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 the rage of the English, other instalments soon followed.  Beaumarchais was henceforth personally interested in the enterprise; he had commenced it from zeal for the American cause, and from that yearning for activity and initiative which characterized him even in old age.  “I should never have succeeded in fulfilling my mission here without the indefatigable, intelligent, and generous efforts of M. de Beaumarchais,” wrote Silas Deane to the secret committee of Congress:  “the United States are more indebted to him, on every account, than to any other person on this side of the ocean.”