The sentence of the Parliament Maupeou, it will be remembered, had been rendered the 26th of February, 1774; early in March the civilly degraded man started for London, and as his own name was too widely known through his memoirs to admit of secrecy, he assumed that of Ronac, anagram of Caron. The firmness, tact, and above all the persuasiveness of his character, enabled him in a few days completely to gain the confidence of Morande, so that he reappeared almost immediately at Versailles to the unbounded astonishment of the King, bringing a specimen of the libel, and prepared to receive final orders for the termination of the affair. The King sent him back to London in quality of his confidential agent to see that the entire scandalous publication was destroyed by fire, and the future silence of Morande secured. Both objects were speedily accomplished. Immediately following the destruction of the Memoirs of Mme. du Barry, Beaumarchais wrote to Morande, “You have done your best, Monsieur, to prove to me that you return in good faith to the sentiments and the conduct of an honest Frenchman, from which your heart reproached you long before I did, of having deviated; it is in persuading myself that you have the design of persisting in these praiseworthy resolutions, that I take pleasure in corresponding with you. What difference in our two destinies! It happened to fall into my way to arrest the publication of a scandalous libel; I work night and day for six weeks; I travel nearly two thousand miles. I spend 500 louis to prevent innumerable evils. You gain at this work, 100,000 francs and your tranquillity, while as for me, I do not even know that my traveling expenses will be repaid.” When Beaumarchais arrived in Paris he hastened to Versailles to receive the reward of his activity. He found the old King attacked by a fatal disease, and in a few days he was no more. “I admire,” he wrote the same day, “the strangeness of the fate which follows me. If the King had lived in health eight days longer, I would have been reinstated in the rights which iniquity has taken from me, I had his royal word.”