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In my very first semester of college—in 1966, at Chico State College, since elevated to California State University, Chico—I had two extraordinary professors. One was a professor of philosophy, Marvin Easterling, who later was killed in an accident while riding his bicycle. The other was a professor of English, Lennis Dunlap.
"Mr. Dunlap," he was called, because he stopped after the master's degree. He once told me that the prospect of doctoral work was simply too tedious to contemplate. He was from the South—Tennessee, I think—and he had studied, among other places, at the Sorbonne. He was then in his early forties, handsome in a rather Mephistophelean way, with a sonorous voice and the posture of an equestrian. Unlike most members of the English Department, he dressed with impeccable style—he tried in vain to instruct me in such matters—and was said to have an independent income. Along with Hugh Kenner, he was the most intelligent man I have known.
His favorite period of literature was Restoration drama, especially the plays of Wycherly and Congreve: witty, sophisticated, unencumbered by illusions—a category that included the evangelical Christianity in which I had been raised, and from which I had for the moment detached myself. Amoral? No, but the code of a natural (not hereditary) aristocracy, embodied by the superior couples of the Restoration stage.
Which brings us to Beaumarchais. If you are even a casual opera-goer, chances are you have taken in a performance of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro or Rossini's The Barber of Seville, both of them based on plays by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799). Hardly known today except among certain scholars of French culture, Beaumarchais nevertheless created some of the best-known characters in world literature, above all the barber Figaro, who like Homer's Odysseus is never at a loss no matter how daunting the circumstances.
The same could said of Figaro's creator, as the epigraph to Hugh Thomas' Beaumarchais in Seville suggests. "My inexhaustible good humour never left me for a moment," Beaumarchais wrote to his father on January 28, 1765, in the course of describing his adventures in Madrid. Fleshed out in Thomas' splendidly entertaining narrative, this is a morality of sorts, an attitude toward life.
Thomas, a distinguished historian, has written a book in which great learning is worn lightly. It's short—the main text isn't much more than 150 smallish pages, the lines generously spaced—and its very title, Beaumarchais in Seville, is a joke, though one with a point: Beaumarchais never was in Seville, but his visit to Spain in 1764-65, most of that time spent in Madrid, allowed him to create the imaginary Seville that still—250 years later—brings tourists to the real Seville.
Very well, you say, but why should I care? It sounds like a coterie book. Not at all. It is good to inhabit for a little while a time and place distant from our present, and Thomas is an excellent guide. His first chapter is called "A Golden Age," golden in part because in 1764 the world was more or less at peace, but for other reasons too: "At that time the Industrial Revolution had not begun, even in England, though a few iron wheels already defaced her countryside. But most towns remained beautiful: even their suburbs." This sets the tone for the book; we must keep in mind Thomas' subtitle, "An Intermezzo," not to mention his playful list of dramatis personae, consisting of 58 people, or an average of more than three per page.
So we are taken back to a moment when every person of note must have that marvel of technology, a wristwatch. "The new age," Thomas writes, "was indicated by King Louis XIV standing in Versailles with a stopwatch in his hand. A minister arrived on the stroke of ten in the morning. The king said, 'Ah, monsieur, you almost made me wait.'" Beaumarchais' father, André-Charles Caron, was among the leading watchmakers in Paris, hence a reasonably affluent paterfamilias, proud father of six surviving children: five daughters and a son.
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