And Beaumarchais, who poured money into our empty treasury from his own full horn-of-plenty,--Beaumarchais, the artist, dramatist, politician, merchant, who set all Paris wild with his "Mariage de Figaro," of whose wit and satire and mischievous subtlety our translations give us no idea,--Beaumarchais must needs ruin himself by spending 1,000,000 livres on a gorgeous _édition de luxe_ of Voltaire, and yet more than that on French muskets. He died of "no particular disease," say his biographers, "at sixty-nine years." So Fortune for him had a long life and a merry one, and riches of which he made a noble use. We all know the fate of the pleasure-loving young king,--the husband of the beautiful and accomplished Marie Antoinette! America, perhaps, owes little to him,--but she remembers that little, and can mourn for the bitter hour that ended his misguided life. But ungrateful, indeed, would she be did she cease to remember Marie Antoinette! Well may we call our beautiful buildings and graceful fashions after her name. Many years after she had bent her lovely head with such courage to the guillotine, Paine wrote, "It is both justice and gratitude to say that it was the queen of France who gave the cause of America a fashion at the French Court." "_Dites-moi_," she had said in parting from Lafayette, "_dites-moi de bonnes nouvelles de nos bons Americans, de nos cher Republicans_," little dreaming, poor lady, that "she was giving the last great impulse to that revolutionary spirit which was so soon to lead her to misery and death." For one more of the Frenchmen who served us--one who was a loyal friend in the field and a traitor at the fireside--the stern Nemesis holds a strange immortality. The secret manuscript which for one hundred and twenty-five years has passed from hand to hand among Virginia women; which was known to and partially quoted by Bishop Meade; which is known to-day by many who gave, like him, a promise never to print the whole of it, contains the story of a young nobleman's infamy--told that he may be execrated by women, the names implicated kept from publication that the innocent descendants may not suffer. "_Sed quid ego hæc nequicquam ingrata revolvo?_ It is vain to lament that corruption which no human power can prevent or repair." CHAPTER IX IN CAMP AND AT MOUNT VERNON