It was at this juncture that Beaumarchais, stung by the reproaches of his own countrymen, made a ringing vindication of his acts in the cause of American independence, which will be given in the next chapter. The reply which Congress made to the letter above quoted, was to appoint Arthur Lee to examine the accounts. “The work was soon done,” says Loménie, “_d’un tour de main_. Arthur Lee pretended to discover that instead of 3,600,000 livres owing Beaumarchais, he not only had nothing to reclaim but on the other hand owed 1,800,000 francs to the United States!” The absurdity of this account could not fail to appear to Congress, and after four years more of protestations, in 1793 it confided a new examination of the debt to “that most distinguished American Statesman, Alexander Hamilton,” who established the sum owing Beaumarchais as 2,280,000 francs, but at the same time he proposed to suspend payment until the question of the lost million was settled. In the meantime the Revolution was advancing upon France with awful strides. Already the royalistic government had fallen, that government whose greatest glory was its noble service to the cause of American independence. When in 1794 Gouverneur Morris applied to Buchot, then minister of Foreign affairs for the new French government, there was no one left who knew or cared for the details that had prevented Vergennes from producing that famous receipt. At the demand of Congress, therefore, it was given to Morris. Armed now with what it chose to consider as proof that Beaumarchais wilfully had appropriated to himself a million livres intended by the French Government for it, Congress refused all settlement. They not only repudiated the payment of the 2,600,000 livres surplus of the debt honorably acknowledged by Deane, who alone knew the immense advances that had been made by Beaumarchais to cover the expenses of the commissioner as well as of the officers whom he had commissioned, but that august body considered that it might even dispense with paying the 1,800,000 livres surplus over and above the million, out of the sum accorded by Alexander Hamilton in which he ignored those advances, together with a part of the commission and interest freely granted by Congress in the contract already quoted in this volume, and arranged by the agent of Beaumarchais, Theveneau de Francy, in 1778. Congress refused all this, arguing that, as M. de Loménie says: “Since the interest of the million given in 1776 will absorb the difference, therefore we owe nothing, and will pay nothing.” The interest on the surplus, as it would have much more than absorbed the million in question, they, of course, conveniently ignored. This turn in his affairs with Congress was a crushing blow to Beaumarchais, but it did not prevent him, during the entire remainder of his life, pleading with the representatives of the American people to pay their debt to him.