At the moment of his triumph in 1774, flattered, praised, and loved as we have seen him, this condition was offset not only by the judgment of parliament which ruined his career, but by a domestic trouble which was at that moment preparing for him.
His father's health had been so shattered by the terrible strain through which he had been obliged to pass by the succession of calamities which had befallen his son that in the end the vigor of his mind became impaired.
It was thus that shortly before his death in 1775, at seventy-seven years of age, without the knowledge of his son, he united himself in marriage with the woman who had been provided for him, as caretaker. M. de Loménie says of this individual, "She was a cunning old maid, who made him marry her in the hope of being ransomed by Beaumarchais.
"Profiting by the weakness of the old man, she had had assigned to her in their contract of marriage, the dowry and the part of a child. However, the elder Caron left no fortune. The portion which he had received from his second wife had gone towards partly covering the advances made to him by his son who in addition gave him a lifetime pension. A written settlement guaranteed Beaumarchais; but the third wife of the elder Caron, speculating upon the celebrity of the son and his repugnance to a suit of such a nature at the very moment when he had scarcely recovered himself from the suit Goëzman, threatened to attack the settlement and to make a noise.
"For the first time in his life," continues Loménie, "Beaumarchais capitulated before an adversary and disembarrassed himself by means of 6,000 francs of the person in question, a person, by the way, very subtle, very daring, and _assez spirituelle,_ to judge from her letters.
"Upon the package of documents relating to this affair I find written in the hand of Beaumarchais these words: _'Infamie de la veuve de mon père pardonnée'_ (Infamy of the widow of my father, pardoned). It is to the influence of this _rusée commère_ that we must attribute the only moment of misunderstanding between the father and the son during an intimate correspondence which embraced the last fifteen years of the life of the former; and it must be added that the misunderstanding lasted but a moment, because the letter of the father on his death-bed which has already been cited proves that harmony had been completely re-established between them at the time of the death of the elder Caron towards the end of August, 1775."