It was, therefore, Beaumarchais, as Grandison, whom we now find seriously occupying himself with the thought of literature. Nor shall we be surprised later to find those of the literary profession preparing to meet him in very much the same spirit as did in the beginning M. Lepaute, watchmaker, and a little later, _Messieurs les Courtisans_ at Versailles. So long as his literary ambition limited itself to charades, farces, and comic songs the antagonism of men of letters was not aroused; but that he who had received no regular training in the schools should presume, _de se mêler_, with serious literary productions was quite another matter. Lintilhac says: “But our immature author, shaking his _tête carrée_ braved this danger like all the rest, arming himself with patience and _esprit_; let us see him at his work. “A literary instinct had from the beginning led him straight to those Gallic writers whose race he was destined to continue. We find him studying Montaigne; he extracts notes and imitates Marot, translates in verse and sets to music one of the hundred and twenty romances of the Cid going against the Moors in the eleventh century. “But his taste for the ancestor of the _esprit français_ is not exclusive; he is happy to find it among their direct descendants: Regnier, whom he quotes abundantly, La Fontaine, of whom he is a disciple, Molière and Pascal, who furnish the models of his chefs-d’oeuvre. More than that, he goes back to their antique masters. The rudiments of Latin which he learned at school serve to help him to read Lucrece, Catulle, Tibulle, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca, and to take from them that salt of _citation_ with which he heightens so effectively the sallies of his Gallic wit.” Among the manuscripts of the Comédie-Française are a number of pages covered with Latin citations, elegantly translated, which Beaumarchais adapted to the circumstances of his life and works, with a precision which could not have been the result of chance. “This is the serious side of his education, but it was not all; the unfolding and development of his talents must have been deeply influenced by that society of which he was the _bout-en-train_, and where the Prince de Conti and the Countess de Boufflers, _la divine Comtesse_, restored the ancient traditions of epicurean esprit. What did he not owe to conversation, often free, always piquant, of the aristocratic and bourgeois salons, to the foyers of the theaters and cafés which he frequented, and in which he was past-master, fencing with such skilled champions as Chamfort, as Sophie Arnould, those little kings _de l’esprit_! We must therefore give to these brilliant contemporaries of our author the honor of having shaped his genius.” (M. de Loménie.)