme, comme l'on a pensé de Rousseau. J'ai remarqué que cet ensemble, cet ‘hermaphroditisme’ moral, est moins rare qu'on ne le croit.

(158)²²

We need not feel obliged to accept this estimate of the relative importance of La Mère coupable and the two preceding Figaro plays at its face value; although there are perhaps hints of such an attitude in the Preface to Le Mariage de Figaro, the reception given to this latter play, not only as an outstanding popular success but also as a highly controversial statement about the society of the ancien régime, must surely have convinced Beaumarchais, if he really needed convincing, of the equal validity of the formula he had developed for the second Figaro play. In La Mère coupable, however, there is a definite return to something like the manner of Eugénie and Les Deux Amis. I say ‘something like the manner’, because there are three prominent features which distinguish La Mère coupable from the formula of sentimental drame bourgeois: features which we can associate mnemonically with the subtitle of the play and the names of its two most active characters.

The full title of Beaumarchais's last play is L'Autre Tartuffe, ou la Mère coupable; and the explicit reference to Molière's play provides a link with one of the most prolific dramatic themes throughout the eighteenth century.²³ During the Revolutionary period, a number of playwrights appropriated the Tartuffe theme for purposes of political satire or propaganda: two of the plays concerned were actually called Le Tartuffe révolutionnaire; and although Beaumarchais's play is less engagé in strictly political terms, the fact that it is set (unlike the first two Figaro plays) in Paris ‘à la fin de 1790’ gives it rather more than a superficial local colour deriving from its Revolutionary context. For the rest, the connection is less with Molière's own play than with Tartuffe as seen through the filter of eighteenth-century interpretations: that is to say, in place of a comic focus on the foibles and follies of Orgon, the typical Molière paterfamilias besotted with the confidence-trickster Tartuffe, we have a sentimental and moralising focus on the sufferings caused in the Almaviva household by the machinations of the evil Bégearss.

This character, whom Beaumarchais has chosen to present (for reasons unknown) as an Irishman, is without a doubt one of the most villainous figures to appear in the second wave of drames bourgeois in the 1780s. The first generation of drames had inherited from the comédies larmoyantes of the 1740s the comforting notion that wrongdoing is a matter of wrong thinking, not something ingrained in human nature, and that all will be well once the aberrant character has been subjected to the corrective influence of tears. Beaumarchais's Clarendon had thus been capable of undergoing a sentimental conversion and participating in the euphoric happy ending of Eugénie; but with La Mère coupable we move nearer to fin de siècle melodrama, and Bégearss belongs to the family of villains whose expulsion is necessary if the play's microcosm of human society is to regain its lost stability. ‘On gagne assez dans les familles quand on en expulse un méchant’ (159): Figaro's sententious phrase not only brings the curtain down at the end of La Mère coupable; it has also been picked out to serve as epigraph to the published text of the play.

The adoption of Molière's hypocrite as a model for his central character also enabled Beaumarchais to prosecute his feud against the lawyer Bergasse. If indeed the subject of a third Figaro play had been in mind as early as 1785, it seems that the incorporation into its plot of ‘l'autre Tartuffe’, as a means of attacking Bergasse, must have been a later addition, for the paths of the playwright and the lawyer crossed for the first time in 1787; however, whereas Beaumarchais had been content to lampoon his earlier adversary Goëzman by means of his witty Mémoires contre Goëzman and by the latter's portrayal as the ineffably foolish Brid'oison, the identification of Bergasse with the much more villainous Bégearss indicates a far more serious purpose. The brief account of the Kornman affair (see chapter 4) may help to explain the ferocity of Beaumarchais's attack.

If the adoption of a plot based on eighteenth-century interpretations of Tartuffe, and the presentation of a villainous manipulator in the role corresponding to that of Molière's hypocrite, suggest all too clearly a move towards melodrama, the duel between Bégearss and Figaro, who leads the forces of law and order opposed to the villain's self-seeking schemes, looks forward to a rather different development in the dramatic writing of the following century: the ‘well-made play’ which was to provide the formula for the comédie-vaudeville of Scribe and his successors, and for the social problem plays by such authors as Dumas fils, Augier and Sardou.²⁴ Beaumarchais claims, in ‘Un Mot sur la Mère coupable’, that the play contains ‘une intrigue de comédie, fondue dans le pathétique d'un drame’ (160);²⁵ but whereas his contemporaries would naturally interpret this analysis in the light of the traditions established by eighteenth-century dramatists, I believe we are justified in seeing in it a valuable, if unconscious, indication of Beaumarchais's status as a forerunner of nineteenth-century dramaturgy.²⁶

Anyone writing about La Mère coupable, even in the quite recent past, would perforce have had to treat it as a museum piece which, however well it might reflect the taste of its time, and whatever hints it might contain of forward-looking dramaturgical technique, had nevertheless disappeared from the active repertory nearly a century and a half ago.²⁷ February 1990, however, brought the first revival at the Comédie-Française since 1850; and those of us who were fortunate enough to see Jean-Pierre Vincent's excellent production have been able to confirm at first hand our conviction that after two centuries this play remains, despite its somewhat old-fashioned combination of sentiment and morality, theatrically viable and dramatically challenging.

Set in 1790, the play supposes a fictional time-span of twenty years since the events of Le Mariage. The Count and Countess (who have renounced their titles since moving to Paris, becoming plain Monsieur and Madame Almaviva) have spent a large part of this intervening period estranged from each other—an estrangement skilfully fostered by the Irishman Bégearss. A single lapse by the Countess with Chérubin, home from the wars, had led to the birth of a child: Chérubin had subsequently been killed in action, and the Countess's son, Léon, is now 18 years old—as is Florestine, the Count's daughter by a former mistress, since dead, whom he has brought into the household as his ward. Bégearss has designs on Almaviva's considerable fortune, which he plans to secure by marrying Florestine: the Count, although he lacks proof of his wife's infidelity, is ready to disinherit Léon in Florestine's favour; we are told he has become the more hostile towards the Countess and Léon since his elder son, a wastrel, was killed in a duel. The young couple (inevitably) love one another, but Bégearss insinuates confidentially—and of course completely misleadingly—that such a love is flying in the face of nature, since they are brother and sister. The Countess is persuaded that Florestine's best interests will be served by marrying Bégearss, while the Count is prepared to make a donation of his fortune to Bégearss as part of the marriage settlement.

The intriguer's plans are defeated by a combination of his own overconfidence and Figaro's watchfulness, backed up by Suzanne's loyal support. The details of the plot are not easy to summarise; indeed, the legal and financial technicalities are a good deal more complicated than those of Les Deux Amis. As with Molière's Tartuffe, Bégearss's undoing takes place in two distinct stages: the disabusing of the Count, followed by the family's rescue from the effects of the latter's imprudence. Both stages depend largely—and in this the play foreshadows a distinctive feature of nineteenth-century dramaturgy—on crucial stage business with material objects.²⁸ In the first Act, Bégearss provides the Count with proof of Léon's parentage, apparently by accident, when a secret drawer in the Countess's jewel-case flies open revealing letters, including one written to her by Chérubin at the time of his son's birth; the stage direction reads: Ils tirent chacun l'écrin de leur côté; Bégearss fait ouvrir adroitement le double fond (161) (I, viii). In Act IV, Figaro is able to convince the Count that this discovery was far from accidental:

La Comtesse: … Apprenez-moi comment vous êtes possesseur d'une terrible lettre que je croyais brûlée avec les autres. Quelqu'un m'a-t-il trahie?

Figaro, s'écriant: Oui! l'infâme Bégearss: je l'ai surpris tantôt qui la remettait à Monsieur.

Le Comte, parlant vite: Non, je la dois au seul hasard. Ce matin, lui et moi, pour un tout autre objet, nous examinions votre écrin, sans nous douter qu'il eût un double fond. Dans le débat et sous ses doigts, le secret s'est ouvert soudain, à son très grand étonnement. Il a cru le coffret brisé!

Figaro, criant plus fort: Son étonnement d'un secret? Monstre! c'est lui qui l'a fait faire!

Le Comte: Est-il possible?

La Comtesse: Il est trop vrai!

Le Comte: Des papiers frappent nos regards, il en ignorait l'existence, et quand j'ai voulu les lui lire, il a refusé de les voir.

Suzanne, s'écriant: Il les a lus cent fois avec Madame!

Le Comte: Est-il vrai? Les connaissait-il?

La Comtesse: Ce fut lui qui me les remit, qui les apporta de l'armée, lorsqu'un infortuné mourut.

Le Comte: Cet ami sûr, instruit de tout?

Figaro, La Comtesse, Suzanne, ensemble, criant: C'est lui!

Le Comte: Ô scélératesse infernale! Avec quel art il m'avait engagé! A présent, je sais tout.

(162; IV, xviii)

Although his eyes are now opened, the Count has, like Molière's Orgon, placed his fortune in the impostor's hands. The disclosure of Bégearss's perfidy has brought Almaviva and his wife together, and he is ready to forgo his fortune in relief at seeing Florestine saved from Bégearss; but Figaro will have none of this:

Le Comte, avec véhémence: Que tout l'or du monde périsse, et que je sois débarrassé de lui!

Figaro, jetant son chapeau sur un fauteuil: Dussé-je être pendu, il n'en gardera pas une obole!

(163; V, iv)

The closing scenes are devoted to achieving this end through a sustained piece of play-acting adroitly stage-managed by Figaro, by which the impostor is taken in. The sequence of events concerning the wallet containing three million livres is as follows: the Count has made the sum over to Bégearss; and Bégearss has gone straight to the notary, M. Fal, in whose safe keeping the bonds had remained, claiming that the fortune had come to him as a legacy from a relative. To recover possession, M. Fal advises that it will be necessary to get Bégearss to admit before witnesses that the money came from Almaviva. Figaro asks the Count to pretend to have dismissed him from his service; and when Bégearss comes in, he finds Figaro acting the part of a suppliant, confessing his misdeeds. Any suspicions he might have are dulled by this, and—a moment of high dramatic irony—he comments on the situation to Léon and Florestine: ‘Ô jeunes gens! quelle leçon! Marchons avec candeur dans le sentier de la vertu. Voyez que tôt ou tard l'intrigue est la perte de son auteur’ (164). Tension mounts as the notary, M. Fal, reading out the marriage contract, persuades Bégearss to hand over the wallet:

M. Fal: … ‘Et pour donner à la demoiselle future épouse une épreuve non équivoque de son attachement pour elle, ledit seigneur futur époux lui fait donation entière de tous les grands biens qu'il possède, consistant aujourd'hui, ainsi qu'il le déclare à nous notaires soussignés, en trois millions d'or ici joints, en très bons effets au porteur.’

Bégearss: Les voilà dans ce portefeuille. Il manque deux millier de louis que je viens d'en ôter pour fournir aux apprêts des noces.

Figaro, montrant le Comte, et vivement: Monsieur a décidé qu'il payerait tout; j'ai l'ordre.

Bégearss, tirant les effets de sa poche et les remettant au notaire: En ce cas, enregistrez-les; que la donation soit entière!

(165; V, vii)

It remains to force Bégearss to acknowledge the origin of the three million livres; and Figaro shames him into a public appreciation of the Count's generosity:

Figaro: … Monsieur, Mademoiselle! Ah! quel bienfaisant protecteur, et que vous allez le chérir! … Mais que dis-je? L'enthousiasme m'aurait-il fait commettre une indiscrétion offensante?

Tout le monde garde le silence.

Bégearss, un peu surpris, se remet, prend son parti, et dit: Elle ne peut l'être pour personne, si mon ami ne la désavoue pas; s'il met mon âme à l'aise, en me permettant d'avouer que je tiens de lui ces effets. Celui-là n'a pas un bon coeur, que la gratitude fatigue; et cet aveu manquait à ma satisfaction. (Montrant le Comte.) Je lui dois bonheur et fortune; et quand je les partage avec sa digne fille, je ne fais que rendre ce qui lui appartient de droit. Remettez-moi le portefeuille; je ne veux avoir que l'honneur de le mettre à ses pieds moi-même, en signant notre heureux contrat. Il veut le reprendre.

Figaro, sautant de joie: Messieurs, vous l'avez entendu? Vous té-moignerez s'il le faut. Mon maître, voilà vos effets, donnez-les à leur détenteur, si votre coeur l'en juge digne.

Il lui remet le portefeuille.

Le Comte, se levant, à Bégearss: Grand Dieu! Les lui donner! Homme cruel, sortez de ma maison; l'enfer n'est pas aussi profond que vous!

(166; V, vii)

This combination, of detailed action dependent to such an extent on the evidence provided by material objects, together with the role of Figaro as a forerunner of the detectives who were to be introduced into narrative fiction by Wilkie Collins and others half a century later, surely establishes La Mère coupable as a pioneer in the genre of the well-made play. For this was the genre which Dumas fils was to define nearly a century later in mathematical terms, as the kind of play whose dénouement is the quod erat demonstrandum, arrived at by a series of carefully executed logical stages from the information presented from the exposition onwards.²⁹

From being the somewhat passive character, given to reflecting on the role of ‘le hasard’, that we have seen in Le Mariage, Figaro now regains in full his status as meneur du jeu. It may have taken him nearly twenty years to bring his exposure of Bégearss to a successful conclusion: on the day that counts he is completely in charge. For, just like the two earlier plays of the trilogy (and indeed, like Eugénie and Les Deux Amis), La Mère coupable obeys the classical precept of the unity of time; and obeys it without any sense of strain. Figaro's one ally at the beginning of the play is Suzanne: for the Almaviva couple, as well as Léon and Florestine, regard Bégearss as a benevolent, trustworthy friend. The programme note to the 1990 Comédie-Française production suggests that Suzanne has in the past fallen victim to the impostor's blandishments:

Suzanne, for her part, fell victim one day to the advances of the Irishman. For a long time, Figaro and she have been estranged, even though they continue to live together and to serve the Almavivas, whom they will never desert.

It is not at all clear to me that the text justifies such an interpretation (that is, a past affair between Suzanne and Bégearss).³⁰ It is true that in the expository scene I, ii Figaro asks Suzanne: ‘Serais-tu dupe encore de ce très méchant homme?’ (167); but if there has ever been any lack of confidence between husband and wife, there is no sign of it at present. Not only does Suzanne reveal to Figaro the detail of Bégearss's aspirations:

C'est lui que la pupille épouse. Il a la promesse du Comte. Il guérira Léon de son amour. Il détachera Florestine. Il fera consentir Madame. Il te chasse de la maison. Il cloître ma maîtresse en attendant que l'on divorce. Fait déshériter le jeune homme et me rend maîtresse de tout. Voilà les nouvelles du jour

(168; II, vi)

—it is also she who proposes to her husband that they stage a quarrel for Bégearss's benefit, to put him off his guard: ‘Ayons l'air de quereller bien fort’; as Bégearss enters, the stage directions read: Figaro, feignant de lui donner un soufflet and Suzanne, feignant de l'avoir reçu (169) (I, ii).

If the third play restores Figaro to the role of meneur du jeu he had enjoyed in Le Barbier, it does not bring with it any of the exuberance and gaiety that had marked his debut. In fact, middle age sits heavily on Figaro and Suzanne as well as on their masters; and whereas the valet had triumphed in Le Mariage de Figaro in the course of a ‘folle journée’, the day which sees the defeat of Bégearss is a sombre one indeed. There are touches of irony and sarcasm, but virtually no lighthearted moments, so preoccupied are the two couples with their memories of the past and, in the Countess's case, with the torments of a guilty conscience.

On the other hand, if we imagine an appropriate passage of fictional time since the events of Le Mariage, there is surely little difficulty in accepting Beaumarchais's reappearing characters as older versions of the quartet whom we previously encountered in the château of Aguas-Frescas; in each case, the playwright seems to have developed those traits of character which were dominant at an earlier stage. The Countess is most obviously an extension of the sentimental, larmoyant and, in spite of her lapse, highly moral heroine of the earlier play; Suzanne—even if one were to believe those commentators who interpret the text of La Mère coupable as implying that she too has had a momentary fall from virtue—in no way strains our credulity as a projection of the vivacious young bride of Le Mariage into a middle age that has arrived rather early; while Almaviva exhibits the same mixture of aristocratic pride, ethical relativism, gullibility and fundamental decency that had characterised him in the earlier plays. And what of Figaro? Beneath the detective, keeper of the family conscience and righter of wrongs, it is not hard to see that Beaumarchais has made a real effort to remind us of the speech patterns and linguistic habits of the one-time barber. If the verbal fireworks have been quenched, he has not lost his partiality for an apt literary allusion, and the metaphors and similes suggest that Figaro has not neglected his reading during the twenty years that he has been plotting the downfall of Bégearss.

For the Irishman is not only ‘Honoré-Tartuffe-Bégearss’ (I, ii) and a ‘serpent, ou basilic’ (II, v), he is also ‘l'enfer concentré, tel que Milton nous l'a dépeint (IV, i) and ‘le diable que les Hébreux appelaient Légion; et si l'on y regardait bien, on verrait le lutin avoir le pied fourchu, seule partie, disait ma mère, que les démons ne sauraient déguiser’ (ibid.). When Léon asks his advice, he replies: ‘Deviner l'énigme du Sphinx ou en être dévoré’ (II, xviii); and his acknowledgement of Suzanne's help is couched in characteristically extravagant terms: ‘Grâce à l'Ariane-Suzon, je tiens le fil du labyrinthe et le Minotaure est cerné’ (II, vii) (170).

In his Preface, Beaumarchais contrasts Molière's ‘Tartuffe de la religion’ with his own ‘Tartuffe de la probité’, insisting that the latter is more dangerous since he is able not merely to dupe the Orgon figure, but to ‘s'attirer la respectueuse confiance de la famille entière qu'il dépouille’. His intention is to protect his contemporaries ‘des pièges de ces monstres (et il en existe partout)’ (171); but he stops short at claiming that the ‘Tartuffe de la probité’ is a figure belonging in particular to the Revolutionary years. In fact, if one is looking for evidence of topical reference in La Mère coupable, it is not to be found in any allusion to the ‘official’ events of this period: even though Bergasse played a prominent role in political life up to 1792, the savage attack on him as ‘l'autre Tartuffe’ has as its target his private morality, not his public activities; as J.-P. de Beaumarchais writes:

For there had taken place, in the years 1789-90, an event of great consequence, irreversible in its effects; but the role of Bégearss—and his defeat—allow us to forget this, or at any rate to think of it in other terms. Thanks to this villain, the social upheaval is transformed into a question of moral evil. … In place of the conflict between aristocrats and Jacobins, the play offers us the struggle between vice and virtue, shifting the battleground from the street to the private hôtel, from real life to the theatre, and substituting money for politics.³¹

More generally, however, the play does reflect the times in which it is set. The fact that the Almavivas are a Spanish family is of no great importance: reminders of the life at Aguas-Frescas are hardly numerous, and in emigrating from Spain the family seems to have assimilated itself without difficulty to the ambiance of revolutionary France, ‘ce pays remué de fond en comble’, as Figaro describes it (I, ii). The Count and Countess seem too preoccupied with their marital discord to have time to regret their lost privileges. The Count accepts with a good enough grace the new egalitarian formulas: ‘M. Almaviva … Il faut bien lui donner son nom, puisqu'il ne souffre plus qu'on l'appelle Monseigneur’, Figaro says; while it is Suzanne who complains, in her reply, of the new equalities: ‘Madame sort sans livrée! nous avons l'air de tout le monde!’ (ibid.).³² Léon displays from time to time an impeccable ‘civisme’: instead of becoming a Knight of Malta, he says, ‘sous le simple habit d'un soldat, je défendrai la liberté de notre nouvelle patrie. Inconnu, je mourrai pour elle ou je la servirai en zélé citoyen’ (IV, xviii) (172). The intellectual climate of the Revolutionary period is reflected in various topical references. To divorce, for instance: Bégearss is said to have persuaded the Almavivas to move to France in order to make their separation definitive through the new divorce laws (though as Pierre Larthomas points out, this is something of an anachronism in a play set in 1790;³³ to views on the religious vocation, when Léon visits a radical club and reads ‘un essai que j'ai fait sur l'abus des voeux monastiques et le droit de s'en relever’ (I, xii); and to duelling as a throwback to the old ‘préjugé nobiliaire’: ‘L'opinion est réformée sur cette horrible frénésie: on ne combattra plus ici que les ennemis de l'État’ (V, vii) (173). And a prominent position in this domestic interior is occupied by a bust of George Washington, as a symbol of contemporary movements towards liberty and equality. But it is the way in which the play evokes the moral climate of the time that is praised by Charles Péguy in his essay Clio, which takes the form of a dialogue between History and the Muse of history, Clio:

I observe, said History, that no-one ever mentions La Mère coupable. All the same, it is a curious play, well and firmly written, and as silly as you like (though isn't it a fact of life that every professional writer should end up like this?), and above all thoroughly in tune with its time. The first two plays had to begin with been created in tune with their times; or perhaps they had naturally reflected the taste of their times; but the taste of their times was less distinctive in 1775 and in 1784 than in 1792. And it was no longer the same, by a long chalk. In 1792 it was no longer a case of mounting satirical attacks against the ancien régime. The attacks were finished, the satire was over and done with. In 1792 it was a question of paying one's court to the tumultuous institutions of the new regime. … If I were a teacher of French history, continued History, and perhaps if I were a teacher of world history, I should require my students to read this play. … I should first of all read them the two comédies, and then I should read them the drame. 1775, 1784, 1792: nothing could represent these three dates in the history of France and of the world as faithfully, as accurately, as profoundly, in a word nothing could date these three dates better than a reading of these three plays. Nothing could make it so easy to measure the difference of time, the difference of tone, in other words what really constitutes the context of an event in the history of a people and of the world. I should like to give my students the taste, the physical flavour, so to speak, of what 1775, 1784 and 1792 were like: I should simply read them these three plays.³⁴

And, continues Péguy, the theme of ‘vingt ans après’ gains its dramatic effect—and its poignancy—from the fact that Beaumarchais has chosen to treat in La Mère coupable not the public history of the times, but the private moral history of representative individuals:

The more these characters are conceived as the very type of youth, and the more successfully they are presented as the very type of youth, the classical, traditional, successful, almost iconic representatives of youth, the more poignant it is to find them like everyone else, that is to say grown older, the men and the women, like everyone else, at 40. Nothing is more poignant, said History, than the fate of these characters. The more clearly we are given to understand that they are young, the more poignant it is that there should be a play by Beaumarchais in which they are no longer young.³⁵

The play's forward-looking dramaturgical style, and the extent to which it proves able to reflect the social attitudes of a post-revolutionary decade, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that La Mère coupable, like Beaumarchais's two earlier drames, exploits long-established sentimental clichés typical of that genre (and of its predecessor, the comédie larmoyante of the 1740s). The Countess's literary ancestry is clear enough—more clearly here, perhaps, than it had been in Le Mariage de Figaro; for although she is ‘la mère coupable’, her technical guilt is not such as to make her forfeit our sympathy. Far from it; and as the passive, uncomplaining victim of a self-righteous and (until his sentimental conversion in Act IV) apparently heartless husband she is perhaps the most notable example of the abandoned wife in the dramatic literature of a century much given to sentimental excess.

Almaviva's conversion is yet another example of the moral corrective deemed to be implicit in strong emotion: it is brought about, not by rational argument, or demonstrative proof of Bégearss's machinations, but by his instinctive reaction when the Countess faints and his pride and anger give way to fears for her life. The Count has deliberately provoked this crisis by substituting a miniature of Chérubin for his own portrait in his wife's bracelet, but has reckoned without the emotional effect her discovery will have on himself:

Le Comte: Et lorsque vous plaidez pour l'enfant de ce malheureux, vous avez au bras mon portrait!

La Comtesse, en le détachant, le regarde: Monsieur, monsieur, je le rendrai; je sais que je n'en suis pas digne. (Dans le plus grand égarement.) Ciel! que m'arrive-t-il? Ah! je perds la raison! Ma conscience troublée fait naître des fantômes! Réprobation anticipée! … Je vois ce qui n'existe pas … Ce n'est plus vous, c'est lui qui me fait signe de le suivre, d'aller le rejoindre au tombeau!

Le Comte, effrayé: Comment? Eh bien! non, ce n'est pas …

La Comtesse, en délire: Ombre terrible! éloigne-toi!

Le Comte, crie avec douleur: Ce n'est pas ce que vous croyez!

La Comtesse, jette le bracelet par terre: Attends … Oui, je t'obéirai …

Le Comte, plus troublé: Madame, écoutez-moi …

La Comtesse: J'irai … Je t'obéis … Je meurs …

Elle reste évanouie.

Le Comte, effrayé, ramasse le bracelet: J'ai passé la mesure … Elle se trouve mal … Ah! Dieu! Courons lui chercher du secours.

(174; V, xiii)

As the Countess continues to pray for death to put an end to her suffering, her husband is brought to his senses after years of outrageous behaviour, and as an indication of his change of heart, for the first time in the play addresses Léon as his son:

La Comtesse: … Ciel juste! il fallait bien que ce crime fût découvert! Puisse ma mort expier mon forfait! …

Le Comte, au désespoir: Non, revenez à vous! Votre douleur a déchiré mon âme!. Asseyons-la. Léon! … Mon fils!

(175; V, xvii)

In dramaturgical terms, this ‘business’ with the bracelet constitutes a ‘scène à faire’ which points forward to such examples of the well-made play as La Dame aux camélias or Lady Windermere's Fan;but the sentimental climax it brings about—the Count's conversion—could not be more firmly rooted in the moral optimism of the Enlightenment.

Another established commonplace concerns the role of the illegitimate child. A study of this subject by Maurice Baudin establishes that whereas seventeenth-century dramatists often showed ‘animosity towards the bastard son, but indulgence towards the “unknown” daughter’,³⁶ the illegitimate child, whether son or daughter, came to enjoy in eighteenth-century drama or fiction a widespread status as an object of sympathy and—in the serious drama of the second half of the century—as subject-matter for an improving moral lesson. That this bore little relation to experience in real life hardly needs to be stressed: for every case of a d'Alembert or a Chamfort who succeeded in making his way in eighteenth-century society in spite of his irregular birth, there must have been dozens of unfortunates for whom the stigma of illegitimacy was an insuperable handicap. The authors of drames bourgeois, however, tend to portray an ideal world in which such a handicap is non-existent; indeed, says Baudin, a world in which, perversely, illegitimacy comes to be seen as a positive asset:

Some authors went further still, and turned the well-worn theme on its head. The illegitimate child became to them an object of extraordinary favour. For were they not ready to see in him the rational being who constituted the goal of Enlightenment thought! The man of logic whom they opposed to the artificial products of society had everything to gain, apparently, from being created by a process independent of that society. A Dorval, a Figaro, born and brought up outside the social norms, will provide strong support for the ideas that are proposed if one of them, though poor, deserves to be powerful and the other, as well as being rich, deserves to be happy. Here, I think, we have the origin of the notion that the illegitimate are superior to those born in wedlock: it is the final stage in the evolution of our theme, a doctrine brought to life in the theatre, and one which the theatre has never ceased to invoke against the prejudices of the real world.³⁷

Not that Beaumarchais forces things to this philosophical conclusion in La Mère coupable. Even if Léon does offer, in a passage already quoted, to reject the advantages he has inherited in order to make an independent life for his mother and himself:

Léon: Non, maman, vous ne mourrez pas, et nous réparerons nos torts. Monsieur! vous que je n'outragerai plus en vous donnant un autre nom, reprenez vos titres, vos biens; je n'y avais nul droit; hélas! je l'ignorais. Mais, par pitié, n'écrasez point d'un déshonneur public cette infortunée qui fut vôtre … Une erreur expiée par vingt années de larmes est-elle encore un crime, alors qu'on fait justice? Mm mère et moi, nous nous bannissons de chez vous.

Le Comte, exalté: Jamais! Vous n'en sortirez point.

Léon: Un couvent sera sa retraite; et moi, sous mon nom de Léon, sous le simple habit d'un soldat, je défendrai la liberté de notre nouvelle patrie.

(176; IV, xviii)

—in practice, this character is as static and passive as the Countess herself. In a more general sense, his situation can perhaps be seen as a reprise of one of the commonplaces of the drama and fiction of the age, in which one son (frequently illegitimate) is favourably contrasted with his legitimate brother or half-brother. The original paradigm of such a contrast seems to have been the juxtaposition of the mean and vindictive Blifil with the open, generous Tom Jones in Fielding's novel. Although Fielding's influence in France never equalled that of Richardson, several episodes from Tom Jones were to be dramatised in the second half of the century; while another play of the period which presents a similar contrast between a pair of brothers is Voltaire's Le Dépositaire of 1767. In La Mère coupable, the worthless brother never appears; his death has taken place before the events of the play, but we are left in no doubt of his nature: Figaro refers to him as ‘un jeune homme assez libertin; joueur, prodigue et querelleur; sans frein, sans moeurs, sans caractère; et n'ayant rien à lui, pas même les vices qui l'ont tué’ (177) (II, xxii), and the Countess seems to corroborate this estimate when, venturing to defend Léon against the Count, she refers in these terms to her elder son:

Le caractère emporté de son frère, son désordre, ses goûts et sa conduite déréglée nous en donnaient souvent [des chagrins] bien cruels. Le ciel sévère, mais sage en ses décrets, en nous privant de cet enfant, nous en a peut-être épargné de plus cuisants pour l'avenir.

(178; IV, xiii)

There can be little doubt that the implied contrast with the noble and upright Léon is yet another example of the way in which Beaumarchais was ready to exploit the sentimental conventions of his century.

Like its predecessors, then, Beaumarchais's last play demonstrates the dramatist's keen sense for the stylistic features, and the plot-motifs, of the drama of a previous generation that could be made to appeal to the taste of his contemporaries; yet at the same time it also illustrates the forward-looking way in which he handled the mechanics of playwriting, which makes him such an important forerunner of nineteenth-century French theatre.

Completed early in 1791, La Mère coupable was offered to the Comédie-Française and accepted. Beaumarchais withdrew his play before the end of the year, however: relations between the company and himself were badly strained because of the long-drawn-out conflict about authors' rights. The first performance took place, therefore, at the new Théâtre du Marais, on 26 June 1792; there were to be fifteen performances in a run of six weeks or so. Shortly afterwards, Beaumarchais was forced to go into voluntary exile as a result of the ‘affaire des fusils’; and during his absence the play was published by friends, anxious to forestall a pirated edition—though as a concession to the political climate of the day, various textual alterations were made such as the suppression of the terms comte, comtesse and roi. By 1796, however, Beaumarchais was able to return to Paris, and La Mère coupable was once more offered to the Comédiens Français: it had five performances in 1797, which were followed by a further six in 1799-1800. Whereas the production at the Marais had been very mediocre, that at the Comédie-Française was ‘perfect’; and as we have seen, at the first performance of this revival, in May 1797, Beaumarchais was called on stage by an enthusiastic audience, supported by Molé (the Count), Fleury (Bégearss) and Mlle Contat (the Countess).³⁸ The authentic text of the play was published in 1797, and this was the edition for which ‘Un Mot sur la Mère coupable’ was written.

In view of the fortunes of the two earlier Figaro plays when transformed into operas, it is perhaps not without interest that La Mère coupable should in its turn have been the subject of a projected opera by Grétry. This project never materialised, but in our own day the play has in fact been turned into an opera by Darius Milhaud. This work, with libretto by the composer's wife, was premiered at Geneva in 1966. Neither score nor libretto has been published, but the following programme note by Milhaud himself is of some interest:

I have always been surprised by the fact that no composer should have thought of writing an opera on the subject. It's true that the Beaumarchais play is virtually forgotten, and that with its five long acts and numerous repetitions, it may not seem particularly attractive. However, cut down to three acts, while keeping the essential action of the play, it might yield an excellent libretto. So I decided to accept the challenge, and asked Madeleine Milhaud to abridge the text and then to write a libretto retaining Beaumarchais's dialogue.

This is a valuable tribute, even if an indirect one, to the dramatic properties of the third Figaro play. We may set it alongside the tangible evidence of a highly successful Comédie-Française production in 1990 as proof that the play is not the dated museum piece that it was too long considered to be. It would be impossible to claim that it is a masterpiece on the same level as Le Barbier de Séville or Le Mariage de Figaro: it exhibits too obviously the defects, as well as the qualities, of the theatre of its time. However, recognition of the dramatic, and theatrical, potential of the third play enables us to come to a fairer appreciation of the cumulative virtues of the Figaro trilogy as a whole as a sequence of three plays which, while very different in style and content, nevertheless complement and complete each other and, overall, constitute a thoroughly viable dramatic unit—a coherent group of texts which Péguy was surely justified in seeing as an important testimony to the moral character of an age. To quote Beaumarchais's words to his prospective spectator in ‘Un Mot sur la Mère coupable’:

Après avoir bien ri, le premier jour, au Barbier de Séville, de la turbulente jeunesse du comte Almaviva, laquelle est à peu près celle de tous les hommes;

Après avoir, le second jour, gaiement considéré, dans La Folle Journée, les fautes de son âge viril, et qui sont trop souvent les nôtres;

Par le tableau de sa vieillesse, et voyant La Mère coupable, venez vous convaincre avec nous que tout homme qui n'est pas né un épouvantable méchant finit toujours par être bon, quand l'âge des passions s'éloigne, et surtout quand il a goûté le bonheur si doux d'être père! C'est le but moral de la pièce.

(179)³⁹

The undoubted achievement of the recent revival of La Mère coupable in the theatre has been to make it possible to believe in the validity of the playwright's claim.

Notes

1. Letter from Voltaire to Cideville, 15 November 1732 in Voltaire, Corr., D536. Beaumarchais (Ouvres, p. 499) has slightly misquoted Voltaire's text.

2. Ouvres, pp. 498-9.

3. Ibid., p. 499.

4. V. McB. Tobin, ‘Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride: an eighteenth-century Euripidean drama’, SVEC, 278, 1990, pp. 333-74 (p. 342).

5. Ibid.

6. Letter of February 1773 to the Mercure de France, quoted ibid., p. 345.

7. Ouvres, p. 285.

8. Ibid., p. 286.

9. Quoted by L. de Loménie, Beaumarchais et son temps, 2 vols, Paris, Lévy, 1873, II p. 406.

10. Ouvres, p. 506. Born at Legnano in 1750, Salieri had his first opera performed at Milan before moving to Vienna, where the rest of his operas were produced with the exception of Les Danaïdes, already mentioned, and Tarare. These included an interesting one-act piece Prima la musica e poi le parole with libretto by Casti (1786); this was to be used as the basis of his Capriccio (1942) by Richard Strauss, who like Beaumarchais had a longstanding interest in the relationship between words and music in opera. The success of Tarare in Paris prompted the Emperor Joseph II to commission an Italian version. Translated by Da Ponte, Axir, Re d'Ormus became a completely new opera.

11. ‘Espèce d'interjection familière dont on se sert pour marquer qu'on se moque de ce qu'on entend dire ou qu'on ne le croit pas’ (183) (Dictionnaire de l'Académie, 1762). The interjection had appeared in the mouth of Antonio, the gardener of Le Mariage de Figaro (III, xviii).

12. ‘Aux abonnés de l'Opéra’, Ouvres, p. 504.

13. Quoted by E. Lintilhac, Beaumarchais et ses oeuvres, Paris, Hachette, 1887, p. 274.

14. See Ouvres p. 1466. An early manuscript bears the title Tarare ou le Libre Arbitre (ibid., p. 1452).

15. In fact, the 1743 edition of Voltaire's play has the title Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet. The Pléiade edition of the Ouvres includes among the supporting documents for Tarare Beaumarchais's revision of an unperformed and unpublished opera libretto by Voltaire, Samson: this was set to music by the composer Mayer, but its refusal by the Opéra in 1782 apparently led Beaumarchais to switch his attention to a possible performance of Tarare. It seems that Beaumarchais had not made any very significant change to Voltaire's text. See Ouvres, pp. 1436ff.

16. Ouvres, p. 1473.

17. Ibid., p. 592. The Revolutionary government had suppressed monastic orders in February 1790.

18. Ibid., p. 593. Divorce was to be legalised in December 1792.

19. Ibid., pp. 593-4. A ‘Société des Amis des Noirs’ was formed in Paris in 1788 under the presidency of Condorcet; but although the Declaration of the Rights of Man in August 1789 appeared to comprehend the abolition of slavery, representations by the lobby of colonial planters were so strong that an edict of March 1790 explicitly excluded internal government of the colonies from the Declaration. This led to the violent risings in St Domingo (Haiti), which resulted in the effective independence of the island in 1798; but slavery and the slave trade remained a very sensitive political issue in France until their abolition in 1848.

20. The most celebrated of these, the ‘Fête de l'Être suprême’ was to be mounted by the painter David, on Robespierre's orders, in June 1794.

21. Le Mariage de Chérubin, p. 53.

22. Ouvres, pp. 600-1.

23. See W. D. Howarth, ‘The theme of Tartuffe in eighteenth-century comedy’, French Studies IV, 1950, 113-27; and ‘Les ‘Tartuffes’ de l'époque révolutionnaire’ in Il Teatro e la Rivoluzione Francese, Vicenza, 1991, pp. 65-77.

24. See A. R. Pugh, ‘Beaumarchais, the drame bourgeois and the pièce bien faite’, The Modern Language Review, LXI, 1966, 416-21.

25. Ouvres, p. 601.

26. Anne Ubersfeld (‘La Mère coupable: une fin ou un commencement?’, Avantscène théâtre no. 864, 1990, p. 40) calls the play ‘the first dramatic work of the nineteenth century, in the first place because of its construction’. One feature La Mère coupable does share with later examples of the well-made play is the characters' unconscious acknowledgement of the difficulty of putting a detailed factual exposition across to the audience; Figaro's summary account of the information we need to possess at the beginning of the play is so blatantly artificial that Suzanne interrupts him: ‘Sais-tu, mon pauvre Figaro, que tu commences à radoter? Si je sais tout cela, qu'est-il besoin de me le dire?’, to which he can only reply: ‘Encore faut-il bien s'expliquer pour s'assurer que l'on s'entend’ (184) (I, ii).

27. P. Larthomas, for instance, writes in his edition of the Ouvres (published in 1988): ‘La Mère coupable is no longer performed, will no doubt never be performed again, and cannot be compared at all, in intention or achievement, with the two Spanish comedies’ (p. 1477).

28. In her edition of Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas (2 vols, Paris, Belles Lettres, 1971-2, I pp. 69-70), Anne Ubersfeld uses the term ‘une dramaturgie de l'objet’. Although referring specifically to Hugo's practice, what Ubersfeld writes would apply equally to this aspect of La Mère coupable. See also W. D. Howarth, ‘From neo-classical to romantic aesthetics: the status of the material world in nineteenth-century French drama’ in French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth century: A Material World. Essays in honour of D. G. Charlton, ed. B. Rigby, London, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 105-27.

29. See F. A. Taylor, The Theatre of Alexandre Dumas fils, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1937, p. 91.

30. Though cf. the comment by M. Descotes: ‘In La Mère coupable, Suzanne discloses that she really had “fertilisé le front” of Figaro—and with the egregious Bégearss of all people!’ (Les Grands Rôles du théâtre de Beaumarchais, Paris, PUF, 1974, p. 174). A far stranger comment, for which there seems to be even less textual justification (if that were possible) is made by Anne Ubersfeld in the article cited in note 6 above: ‘Suzanne, who ended up one day in bed with Count Almaviva, as had been predicted in Le Mariage’ (p. 40).

31. J.-P. de Beaumarchais, ‘De Bergasse à l'Autre Tartuffe’ in the programme of the Comédie-Française production of La Mère coupable, Paris, 1990, pp. 14-15.

32. It is interesting to compare these words put into the mouths of his characters with Beaumarchais's own comments in a letter:

    Qu'allons-nous devenir, ma chère? Voilà que nous perdons toutes nos dignités. Réduits à nos noms de famille, sans armoires et sans livrées! Juste Ciel! Quel délabrement! Je dînais hier chez Mme de la Reynière, et nous l'appelions à son nez Mme Grimod, court et sans queue. Mgr. l'évêque de Rodez et Mgr. l'évêque d'Agen n'eurent de nous que du monsieur, chacun s'appelait par son nom, nous avions l'air de la sortie d'un bal de l'Opéra, l'hiver, où tout le monde est démasqué. (185)

    This letter was written (to his wife, who was away from Paris) three days after the decree of the Assemblée Constituante of 19 June 1790 which abolished hereditary nobility, suppressed the aristocratic ‘particule’, and forbade the use of titles deriving from the possession of property. Beaumarchais was determined not to revert to the name ‘Caron’, and his letter continues with the characteristically proud assertion:

    J'ai démontré dimanche que je n'avais plus de possession qui eût le nom de Beaumarchais, et que le décret portait bien qu'on quittera les noms de terre, mais rien dessus les noms de guerre, et c'est sous celui-là que j'ai toujours vaincu mes lâches ennemis. (186)

    Quoted by J. C. Gatty, Beaumarchais sous la Révolution: l'affaire des fusils de Hollande, Leiden, Brill, 1976, p. 49.

33. Ouvres, p. 1491.

34. C. Péguy, Ouvres en prose, 1909-1914, Paris, Pléiade, 1961, pp. 157-8, 169.

35. Ibid., pp. 169-70.

36. M. Baudin, Les Bâtards au théâtre en France de la Renaissance à la fin du xviiie siècle, Baltimore and Oxford, Johns Hopkins Press, 1932, pp. 23-4.

37. Ibid., p. 84.

38. See chapter 4.

39. Ouvres, pp. 599-600.