The Life of Marie Antoinette

CHAPTER XIX. "The Marriage of Figaro"-Previous History and Character of Beaumarchais. -The Performance of the Play is forbidden.-It is said to be a little altered.-It is licensed.-Displeasure of the Queen.-Visit of Gustavus III. of Sweden.-Fete at the Trianon.-Balloon Ascent.

In the spring of 1784, the court and capital wore wrought up to a high pitch of excitement by an incident which was in reality of so ordinary and trivial a character, that it would be hard to find a more striking proof how thoroughly unhealthy the whole condition and feeling of the nation must have been, when such a matter could have been regarded as important. It was simply a question whether a play, which had been recently accepted by the manager of the principal theatre in Paris, should receive the license from the theatrical censor which was necessary to its being performed.

The play was entitled "The Marriage of Figaro." The history of the author, M. Beaumarchais, is curious, as that of a rare specimen of the literary adventurer of his time. He was born in the year 1732. His father was a watch-maker named Caron, and he himself followed that trade till he was three or four and twenty, and attained considerable skill in it. But he was ambitious. He was conscious of a handsome face and figure, and knew their value in such a court as that of Louis XV. He gave up his trade as a watch-maker, and bought successively different places about the court, the last of which was sold at a price sufficient to entitle him to claim gentility; so that, in one of his subsequent railings against the nobles, he declared that his nobility was more incontestable than that of most of the body, since he could produce the stamped receipt for it. Following the example of Moliere and Voltaire, he changed his name, and called himself Beaumarchais. He married two rich widows. He formed a connection with the celebrated financier, Paris Duverney, who initiated him in the mysteries of stock-jobbing. Being a good musician, he obtained the protection of the king's daughters, taught them the harp, and conducted the weekly concerts which, during the life of Marie Leczinska, they gave to the king and the royal family. He wrote two or three plays, none of which had any great success, while one was a decided failure. He became involved in lawsuits, one of which he conducted himself against the best ability of the Parisian bar, and displayed such wit and readiness that he not only gained his cause, but established a notoriety which throughout life was apparently his dearest object. He crossed over to England, where he made the acquaintance of Wilkes, and one or two agents of the American colonies, then just commencing their insurrection; and, partly from political sympathy with their views of freedom, partly, as he declared, to retaliate on England for the injuries which France had suffered at her hands in the Seven Years' War, he became a political agent himself, procuring arms and ships to be sent across the Atlantic, and also a great quantity of stores of a more peaceful character, out of which he had hoped to make a handsome profit. But the Americans gave him credit for greater disinterestedness; the President of Congress wrote him a letter thanking him for his zeal, but refused to pay for his stores, for which he demanded nearly a hundred and fifty thousand francs. He commenced an action for the money in the American courts, but, as he could not conduct it himself, he did not obtain an early decision; indeed, the matter imbittered all his closing days, and was not settled when he died.

But while he was in the full flush of self-congratulation at the degree in which, as he flattered himself, he had contributed to the downfall of England, the exuberance of his spirits prompted him to try his hand at a fourth play, a sort of sequel to one of his earlier performances-"The Barber of Seville." He finished it about the end of the year 1781, and, as the manager of the theatre was willing to act it, he at once applied for the necessary license. But it had already been talked about: if one party had pronounced it lively, witty, and the cleverest play that had been seen since the death of Moliere, another set of readers declared it full of immoral and dangerous satire on the institutions of the country. It is almost inseparable from the very nature of comedy that it should be to some extent satirical. The offense which those who complained of "The Marriage of Figaro" on that account really found in it was, that it satirized classes and institutions which could not bear such attacks, and had not been used to them. Moliere had ridiculed the lower middle class; the newly rich; the tradesman who, because he had made a fortune, thought himself a gentleman; but, as one whose father was in the employ of royalty, he laid no hand on any pillar of the throne. But Beaumarchais, in "The Marriage of Figaro," singled out especially what were called the privileged classes; he attacked the licentiousness of the nobles; the pretentious imbecility of ministers and diplomatists; the cruel injustice of wanton arrests and imprisonments of protracted severity against which there was no appeal nor remedy; and the privileged classes in consequence denounced his work, and their complaints of its character and tendency made such an impression that the court resolved that the license should not he granted.

The refusal, however, was not at first pronounced in a straightforward way; but was deferred, as if those who had resolved on it feared to pronounce it. For a long time the censor gave no reply at all, till Beaumarchais complained of the delay as more injurious to him than a direct denial. When at last his application was formally rejected, he induced his friends to raise such a clamor in his favor, that Louis determined to judge for himself, and caused Madame de Campan to read it to himself and the queen. He fully agreed with the censor. Many passages he pronounced to be in extremely bad taste. When the reader came to the allusions to secret arrests, protracted imprisonments, and the tedious formalities of the law and lawyers, he declared that it would be necessary to pull down the Bastile before it could be acted with safety, as Beaumarchais was ridiculing every thing which ought to be respected. "It is not to be performed, then?" said the queen. "No," replied the king, "you may depend upon that."

Similar refusals of a license had been common enough, so that there was no reason in the world why this decision should have attracted any notice whatever. But Beaumarchais was the fashion. He had influential patrons even in the palace: the Count d'Artois and Madame de Polignac, with the coterie which met in her apartments, being among them; and the mere idea that the court or the Government was afraid to let the play be acted caused thousands to desire to see it, who, without such a temptation, would have been wholly indifferent to its fate. The censor could not prevent its being read at private parties, and such readings became so popular that, in 1782, one was got up for the amusement of the Russian prince, who was greatly pleased by the liveliness of the dramatic situations, and, probably, not sufficiently aware of the prevalence of discontent in many circles of French society to sympathize with those who saw danger in its satire.

The praises lavished on it gave the author greater boldness, which was quite unnecessary. He even meditated an evasion of the law by getting it acted in a place which was not a theatre, and tickets were actually issued for the performance in a saloon which was often used for rehearsals, when a royal warrant[1] peremptorily forbidding such a proceeding was sent down from the palace. A clamor was at once raised by the friends of Beaumarchais, as if "sealed letters" had never been issued before. They talked in a loud voice of "oppression" and "tyranny;" and any one who knew the king's disposition might have divined that such an act of vigor was sure to be followed by one of weakness. Presently Beaumarchais changed his tone. He gave out that he had retrenched the passages which had excited the royal disapproval, and requested that the play might be re-examined. A new censor of high literary reputation reported to the head of the police[2] that if one or two passages were corrected, and one or two expressions, which were liable to be misinterpreted, were suppressed, he foresaw no danger in allowing the representation. Beaumarchais at once promised to make the required corrections, and one of Madame de Polignac's friends, the Count de Vaudreuil, the very nobleman with whom that lady's name was by many discreditably connected, obtained the king's leave to perform it at his country house, that thus an opportunity might be afforded for judging whether or not the alterations which had been made were sufficient to render its performance innocent.

The king was assured that the passages which he had regarded as mischievous were suppressed or divested of their sting. Marie Antoinette apparently had her suspicions; but Louis could never long withstand repeated solicitations, and, as he had not, when Madame de Campan read it, formed any very high opinion of its literary merits, he thought that, now that it was deprived of its venom, it would be looked upon as heavy, and would fail accordingly. Some good judges, such as the Marquis de Montesquieu, were of the same opinion. The actors thought differently. "It is my belief," said a man of fashion to the witty Mademoiselle Arnould, using the technical language of the theatre, "that your play will be 'damned.'" "Yes," she replied, "it will, fifty nights running." But, even if Louis had heard of her prophecy, he would have disregarded it. He gave his permission for the performance to take place, and on the 27th April, 1784, "The Marriage of Figaro" was accordingly acted to an audience which filled the house to the very ceiling; and which the long uncertainty as to whether it would ever be seen or not had disposed to applaud every scene and every repartee, and even to see wit where none existed. To an impartial critic, removed both by time and country from the agitation which had taken place, it will probably seem that the play thus obtained a reception far beyond its merits. It was undoubtedly what managers would call a good acting play. Its plot was complicated without being confused. It contained many striking situations; the dialogue was lively, but there was more humor in the surprises and discoveries than verbal wit in the repartees. Some strokes of satire were leveled at the grasping disposition of the existing race of courtiers, whoso whole trade was represented as consisting of getting all they could, and asking for more; and others at the tricks of modern politicians, feigning to be ignorant of what they knew; to know what they were ignorant of; to keep secrets which had no existence; to lock the door to mend a pen; to appear deep when they were shallow; to set spies in motion, and to intercept letters; to try to ennoble the poverty of their means by the grandeur of their objects. The censorship, of course, did not escape. The scene being laid in Spain, Figaro affirmed that at Madrid the liberty of the press meant that, so long as an author spoke neither of authority, nor of public worship, nor of politics, nor of morality, nor of men in power, nor of the opera, nor of any other exhibition, nor of any one who was concerned in any thing, he might print what be pleased. The lawyers were reproached with a scrupulous adherence to forms, and a connivance at needless delays, which put money into their pockets; and the nobles, with thinking that, as long as they gave themselves the trouble to be born, society had no right to expect from them any further useful action. But such satire was too general, it might have been thought, to cause uneasiness, much more to do specific injury to any particular individual, or to any company or profession. Figaro himself is represented as saying that none but little men feared little writings.[3] And one of the advisers whom King Louis consulted as to the possibility of any mischief arising from the performance of the play, is said to have expressed his opinion in the form of an apothegm, that "none but dead men were killed by jests." The author might even have argued that his keenest satire had been poured upon those national enemies, the English, when he declared what has been sometimes regarded as the national oath to be the pith and marrow of the English language, the open sesame to English society, the key to unlock the English heart, and to obtain the judicious swearer all that he could desire.[4]

And an English writer, with English notions of the liberty of the press, would hardly have thought it worth while to notice such an affair at all, did he not feel bound to submit his judgment to that of the French themselves. And if their view be correct, almost every institution in France must have been a dead man past all hopes of recovery, since the French historical writers, to whatever party they belong, are unanimous in declaring that it was from this play that many of the oldest institutions in the country received their death-blow, and that Beaumarchais was at once the herald and the pioneer of the approaching Revolution.

Paris had scarcely cooled down after this excitement, when its attention was more agreeably attracted by the arrival of a king, Gustavus III. of Sweden. He had paid a visit to France in 1771, which had been cut short by the sudden death of his father, necessitating his immediate return to his own country to take possession of his throne; but the brief acquaintance which Marie Antoinette had then made with him had inspired her with a great admiration of his chivalrous character; and in the preceding year, hearing that he was contemplating a tour in Southern Europe, she had written to him to express a hope that he would repeat his visit to Versailles, promising him "such a reception as was due to an ancient ally of France;[5]" and adding that "she should personally have great pleasure in testifying to him how greatly she valued his friendship."

Her mention of the ancient alliance between the two countries, which, indeed, had subsisted ever since the days of Francis I., was very welcome to Gustavus, since the object of his journey was purely political, and he desired to negotiate a fresh treaty. But those matters he, of course, arranged with the ministers. The queen was only concerned in the entertainments due from royal hosts to so distinguished a guest. Most of them were of the ordinary character, there being a sort of established routine of festivity for such occasions. And it may be taken as a proof that the court had abated somewhat of its alarm at Beaumarchais's play that "The Marriage of Figaro" was allowed to be acted on one of the king's visits to the theatre. She also gave him an entertainment of more than usual splendor at the Trianon, at which all the ladies present, and the invitations were very numerous, were required to be dressed in white, while all the walks and shrubberies of the garden were illuminated, so that the whole scene presented a spectacle which he described in one of his letters as "a complete fairy-land; a sight worthy of the Elysian Fields themselves.[6]" But, as usual, the queen herself was the chief ornament of the whole, as she moved graciously among her guests, laying aside the character of queen to assume that of the cordial hostess; and not even taking her place at the banquet, but devoting herself wholly to the pleasurable duty of doing honor to her guests.

One of the displays was of a novel character, from which its inventors and patrons expected scientific results of importance, which, though nearly a century has since elapsed, have not yet been realized. In the preceding year, Montgolfier had for the first time sent up a balloon, and the new invention was now exhibited in the Court of Versailles: the queen allowed the balloon to be called by her name; and, to the great admiration of Gustavus, who had a decided taste for matters which were in any way connected with practical science, the "Marie Antoinette" made a successful voyage to Chantilly. The date of another invention, if, indeed, it deserves so respectable a title, is also fixed by this royal visit. Mesmer had recently begun to astonish or bewilder the Parisians with his theory of animal magnetism; and Gustavus spent some time in discussing the question with him, and seems for a moment to have flattered himself that he comprehended his principles. But the only durable result which arose from his stay in France was the sincere regard and esteem which he and the queen mutually conceived for each other. They established a correspondence, in which Marie Antoinette repeatedly showed her eagerness to gratify his wishes and to attend to his recommendations; and when, at a later period, unexpected troubles fell on her and her husband, there was no one whom their troubles inspired with greater eagerness to serve them than Gustavus, whose last projects, before he fell by the hand of an assassin, were directed to their deliverance from the dangers which, though neither he nor they were as yet fully alive to their magnitude, were on the point of overwhelming them.