Bouncy castles in Spain

Hugh Thomas is widely known as the author of scholarly blockbusters 1,000 pages long. He now excels in what he calls an intermezzo, a learned and lively book of 192 pages, full of good things including splendid pen portraits of worthies: of Choiseul, the easygoing foreign minister of France; of King Charles III of Spain, rising at dawn to spend the day shooting game and going to bed early after a frugal dinner. It concerns the visit to Spain in 1764 of Pierre Augustin Caron, later to be known, the result of assiduous social climbing, as de Beaumarchais.

Beaumarchais’ father was a famous Parisian watchmaker in an age when possession of a fine pocket watch, a technological breakthrough, was for a nobleman as necessary an indication of status as fine clothes and a wig. His father’s clients were rich French and Spanish aristocrats. Beaumarchais used this connection to further his social ambitions. Like most successful social climbers he was a charmer who had picked up his techniques as the only son in a family of women. He was the James Bond of his day without Bond’s taste for violence: a wild success with women, a risk-taker and gambler who bankrupted at cards the unfortunate Russian ambassador to Spain.

Seeing that he was doing splendidly in smart Parisian circles, why, Thomas asks, did he bother to go to Spain? Ostensibly his mission, as he put it, and we have only his account, was to recover the honour of his sister Lisette, who lived in Madrid, after she had been jilted at the altar by José Clavijo. Clavijo was an intelligent and enlightened journalist, founder of a periodical modelled on The Spectator, a man who otherwise would have been a friend of Beaumarchais.