The hereditary noble listened to this: ‘Nobility, money, rank, place, all that makes people so proud! What have you done for so much good fortune? You have given yourself the trouble to be born;’ and the _bourgeois_ at his side, to whom merit had opened no path to glory, heard with a strange thrill Figaro continue, ‘While for me, lost in a crowd of nobodies, I have had need of more knowledge and calculation simply to exist, than has been employed to govern all the Spains for a hundred years.’ Did the Minister who had filled the snug posts in the Government with his own relations and friends see nothing but a joke in: ‘They thought of me for a situation, but unluckily I was fit for it; they wanted an accountant; a dancer obtained the place’? ‘Intelligence a help to advancement? Your lordship is laughing at mine. Be commonplace and cringing, and you can get anywhere.’ ‘To succeed in life, _le savoir-faire vaut mieux que le savoir_.’ The ubiquitous Englishman of the audience heard Figaro announce ‘Goddam’ to be ‘the basis of the English language.’ The political world listened to a scathing definition of diplomacy: ‘To pretend to be ignorant of what everyone else knows, and to know what everyone else does not know ... to seem deep when one is only empty and hollow ... to set spies and pension traitors ... to break seals and intercept letters ... there’s diplomacy, or I’m a dead man.’ The audience trooped out into the night--the performance lasted from half-past five till ten--with enthusiastic admiration on its lips and still ringing in its ears the seventh couplet of the vaudeville: Par le sort de la naissance, L’un est roi, l’autre est berger; Le hasard fit leur distance; L’esprit seul peut tout changer. The writer, certainly, had as little idea as his audience that his was to be the wit to change everything. From first to last, Beaumarchais was the man we have always with us, who means to advance in the world and let that world take care of itself; whose argument is that posterity having done nothing for him, he need do nothing for posterity; the true time-server, just audacious enough to say what less courageous people only dare to think, and earning thereby their gratitude and applause. Caron had reaped place and fortune from the old order, and was not at all minded to overthrow it. Tyranny for tyranny, he preferred the despotism of the King to the despotism of the mob. If he revenged himself in his play for the slights and humiliations from which even his cleverness had not been able to save him--that was absolutely all. Overturn Throne and Church! Such a _bouleversement_ would very likely overturn Caron de Beaumarchais too, and was not to be thought of.