“‘I am at the end of my courage,’ he wrote April 9, 1773, to M. de Sartine. ‘The opinion of the public is that I am entirely sacrificed, my credit has fallen, my business is ruined, my family of which I am the father and the support is in despair. Monsieur, I have done good all my life without ostentation and I have never ceased to be torn to pieces by those evilly disposed. “‘If my home were known to you, you would see me in the midst of its members, a good son, a good brother, a good husband, and a useful citizen; I have assembled only benedictions about me, while my enemies calumniate me at a distance. “‘Whatever vengeance one may wish to take of me for that miserable affair of Chaulnes, will it then have no limits? It is well proved that my imprisonment makes me lose a hundred thousand francs. The form, the ground, everything makes one shudder in that iniquitous sentence, and it is impossible for me to rise above it so long as I am kept in this horrible prison. I have courage to support my own misfortunes; but I have none against the tears of my respectable father, seventy-five years of age, who is grieving himself to death for the abject state to which I have fallen. I have none against the anguish of my sisters, of my nieces, who already feel the horror of my detention and know of the disorder which has come to my affairs because of it. All the activity of my being is again turned inward, my situation kills me, I am struggling against an acute malady of which I feel an agonizing premonition, through loss of sleep and disgust with food. The air of my prison destroys me.’ “It was in this state of deep depression and misery when the soul of Beaumarchais seemed overwhelmed and all his manhood slipping from him, that the petty detail of the fifteen louis came to stir his mind once more to action, and while his sisters wept and his father prayed, his proud and unconquerable spirit rose triumphant out of the abyss into which for a moment it had fallen, and with fresh courage gleaming in his eyes he began pacing the floor of his prison, already ‘meditating his memoirs.’ “The minister de la Vrillière allowed himself at last to be touched, and on the 8th of May, 1773, after two months and a half of detention without cause, he gave the prisoner his liberty. “It is here that out of this lost process sprang suddenly another more terrible still, which should complete the ruin of Beaumarchais, but which saved him and made him pass in a few months from the state of abjection and of misery where to use his own expression, ‘He was an object of disgust and pity to himself, to a state where he is acclaimed the vanquisher of the hated parliament and the favorite of the nation.’” “He was,” says Grimm, “the horror of Paris a year ago; everyone upon the word of his neighbor, believed him capable of the greatest crimes; all the world dotes on him to-day.” It remains for us now to explain how this change of opinion came about.