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.

Doted on by his sisters, the young Beaumarchais flourished. He was protean, inventing (when he was 21) a device that significantly improved the accuracy of timepieces (and winning a battle against a well-established clockmaker who had tried to steal the invention and claim it as his own), then going to the royal court, where he soon became the music teacher for Louis XV's four daughters. "From the moment he arrived in Versailles," a friend recalled, "all the women were struck by his height, his elegant figure, the regularity of his features, his assured look, his lively mien, the dominating air which he seemed to have and which seemed to elevate everything and everyone surrounding him."

Indeed. He had married a slightly older widow, who died soon afterward, and parlayed various royal appointments to be able to add "de Beaumarchais" to the end of his name. He wrote little plays and made friends with an exceedingly rich financier who took a shine to him and began giving him money to establish himself.

What brought him to Spain was an appeal from two of his sisters, who had been living for some time in Madrid. One of them had received a promise of marriage from a curious character, José Clavijo y Fajardo, who had started a Spanish magazine modeled on The Spectator and who was later to become well known as a naturalist. Clavijo was not fulfilling his promise, and Beaumarchais agreed to travel to Madrid to straighten things out. At the same time, he was entrusted with a complex and (from this vantage point) insanely ambitious commission by his financier friend and patron, for which purpose he was given a large sum. Finally, Beaumarchais' father asked him to try and recover money owed to him by a number of grandees in Madrid, who had their watches but had never paid up.

Believe me, I am ruthlessly simplifying, and yet we haven't even left France yet. You will have to read Thomas' book to get the flavor of his account of life in Madrid and Spain more generally. Imagine a story with more twists and turns than could be accommodated in an opera, no matter how convoluted the plot, a comic tale with dark undercurrents (one part of the multipart commission—which ended with failure across the board—was to try and obtain the license to sell slaves to the Spanish Empire), set against a Spanish background largely unfamiliar to us, though with touches that we know from the Spain of fiction and drama and poetry and music. (There is a wonderful description of the fandango, "this obscene dance.") Added to that—and for some readers the highlight—is Thomas' account of certain experiences in Spain—including plays Beaumarchais saw or may have seen—that could have influenced Beaumarchais' two masterpieces, especially the conception of the characters.

And keep in mind that there are morals to be drawn from this well-told tale. For example, it is good to be handsome, like Louis XV ("the best-looking monarch to be seen on a throne for many years"). It is bad to be ugly, like the pious Charles III of Spain, who moreover cuts an absurd figure because after the death of his domineering wife, when he is still a relatively young man, he neither remarries nor—in marked contrast both to his French counterpart and to Beaumarchais—indulges in amorous adventures.

When Beaumarchais meets in Spain an extraordinarily lovely young woman, Madame de Croix, whose military husband is always off somewhere, he persuades her—overcoming her initial refusal—to try and seduce Charles, evidently hoping that he might thus be able to exercise influence of benefit to France on the king of Spain. But although Charles is clearly mightily attracted to her, he withstands the temptation, for which he is portrayed here as an earnest fool.

The lovely Madame de Croix does not hold this against Beaumarchais, and they are a couple for the remainder of his time in Spain. In the summing up at the end, we learn that "she seems to have had no more intrigues, and gave herself up to religion. The Baron de Gleichen in Paris remembers her retaining her wonderful looks into old age. 'She exists only for the poor,' wrote Baron Gleichen, who added that she remained vivacious to the end of her life." This helps a little to ward off the chill that has crept unannounced into Seville.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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