Back-Door Dramatist

BEAUMARCHAIS--Paul Frischauer--Viking ($3.50).

In outline, the story of Pierre-Augustin Caron, afterward known as the French dramatist Beaumarchais. was typical of the ambitious, unscrupulous men of his age. He belonged in the ranks of those international adventurers and quick-change artists who floated around Europe in the days before the French Revolution, men of talent too restless to be content with their humble stations, too enlightened to accept the prevailing beliefs of their class, too adroit not to squeeze through the crevices that appeared when the social structure began splitting apart. But Beaumarchais' life had one distinction which was lacking in the careers of such blackmailers as D'Eon, Cagliostro or Morande. Like them he employed forgery and imposture when it seemed convenient, dabbled in high finance, grafted, was guilty of staggering treacheries. Unlike them, he possessed a streak of integrity, was capable of writing artful and honest plays that expressed the dominant social conflicts of his time. In Paul Frischauer's excellent biography, Beaumarchais is analyzed as "a herald of revolution," since the type of conflict he dramatized was soon to explode in reality.

The robust, blue-eyed, life-loving son of a poor watchmaker, Beaumarchais won the attention of Louis XV when he devised an escapement for clocks, fought with a rival watchmaker who claimed his invention. He became the protege of a minor palace official, purchased the office of secretary of the royal kitchens, which paid a small salary but opened opportunities for graft, even more opportunities to collect valuable information. He probably killed his patron, although the charge was never proved. He certainly married his patron's wealthy widow soon afterward. But at her death he was unexpectedly left poorer than he had ever been.

After amusing adventures in Spain which afterward provided Goethe with the theme for a play, Beaumarchais was attacked by a jealous nobleman whose mistress he had stolen. His release from prison after this scandalous affair made him a popular hero, since it was considered a triumph over arrogant nobles. His pamphlets and the success of The Barber of Seville made him famed. But he was still poor, and as a secret agent of Louis XVI, authorized to prevent the publication of damaging pamphlets, he printed others, then paid himself for destroying them. He was arrested by Queen Maria Theresa of Austria when he tried to blackmail her with a pamphlet relating that her daughter, Marie Antoinette, would bear no legitimate children. His intrigues became historically important when he helped finance the American Revolution. Although he was motivated primarily by hostility to England and a desire to defend French colonies, he committed the French Government to assist the Revolution, was emotionally influenced by the Declaration of Independence.

In this period he wrote The Marriage of Figaro, which Louis XVI promptly suppressed. A brilliant comedy, relating the conflict of a lackey and his noble master, its revolutionary implications were plain, for it presented the lackey as witty, resourceful, strong. For the first time, a member of the lower class was pictured as a hero on the formal Paris stage. Inconsistently, the bored nobles demanded the presentation of a play which ridiculed them and delighted the masses, forced Louis to withdraw his ban.

Only in his writing was Beaumarchais honest, for with a queer, premonitory genius he created, not records of what had happened, but symbolic representations of what was to come. In the poisonous atmosphere of France of his time, he responded in the way that birds taken into coal mines respond to the first faint whiff of gas, to developments of which less sensitive spirits were unconscious. When the Revolution actually broke out, he was horrified. Forced to run for his life, he was imprisoned, exiled. The only time he ever realized his ambition to mingle on equal terms with the nobility was when he was confined in the same common prison with the very flower of it.

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