DIPLOMACY: Figaro in Disguise

When Congress appointed an envoy earlier this year to negotiate for badly needed French arms, it did not know that the task was already nearly completed—by the French themselves. The man behind the move: French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. his agent extraordinary: Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, author of the popular comedy, The Barber of Seville. Together, they have been maneuvering for well over a year to win greater support for the American Patriots.

Both Vergennes and Beaumarchais have faced the steady opposition of the new monarch, Louis XVI, who inclines toward pacifism, and of former Finance Minister Anne Robert Turgot, who maintains that France’s Treasury cannot afford a possible conflict with Britain and that the American Colonies will eventually win their freedom anyway. Vergennes, however, has never forgiven Britain for stripping France of most of its colonies after the French and Indian War. He sees the American Rebellion as a means of getting back at Britain, that “rapacious, unjust and faithless enemy.”

Vergennes’s undercover agent, Beaumarchais, 44, is the brash son of a watchmaker. By charm and ability, he worked hi way into the salons of French aristocracy, and he won Vergennes’s confidence in two previous secret missions to London. He first bought up and destroyed the alleged memoirs of Madame du Barry, mistress to the late King Louis XV. He returned to London last year to negotiate for the return of some incriminating documents about a proposed French invasion of England. One of Louis XV’s secret agents, the Chevalier

Charles d’Eon de Beaumont, had threatened to turn the documents over to the British government unless he received a substantial sum of money from the French Crown.*

Beaumarchais’s dispatches from London on the American situation, backed up by reports from a French agent in Philadelphia, argued that French aid could be decisive for the colonial cause—and yet not force a war between France and Britain. “It is the English, Sire, whom you need to humiliate and weaken,” Beaumarchais wrote to Louis last winter, “if you do not wish to be humiliated and weakened yourself on every occasion.” Without French help, he warned, the Americans might give up their fight and join with the British to take away France’s rich sugar islands in the West Indies. “Believe me, Sire, the saving of a few millions today may soon cause a great deal of blood to flow and money to be lost to France … This danger [of war with Britain] can be averted if the plan be adopted which I have so often proposed, to aid the Americans secretly.”

Beaumarchais’s entreaties and warnings, combined with Vergennes’s eloquence, convinced Louis only two months ago, and the King authorized the secret expenditure of 1 million livres, or about £43,000, to help arm the Americans. The Spanish government, which also fears British designs on its Caribbean and American colonies, is expected to add another 1 million livres to the French project next month.

Using the facades of an international merchant, Beaumarchais has set up a company, Roderique Hortalez & Cie., in the former Dutch embassy in Paris. The company is to buy arms and ammunition from French arsenals and ship them to America, either directly or through islands in the Caribbean, where they will be exchanged for American products, then forwarded to America. If the Americans run out of produce or cannot deliver on tune, the arms will be shipped on credit. If they do have valuable goods, Roderique Hortalez & Cie.—meaning Beaumarchais and two partners—stands to make a sizable profit. Either way, the Americans get the arms.

Officials in London may be excused if they are confused by the whole scheme. Figaro, the Barber of Seville, is a master of disguises and deceptions in a good cause. So, apparently, is his creator Beaumarchais.

*D’Eon, 47, is himself — or herself — an extraordinary person. Dressed as a beautiful woman, he won the confidence of Russia’s Empress Catherine in 1755 and was instrumental in forging an alliance between France and Russia. Dressed as a man, he won the friendship of England’s King George III and sent him back useful information to Paris. To and this no one certain whether he is indeed male or female, but Louis XVI has promised to let him return to France if he henceforth sticks to the nonpolitical role of a woman.