Rousseau when he heard the accusation cried out, “I do not know whether Beaumarchais writes them or not, but I know this, no one writes such memoirs for another.” Voltaire in the depths of his retreat read the memoirs with eager interest. Personal reasons had made him in the beginning a supporter of the parliament Maupeou. Little by little, he changed his opinion; “I am afraid,” he wrote, “that after all that brilliant, hare-brained fellow is in the right against the whole world.” And a little later, “What a man! He unites everything; jesting, gravity, gaiety, pathos,--every species of eloquence without seeking after any; he confounds his adversaries; he gives lessons to his judges. His _naïveté_ enchants me.” As to the most atrocious calumnies circulated against him, La Harpe who knew him well, although never intimately, has said: “I have not forgotten how many times I heard repeated by persons who did not believe in the least that they were doing wrong, that a certain M. de Beaumarchais who was much talked about had enriched himself by getting rid successively of two wives who had fortunes. Surely this is enough to make one shudder, if one stops to reflect that this is what is called scandal (something scarcely thought sinful) and that there was not the slightest ground for such a horrible defamation. He had, it is true, married two widows with fortunes, which is surely very permissible for a young man with none. He received nothing from the one, because in his grief he forgot to register the contract of marriage duly, and this alone which rendered the crime useless was sufficient to prove his innocence. “He inherited something from the second who was a very charming woman, whom he adored. She left him a son, whom he lost soon after his wife’s death. I do not know why no one ever accused him of poisoning the child, that crime was necessary to complete the other. It is evident, even if he had not loved his wife, that in keeping her alive he had everything to gain, as her fortune was in the main hers only during life. “These are public facts of which I am sure, but hatred does not look for the truth, and it knows that it will not be required of it by the thoughtless. Where are we, great Heavens, if a man cannot have the misfortune to inherit from his wife without having poisoned her?...” When Voltaire, who had heard the calumny, read the memoirs of Beaumarchais, he said, “This man is not a poisoner, he is too gay.” La Harpe adds, “Voltaire could not know as I do, that he was also too good, too sensible, too open, too benevolent to commit any bad act, although he knew very well how to write very amusing and very malicious things against those who blackened him.”