All the social talents had Caron--tact, impudence, a witty tongue, a delightful voice, added to a real talent for the harp, which was the fashionable instrument of the moment. Mesdames killed a great deal of the too ample royal leisure with music; Madame Adelaide played every instrument down to the horn and the comb. This delightful young _parvenu_ is the very man to teach us the harp! He not only did that, but he organised concerts, of which he was himself the bright, particular star. On one occasion the King was so impatient for him to begin to play, that he pushed towards him his own armchair; while on another, Mesdames declined the present of a fan on which the painter had portrayed their concerts--without the figure of Beaumarchais. Of course the courtiers were jealous. The beautiful insolence of his manners, the perfectly good-natured conceit (surely one of the most exasperating of the minor vices) naturally made him enemies. One scornful young noble handed this new favourite, this royal instructor, his watch to look at. ‘Sir,’ says Beaumarchais, ‘since I have given up my trade I have become very awkward in such matters.’ ‘Do not refuse me, I beg.’ Beaumarchais takes the watch, pretends to examine it, and drops it. ‘Sir,’ says he, with a bow to the owner, ‘I warned you of my clumsiness,’ and, turning on his heel, leaves the watch in fragments on the floor. The new courtier was at least a match for the old ones. ‘I was born to be a courtier,’ says Figaro. ‘To accept, to take, and to ask; there is the secret in three words.’ Figaro’s father had the secret already. Soon he made friends with Paris-Duverney, financier and Court banker, ‘asked’ of him the art of making money, and ‘received’ so much of it that in 1761 he could buy himself a brevet of nobility. He would have bought also the post of Master of Woods and Forests, but that the other Masters objected so lustily to receiving such a _bourgeois_ into their order, that even the patronage of Mesdames, and his own wit displayed in an amusing pamphlet, could not gain the _bourgeois_ his point. So he bought the post of Lieutenant-General of the King’s Preserves instead, and in that capacity sat solemnly in a long robe once a week in judgment on the poachers of the neighbourhood of Paris. In 1764, he made a journey into Spain, where one of his sisters, who had married a Spaniard, was living, and another had just been jilted with a peculiar insolence and brutality by a man called Clavijo. Beaumarchais brought Clavijo to book; the day of the wedding was fixed, when the shifty suitor absconded a second time. Beaumarchais made the episode famous in his account of the affair, which appeared in his Fourth Memoir against Goezman in February 1774, and which naturally does not tend to the discredit of M. Pierre Augustin Caron.