ourt; and the
Parisian public, irritated at being thus excluded, then raised for the
first time the cry of tyranny and oppression. When at last the
Government in its weakness made the final concession, and permitted a
public performance, the demand for seats was greater than had ever
previously been known. The theatre was packed. Great lords and ladies
sat elbow to elbow with bourgeois and fashionable women; and when
Figaro came on and declaimed against social injustice, the opposite
parties in {23} the house stormed approval or disfavour. Figaro is
Beaumarchais, is the lower or middle class man, with nothing but his
wits with which to force his way through the barriers which privilege
has erected across every path along which he attempts to advance. As
the valet of Count Almaviva he has seen the man of privilege at close
quarters and has sounded his rottenness and incapacity. Because you
are a grand seigneur, he says, you think yourself a great genius; but,
Monsieur le Comte, to what do you really owe your great privileges? To
having put yourself to the inconvenience of being born, nothing more.
I, with all my ability and force, I who can work for myself, for
others, for my country, I am driven away from every occupation.

That was what the pushing adventurer and witty dramatist had to say,
but all through the country thousands of plain, inconspicuous men,
doctors, lawyers, merchants, farmers, even here and there a peasant or
a noble, the best representatives of the deep-rooted civilization of
France, of her keen intelligence, of her uprightness, of her humanity,
revolted inwardly at the ineptitude and injustice of her government.
As they saw it, the whole system seemed to revolve about Versailles,
the abode {24} of the Bourbon King, the happy hunting ground of the
privileged courtier, the glittering abode of vice and debauchery, the
sink through which countless millions were constantly drained while the
poor starved, the badge of dishonour and incapacity which had too
frequently been attached to the conduct of France both in war and in
peace. The twenty-five millions without the gates gazed at the hundred
thousand within, and the more they gazed the louder and more bitter
became their comment, the dimmer and the more tawdry did the glitter of
it all appear to them, and the weaker and more half-hearted became the
attitude of the one hundred thousand as they attempted by insolence and
superciliousness to maintai