On June 6, 1792, the day before it was to be produced, its author was denounced before the National Assembly by Chabot. He had indeed, with a view to making at once a _coup_ for his country and for himself, and though he was now sixty years old and getting deaf, undertaken to bring into France sixty thousand guns--‘to massacre patriots,’ shouted unreasonable patriotism. On August 10 his house was searched; on August 23 he was taken to the Abbaye prison, and on August 30 he was freed by Manuel (his brother _littérateur_, as well as Procurator of the Commune), just two days before the September massacres. After all, his star had not yet declined. After hiding in barns and roaming ‘over harrowed fields, panting for his life,’ he escaped to England, where very luckily for himself a London merchant, to whom he was in debt, prevented his returning to Paris and the guillotine by shutting him up in the King’s Bench Prison. In March, 1793, he did return, ‘to offer my head to the sword of justice, if I cannot prove I am a good citizen.’ That he did not thus pay for his imprudence proves that there was as much in that head as had ever come out of it. Three months later, Beaumarchais was sent as the emissary of the Revolutionary Government to fetch those sixty thousand guns which had been left in Holland. He had many highly dramatic escapes and adventures; and, being wholly modern in his belief in self-advertisement, he once more made the most of them. In his absence the Government which had sent him, by one of those little mistakes which make its history so vivacious, declared him an _émigré_! During the Terror he was at Hamburg, in direst poverty and in mortal anxiety as to the fate of his wife, his daughter, and his sister Julie. They escaped with their lives; but when Beaumarchais was at last taken off the list of _émigrés_ and returned to Paris in 1796, he found house and fortune alike in ruins, his door besieged by creditors, and his famous garden a wilderness. He was sixty-four years old and had already done more in his life than a hundred ordinary men compress into a hundred ordinary careers. And now he must start afresh! He saw his daughter married; revived his old social tastes, produced ‘The Guilty Mother,’ and took the keenest interest, both in prose and verse, in that young Lieutenant of Artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte. He also published two very anti-Christian letters in praise of Voltaire. The watchmaker’s son, who had charmed Mesdames at Versailles, was to the end witty, gay, bold, and practical. On the morning of May 18, 1799, his friends found him dead of apoplexy. To die in his bed at last was surely not the least of his clevernesses.