“Soon after his return from Spain, Beaumarchais had a quarrel with the Prince of Condé, on the subject of the privileges of the chase, in connection with a certain garden wall which the Prince had torn down and which Beaumarchais as the protector of the rights of the individual had caused to be rebuilt. The Prince was very angry. M. de Beaumarchais mounted on a horse and went to find him while the nobleman was out hunting. “‘I have come,’ said Beaumarchais, ‘to give an account of my conduct.’ “A discussion at once arose; the Prince had a good deal of _esprit_ and what is rarer still in one of his rank, he had liberal ideas. “‘Certainly,’ Beaumarchais said to him, ‘your Highness can obtain anything you wish. Your rank, your power--’ “‘No,’ replied the Prince, ‘it is as lawyer that I pretend to be in the right.’ “‘In that case,’ said Beaumarchais, ‘I demand of your Highness leave to be the lawyer on the opposite side and to plead before you. You shall be the judge.’ “He then proceeded to expose the affair with so much clearness, precision, eloquence, energy, and regard for the Prince that the latter avowed he was in the wrong and from that moment felt for Beaumarchais the greatest affection.” And the devoted biographer hastens to add, “It was difficult to see him without loving him; the Dauphin, Mesdames, the Duke de la Vallière, the Duke de Chaulnes and nearly all those with whom he came in contact have experienced the same sentiment.” During Beaumarchais’s sojourn in Spain the functions of this office, when not presided over by the Duke in person, were necessarily left to subordinates. Beaumarchais however retained his charge until a period just prior to its final abolishment in 1789. When in the spring of 1765, Beaumarchais returned from Spain he found the court plunged in mourning, for the Dauphin was very near his end. Concerts for Mesdames were not to be thought of, so very naturally he found himself drifting farther and farther from the social atmosphere of Court life. We soon shall see him employing his spare moments in literary work but before attempting to study Beaumarchais as an author, let us pause to contemplate him as the lover. Like most romances connected with the life of this unusual character, the affair which we are now about to consider is not a romance pure and simple, but has also a very prosaic, business-like, matter-of-fact side. It would seem that the story has come down to us only because there was a question of money involved, and of money never repaid to Beaumarchais. In the words of Loménie, “We thank heaven that there was really a matter of business, that is to say, a debt at the end of this love affair, or else it would have met the fate of other episodes of the same nature, the papers relating to which have been destroyed, and so it is in the august character of _pièces justicatives_ that some very tender letters of an amiable young lady have been able to traverse the years.”