“In truth, my ardent zeal for my new friends might well have been a little wounded at the cold reception which was made to brave men whom I had myself brought to expatriate themselves for the service. My pains, my work, and my advances were immense in this respect. But I am afflicted only for our unhappy officers, because even in the very refusal of the Americans, I don’t know what exultation, what republican pride attracted my heart, and showed me a people so ardent to conquer their liberty, that they feared to diminish the glory of success in allowing strangers to divide with them the perils. My soul thus is composed; in the greatest evils it searches with care, and consoles itself with the little good which it encounters. And so, while my efforts had so little fruit in America ... sustained by my pride, I disdained to defend myself, leaving the evil-minded to their proper channel. “The idle of Paris envied my happiness, and were jealous of me as a favorite of fortune and of power; and I, sad plaything of events, alone, deprived of rest, lost for society, exhausted by insomnia and troubles, _tour à tour_ exposed to the suspicions, the ingratitude, anxieties, to the reproaches of France, England and America; working day and night and running to my goal by constant effort across a thorny land—I exhausted myself with fatigue and advanced little. I felt my courage revived when I thought that a great people would soon offer a sweet and free retreat to all the persecuted of Europe; that my fatherland would be revenged for the humiliation to which it had been subjected by the treaty of 1763; in a word, that the sea would become open to all commercial nations; I was supported by the hope that a new system of politics would open in Europe.” [Illustration: THE BASTILLE] But notwithstanding all his difficulties and losses, the affairs of Beaumarchais were advancing steadily. His merchant fleet, after the Treaty of Paris, signed in September, 1783, was no longer subject to the risks of war, and soon began to bring him in vast returns. But as late as March of this same year, we find him writing to Vergennes, in a letter quoted by Gaillardet: “The taking of my two vessels cost me more than 800,000 livres, and since the publicity of my losses I have been drawn upon, through fear, for a similar sum. Remittances have come to me from America, and now unfortunately their payment is suspended. I have two new vessels at Nantes, one of 12,000 tons, which I destined for China, and which I am now unable to sell. “I have 80,000 livres worth of bales of merchandise on the _Aigle_, destined for Congress, and the _Aigle_ has been taken. A sudden inundation, which happened at Morlaige, has submerged two warehouses where I had 1,000,000 pounds of tea. The whole is damaged to-day. “Day before yesterday, at the instant of payment, the exchange agent of Girard by his fraudulent bankruptcy carried off near 30,000 livres.