As might be expected, the success of the play after its first presentation produced a storm of opposition; critics and journals vied with each other to prove to the public that they had again been deceived. Gudin says, “His facility to hazard everything and receive applause awakened jealousy and unchained against him cabals of every kind.” In the brilliant preface already alluded to, which Beaumarchais published with the play after its success was established, he allowed himself the pleasure of mocking, not only at the journalists and critics, but at the public itself. “You should have seen,” he wrote, “the feeble friends of the _Barbier_, dispersing themselves, hiding their faces, or disappearing; the women, always so brave when they protect, burying themselves in hoods, and lowering their confused eyes; the men running to make honorable amends for the good they had said of my piece and throwing the pleasure which they had taken in it upon my execrable manner of reading things. Some gazing fixedly to the right when they felt me pass to the left, feigned not to see me, others more courageous, but looking about to assure themselves that no one saw them, drew me into a corner to ask, ‘Eh? how did you produce such an illusion? Because you must admit my friend that you have produced the greatest platitude in the world.’” Beaumarchais could afford to indulge in such pleasantries, for his piece was not only continuing to draw vast crowds, but it had begun already a triumphant progress over Europe. In St. Petersburg alone it went through fifty representations. But the revenge of Beaumarchais did not stop here; most of the cuttings which he had been forced to make in the play, the witticisms, jests and tirades were far too good to be lost. He saved them for future use and made the public laugh over and applaud what it first hissed. When Figaro made his second appearance, on the mad day of his marriage, he used them nearly all. Beaumarchais’s revenge then was complete. But while waiting for this, he had the audacity to make the comedians themselves mock at their own playing, as we shall see presently. The story of the _Barbier de Séville_ is of the simplest: “Never,” says Lintilhac, “did any one make a better thing out of nothing.”