“It is the best of his dramas, a _mélange_ of mirth and pathos, where are centered and dissolved with an authoritative cleverness, all the elements of interest and of action which he draws from the heart of his subject and which are multiplied by his fancy and his fears. In the beginning, an invocation, the prelude of a _héroïque-comique_ drama, then thanking a host of honest people who applaud and whose aid he skilfully declines, the hero springs with one bound into the fray. “He directs his finishing blows to each one of his adversaries, and making a trophy of their calumnies, he awards himself an eloquent apology which he modestly entitles, ‘Fragments of my voyage in Spain.’ The episode of Clavico, thanks to the touching interest which it excites, crowns the memoir like the recitals which unravel the plot in classic plays, and whose discreet eloquence leads the soul of the auditor to a sort of final appeasement. “If the action is dramatic, the characters are no less so. First Madame Goëzman advances, a scowl upon her face, but at a gracefully turned compliment from her adversary, ‘at once a sweet smile gives back to her mouth its agreeable form.’” And so with the rest. “But the most vivid of all his portraits is that of the principal personage, the author himself, this propagandist always _en scène_, who is never weary, whom one sees or whom one divines everywhere, animating everything with his presence, the center of all action and interest. He is endowed with such a beautiful sang-froid, which acts under all circumstances, and such vivid sensibility that everything paints itself in his memory, everything fixes itself under his pen. So that he appears to us in the most various attitudes; here the soul of gallantry, advancing to offer his hand to Madame Goëzman; there of modesty lowering his eyes for her, or again, hat in hand very humbly inclining before the passage of some mettlesome president.” But as Gudin assures us, “The courage of Beaumarchais was not insensibility. The tone of his memoirs showed his superiority but he was none the less deeply affected. I have seen him shed tears, but I have never seen him cast down. His tears seemed like the dew which revivifies. The hour of combat gave him back his courage. He advanced, dauntless, against his enemies; he felled them to the ground and caused to react upon them the outrages with which they attacked him. In their despair they published that he was not the author of his memoirs. ‘We know,’ they cried, ‘where they are composed and who composes them.’ “It was this accusation which gave to Beaumarchais the opportunity for one of his wittiest retorts. ‘Stupid people, why don’t you get your own written there?’” Gudin was even accused of writing them,--faithful Gudin, whose history of France in thirty-five volumes never found a publisher, and “whose prose,” says Loménie, “resembled that of Beaumarchais about as the gait of a laboring ox resembles that of a light and spirited horse.”