A real Downie of a day – the Beaumarchais edition

After a mid-morning coffee and croissant break (well, tea for me and coffee for everyone else), we made our way along rue François Miron. There, showing that half-timbering wasn’t exclusively the province of Normandy, we saw two of the oldest half-timbered houses in Paris. We continued our walk until we came to a walled-off mansion that had, at one time, been the home of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.

On this morning, we had only a brief encounter with the one-time home of Beaumarchais. When we walked past it in May 2018 the building had become a private residence with 12 apartments. Thus, I was able to take only two photos (one of which you will see in part two of this entry). Although our brush with his home was brief and inconsequential, I think Beaumarchais himself is such a fascinating character and he played such a crucial role in American history, that he merits his own post.

Watchmaker, inventor, playwright, spy, publisher, arms dealer, financier, and revolutionary.

The man born Pierre-Augustin Caron to the son of a watchmaker in Meaux (though, somewhat fittingly, Pierre himself was born in rue Saint-Denis in Paris in January 1732) is, without question, one of the most fascinating people I have ever faced the challenge of writing about. Condensing his life, his achievements, or his adventures into a distillate of even a few thousand words is an obstacle I’ll endeavor to overcome but also one that will reveal little of the bronze below the patina. To start, I could have easily added musician, diplomat, publisher (he published seven volumes of the works of Voltaire between 1783 and 1790), and horticulturist to his list of accomplishments in the section header.

Before he added ‘de Beaumarchais” to his name, Pierre gained notoriety at the tender age of 21 when he invented an escapement (“a device in a timepiece which controls the motion of the train of wheelwork and through which the energy of the power source is delivered to the pendulum or balance by means of impulses that permit a tooth to escape from a pallet at regular intervals” as defined by Merriam-Webster) that not only improved the accuracy of watches and clocks but allowed for their manufacture at increasingly smaller sizes.

The measure of his fame for this invention arose, at least in part, because Jean-André Lepaute, the royal clockmaker who had met the young Pierre when he was an apprentice in his father’s shop, claimed the invention for himself. Pierre wrote a letter claiming the invention as his own and urging the French Academy of Sciences to examine his proof. In due time, and in a decision that would have far reaching consequences, the Academy ruled in Pierre’s favor disgracing Lepaute and elevating Pierre’s reputation to the point where Louis XV requested he make a watch for his official chief mistress Madame de Pompadour.

The watch he made so impressed Louis that he declared Pierre-Augustin Caron the “Purveyor to the Crown” – a gesture that made the Caron family wealthy.

In 1756, Pierre married Madeleine-Catherine Aubertin who brought a piece of land called “le Bois Marchais” to the marriage. This is reputed to be the source of the addition of “de Beaumarchais” to his name. The marriage lasted barely a year before Madeline died.

Before her death, however, Madeleine had managed to secure Pierre a position in the royal court and by 1758, he had become such an accomplished musician that Louis engaged him as the harp tutor to his four daughters. Beaumarchais parlayed this into becoming a musical advisor to the royal family in 1759.

Soon after this, Pierre met the wealthy entrepreneur Joseph Pâris dit Duverney

[Portrait of Joseph Pâris dit Duverney by Louis Michel van Loo from Wikipedia – Public Domain.]

with whom he collaborated in several speculative but successful business schemes. These successful endeavors allowed him to purchase the title Secretary-Councilor to the King in 1760 or 1761 and that then conferred upon him the status of hereditary nobility. This position and status would eventually lead him into the spy business and that, in turn, would open the door to Beaumarchais becoming an arms dealer.

But before I get to that, let’s take a step back and look at Beaumarchais the playwright. In March 1764, Beaumarchais traveled to Madrid where he spent nearly a year ostensibly to help his sister who had been abandoned by her fiancé but where he also tried (with little success) to establish business contacts on behalf of Pâris dit Duverney.

It was at this time that Beaumarchais began to show an interest in playwriting and he even considered writing about his sister’s affair. Ultimately, those events were dramatized by Goethe in 1774 in his tragic play Clavigo. Beaumarchais instead turned to writing comedies and, in 1767, his first play called Eugénie, had its premiere at the Comédie-Francaise – a national theater that had been established for nearly a century.

Of course, his greatest fame as a playwright would come with the trilogy of plays featuring the characters Figaro and Almaviva. Although he completed the first of those plays, Le Barbier de Séville (The Barber of Seville) in 1773, its not so subtle satirical jabs at the monarchy and court delayed its premiere until 1775. After some early issues, the play became a big hit. This was followed in turn by Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) in 1778 and La Mère Culpable (The Guilty Mother) in 1791. (Figaro ran into even greater problems than Le Barbier. Its premiere was delayed until 1784.) Interestingly, while the Rossini and Mozart operas based on the first two plays of the trilogy have become part of the standard repertoire, none of Beaumarchais’ work on which they were based has particularly stood the test of time.

(Many, if not all of you, are aware that Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte adapted Le Mariage de Figaro into their four act comic opera La Nozze di Figaro which premiered in 1786. You might not know that Antoine-Laurent Baudron composed original music for the first two of the Figaro plays and that Mozart, in 1778 composed a set of variations on Baudron’s music for Le Barbier. It’s titled “12 Variations for Piano on Je suis Lindor” and is in the original Köchel Catalog as K 354).

We’ll continue our look at the extraordinary life and accomplishments of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais in the next entry in this series.

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the full explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.