Caron de Beaumarchais was not a very unusual type of character or even of intellect; but in the use he made of his brains, of his qualities and of his circumstances, he was a man in a million. His marvellous enterprise and industry enabled him to build more than one successful career on very ordinary foundations. His luck, that astonishing luck which followed him from the cradle to the grave, seems to have prevented such dangerous qualities as his conceit, his pugnaciousness, and his love of intrigue and speculation, from bringing their usual fatal results. Such gifts as a handsome face, a fine figure, a ‘parvenu grandeur of manner’ and real kindness and generosity, he used to their utmost advantage. For himself and his contemporaries he was a brilliantly successful individuality. For posterity, he is the man who, with a single thrust, pushed open that door, which by long labour and bitter sacrifice Voltaire and the Encyclopædists had unbarred, upon the great Revolution and the Day. X _CONDORCET: THE ARISTOCRAT_ Voltaire was the son of a lawyer, and Diderot the son of a cutler; d’Alembert was a no-man’s child educated in a tradesman’s family; Grimm and Galiani were foreigners in the country to which they gave their talents. Of all Voltaire’s fellowship only Vauvenargues and Condorcet came from the order their work was pledged not to benefit but to destroy. Condorcet alone lived to experience the extreme consequences of his principles, and paid for them by imprisonment and death. The Aristocrat who lost his life through the People to whom he had devoted it--this was Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Born in 1743, at Ribemont, a town in Picardy, Condorcet belonged to a noble family highly connected both with the Church and the Army. His father was a captain of cavalry and designed his son for the same aristocratic post. But he died when the child was four; and a devout mother vowed him to the Virgin and _au blanc_, [Illustration: JEAN-ANTOINE-NICOLAS DE CARITAT, MARQUIS DE CONDORCET. _From an Engraving by Lemort, after the Bust by St. Aubin._] dressed him in white frocks like a little girl, so that the luckless Caritat could neither run nor jump as nature bade him, and owed to his mother’s piety a weakness in his limbs from which he never recovered. His first schoolmasters were the Jesuits. What is one to make of the fact that they had as virgin soil the intellects of at least four of their mightiest and fiercest opponents--Voltaire, Diderot, Turgot, and Condorcet? At eleven, Caritat was under their supervision, with his home influence pressing him to their way of thought, with an uncle a bishop, and Cardinal de Bernis a relative. At thirteen, he was sent to Rheims, to be more completely under their control. At fifteen, he came up to Paris, and began at the College of Navarre to study mathematics and to think for himself; and when once a mind has begun to do that, nothing can stop it.