“Beaumarchais, in consequence of the noise which continued to be made about his name, was none the less one of the personages the most sought after of the capital. Whatever he says about it, the fact is that he lived in great style. His stables contained as many as ten horses. He kept open table; strangers of distinction, desirous of knowing the popular author of so many celebrated works, solicited the honor of being presented to him. He received men of distinction in politics, in letters and arts, and women the most sought after, in the midst of whom the mistress of the house shone in the first rank by her _esprit_, her education, and her charms.... Nearly every evening in the Hotel Boulevard St. Antonie, there was talking, music, playing, although the master never took part in play. His _esprit_ was equally free, equally alert, his fancy inexhaustible. It is there he loved to read his new productions, and he excelled at that. Arnault recounts one of these literary reunions at which he assisted, ‘in a great circular salon, partly ornamented with mirrors, partly with landscapes of vast dimensions, and half of which was occupied by seats for placing the auditors. Upon an estrade, furnished with a desk, stood the armchair of the reader. There, as in a theatre, Beaumarchais read, or rather played his dramas; because it is to play, if one delivers a piece in as many different inflexions of the voice as there are different personages in the action; because it is to play if one gives to each one of the personages the pantomime which should characterize him.’” (Arnault, _Souvenirs d’un sexagénaire_, Vol. IV.) And Gudin adds another touch to the portrait of this many-sided man; after speaking of the loss of his mother, dying in her eighty-third year, he said: “Beaumarchais came at once to see me, offered me all the consolations of friendship, and reclaimed the promise which we had given one another long ago, to unite the rest of the days which nature reserved to us. “It is thus that I found in the family of my friend all those attentions which could sweeten the irreparable loss of the tenderest mother and one whom I had quitted almost never.”