however, the conduct adopted on the advice of M. de Vergennes;
he had been powerfully supported by the arguments presented in a
memorandum drawn up by M. de Rayneval, senior clerk in the foreign
office; he was himself urged and incited by the most intelligent, the
most restless, and the most passionate amongst the partisans of the
American rebellion--Beaumarchais.

Peter Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, born at Paris on the 24th of
January, 1732, son of a clockmaker, had already acquired a certain
celebrity by his lawsuit against Councillor Goezman before the parliament
of Paris. Accused of having defamed the wife of a judge, after having
fruitlessly attempted to seduce her, Beaumarchais succeeded, by dint of
courage, talent, and wit, in holding his own against the whole magistracy
leagued against him. He boldly appealed to public opinion. "I am a
citizen," he said; "that is to say, I am not a courtier, or an abbe, or a
nobleman, or a financier, or a favorite, nor anything connected with what
is called influence (_puissance_) nowadays. I am a citizen; that is to
say, something quite new, unknown, unheard of in France. I am a citizen;
that is to say, what you ought to have been for the last two hundred
years, what you will be, perhaps, in twenty!" All the spirit of the
French Revolution was here, in those most legitimate and at the same time
most daring aspirations of his.

French citizen as he proclaimed himself to be, Beaumarchais was quite
smitten with the American citizens; he had for a long while been pleading
their cause, sure, he said, of its ultimate triumph. On the 10th of
January, 1776, three weeks before the declaration of independence, M. de
Vergennes secretly remitted a million to M. de Beaumarchais; two months
later the same sum was intrusted to him in the name of the King of Spain.
Beaumarchais alone was to appear in the affair and to supply the
insurgent Americans with arms and ammunition. "You will found," he had
been told, "a great commercial house, and you will try to draw into it
the money of private individuals; the first outlay being now provided, we
shall have no further hand in it, the affair would compromise the
government too much in the eyes of the English." It was under the style
and title of Rodrigo Hortalez and Co. that the first instalment of
supplies, to the extent of more than three millions, was forwarded to the
Americans; and, notwithstanding the hesitation of the ministry and t