If d’Eon had the satisfaction of duping Beaumarchais in a certain sense, he failed utterly in inducing him to loosen the strings of the royal purse which he carried, and without which nothing was accomplished. Finding that Beaumarchais was inexorable on this point, all the pent-up fury of the chevalier blazed forth. He began at once addressing interminable memoirs to the minister Vergennes, full of accusations against his agent, couched in the coarsest and most violent language, attributing to the latter all the epithets that fall so glibly from his pen, “the insolence of a watchmaker’s boy, who by chance had discovered perpetual motion.” “Beaumarchais,” said Loménie, “received these broadsides of abuse with the calm of a perfect gentleman: ‘She is a woman,’ he wrote to M. de Vergennes, ‘and a woman so frightfully surrounded that I pardon her with all my heart; she is a woman—that word says everything.’” But exactly this was what the chevalier did not want; he did not want to be pardoned by Beaumarchais; he wanted a quarrel with him, and to have his accusations credited by the minister. He succeeded in neither of his objects, although his resentment and his desire for revenge augmented rather than diminished with time. Returned to France, he openly accused Beaumarchais of having retained for himself money that was destined for him. His abuse was so violent that in self-defense the accused man appealed for justification to the minister, and received the following letter, which bears date of January 10th, 1778: “I have received, Monsieur, your letter of the 3rd of this month, and I have not been able to see without surprise that the demoiselle d’Eon imputes to you having appropriated to yourself to her prejudice the funds which she supposes to have been destined for her. I have difficulty in believing, Monsieur, that this demoiselle has been guilty of an accusation so calumnious; but if she has done so, you should not have the slightest disquietude or be in the least affected; you have the gage and the guarantee of your innocence in the account which you have given of your management of the affair, in the most approved form, founded upon the most authentic titles, and in the discharge which I have given you of the approval of the King. Far from the possibility of your disinterestedness being suspected, I have not forgotten, Monsieur, that you made no account of your personal expenses, and that you never allowed me to perceive any other interest than to facilitate to the demoiselle d’Eon the means of returning to her native land. “I am very perfectly, Monsieur, your very humble and very obedient servitor, “De Vergennes.”