To which the elder Caron replied, September 19th, 1764, "We supped yesterday with my dear and good friend who laughed heartily when she saw the article in your letter, imagining as she very well could, the way in which you would go about this affair if you were in my place, so that as she says, she only embraces you with all her heart, because you are nine hundred miles away."
But though the amiable Madame Henry was quite ready to laugh at the article in the son's letter she does not appear to have been in any hurry to change the relationship which had so long existed between herself and the elder Caron, for shortly before his return from Madrid we find Beaumarchais writing in relation to the same matter: "A man ought not to be alone. One must hold to something in this life, and the society of your sons and daughters can only be sacrificed to another much sweeter, but which you do not seem on the point of acquiring. I precede my arrival by a picture of what should be, so that you may have time to determine what you ought to do before my return, which will be soon. What happiness for me, if on reaching there I could on the same day see assured the felicity of my father and my sister."
Unfortunately for us, Beaumarchais returned from Spain in May, 1765, so that the correspondence ceased and with it, our means of following in detail the lives of those in whom we have begun to take so warm an interest. The "felicity" of the father we know, however, to have been consummated, for on January 15, 1766, he was united in marriage with the woman of his choice, Madame Henry, she being then sixty years of age and he sixty-eight. After two years of happy married life, Madame Caron died and we find her husband again returning to the rue Condé to live with his dearly loved son.
In the meantime, Mademoiselle de Boisgarnier had taken the advice of her brother, and we cannot for a moment doubt that she acted wisely; for her lover, Janot de Miron, seems to have been a man of exceptionally fine character. Referring to the letter already quoted in which Beaumarchais pleads with his sister for her friend, M. de Loménie says, "In reading this eulogy of poor Miron, where his moral qualities are exalted rather to the detriment of his brilliant ones, we have need to remember that Beaumarchais previously had declared his friend was not wanting in external accomplishments; and truly he was not. Miron, judging from his letters was rather pedantic, but in no way stupid. The taste for poetry and art, which reigned in the Caron family was no stranger to him. After several years of torment, he succeeded in touching that disdainful little heart and thus his constancy was rewarded. Mademoiselle de Boisgarnier, suitably endowed by her brother, married in 1767 M. de Miron, whom the influence of Beaumarchais later succeeded in having appointed _Secrétaire des Commandements du Prince de Conti_.