A year later, in 1775, he came to England on another and far more important secret mission connected with the rebellion of the American colonies. It was the one enterprise of his life, it is said, into which he put more heart than head. He attended parliamentary debates, and was constantly at the house of Wilkes. ‘All sensible people in England,’ he wrote to Louis the Sixteenth in September 1775, ‘are convinced that the English colonies are lost.’ He advised that, while France should not openly embroil herself with England, she should send secret aid to the insurgents. For this purpose, financed by his country, he equipped for war three ships--his ‘navy’ he called it--and when he returned to Paris he traded in the American interest under the name of Roderigue, Hortalez & Co. England was naturally angry when she found out how she had been tricked, and America, so far as money acknowledgments were concerned, was not a little ungrateful. But the clever instrument, Beaumarchais, came out of the affair with his usual flourish and distinction, and would have deserved a paragraph in history, even had he not earned a page in literature. On February 23, 1775, there was produced at the old Comédie Française in the Rue des Fossés, Saint-Germain des Prés, opposite the famous Café Procope, a play called ‘The Barber of Seville.’ Accepted by the Comédie Française in 1772, its first performance, fixed for Shrove Tuesday 1773, had been stopped by the authorities because just at that moment its author was unluckily serving a term of imprisonment for fighting the Duc de Chaulnes. Before the next date fixed for its début, he had been condemned by the Maupeou Parliament for the affair with la Blache. The third attempt was no luckier. The irrepressible creature had just published the Fourth Goezman Memoir! And now, when the performance really did come off, it was a failure. La Harpe declared that its inordinate length bored people, its bad jokes irritated them, and its false morality shocked them. The _parterre_ was loudly and vulgarly disgusted, and the boxes yawned behind their fans. By Beaumarchais? He was but mediocre before, we remember, in ‘Eugénie.’ Watchmaker, courtier, advocate, secret agent, this--but clearly no playwright!