“Arrived in your midst, mind and body weakened, unable to maintain my rights, should I there be forced, my proofs in my hand, to have myself carried to the doors of your National Assembly, and, holding aloft the cap of liberty, with which I helped as much as anyone to adorn your heads—to cry out ‘Give an alms to your friend, whose accumulated services have only had this recompense, _date obolum Belisario_!’ “Pierre-Augustin Caron Beaumarchais.” It was precisely to save her daughter, that Madame de Beaumarchais had broken all communication with her husband, retaken her family name and thought only of making herself forgotten. “The Revolutionary laws,” says Gudin, “ordained the divorce of the wives of _émigrés_, under pain of being suspected and of running the risk of death that could not be inflicted upon their husbands. Madame de Beaumarchais, worthy of the courageous man whose hand she had received, went to the Revolutionary Committee and with that firmness which inspired respect and that grace which embellished every action, said, ‘Your decrees oblige me to demand a divorce. I obey, although my husband, charged with a commission is not an _émigré_ and never had the thought: I attest it and I know his heart. He will justify himself of this accusation, as he has of all the rest, and I shall have the satisfaction of marrying him a second time, according to your new laws.’” “Such was the effect of his destiny,” observes this eighteenth century philosopher, “that he was obliged to renew the knot of his own marriage at the same time that he occupied himself with the marriage of his daughter.” The condition of the family of Beaumarchais when they found themselves once more free, was far from enviable. Their revenues had been seized and their beautiful home was ordered to be sold. Eugénie felt only horror for the place and persuaded her mother to live in a small house. Gudin had gone into the country and Julie, the faithful sister of Beaumarchais, went to live alone with an old servant in the deserted palace of her brother, which was now guarded by agents of the Republic and which bore written upon its walls, “_Propriété nationale_.” “If, as I hope,” says Loménie, “the reader has retained an agreeable impression of Julie, it will be a pleasure perhaps to see again that intelligent, merry, courageous face which neither age, privations, nor dangers had been able to change. “A picture of the domestic and inner life of three women, once rich, forced to face the difficulties of a fearful epoch will give details of interest to that period which history itself cannot furnish.