"Beaumarchais was present. The rôle of Figaro was taken by the Comte d'Artois....
"A soirée, certainly the most singular. At the very hour when so many catastrophes were preparing, was it not curious to hear the brother of Louis XVI, the Comte d'Artois, cry out in the language of the Andalusian barber, 'Faith, Monsieur, who knows whether the world will last three weeks longer?' (Act III, Scene 5). He the zealous partisan of the old _régime_, he the future _émigré_, he the prince who would one day bear the title of Charles X, it was he who uttered such democratic phrases as these: 'I believe myself only too happy to be forgotten, persuaded that a great lord has done us enough good, when he has done us no harm.' (Act I, Scene 2)
"'From the virtues required in a domestic, does your Excellency know many masters who are worthy of being valets?' (Act I, Scene 2)
"Was there not something like a prediction in these words of Figaro in the mouth of the brother of Louis XVI, 'I hasten to laugh at everything for fear of being obliged to weep'? (Act I, Scene 2)
"Ah, let Marie Antoinette pay attention and listen! At this moment when the affair of the necklace begins, would not one say that all the maneuvers of her calumniators were announced to her by Basile: 'Calumny, Sir....' Beautiful and unfortunate Queen, on hearing that definition of the _crescendo_ of calumny would she not turn pale?
"With this representation of the _Barbier de Séville_, ended the private theatricals of the _Petit-Trianon_. What was preparing was the drama, not the fictitious drama, but the drama real, the drama terrible, the drama where Providence reserved to the unhappy queen the most tragic, the most touching of all the rôles...." (For the full details of this fatal affair of the diamond necklace, see _L'ancien Régime_, by Imbert de Saint-Amand.)
Little did Beaumarchais realize the part he was playing in the preparation for that great drama. The gay utterances of his Figaro were the utterances of the mass of the people of France. Through Beaumarchais, the _Tiers État_ was at last finding a voice and rising to self-consciousness; it was rising also to a consciousness of the effete condition of all the upper strata of society. Hence the wild enthusiasm with which these productions were greeted, an enthusiasm in which the aristocracy themselves joined, eager as the populace to laugh, for exactly the same reason as Figaro, so that they might not be obliged to weep.