Figaro: The Life of Beaumarchais

He was a watchmaker's son who became the most influential playwright of the eighteenth century. He was a secret agent for the king who financed the American Revolution. He was imprisoned by the monarchy, then imprisoned by the revolution he helped spark. Beaumarchais lived five lives and they were all extraordinary. As the creator of Figaro, he wrote the most scandalous, funny, and politically dangerous plays of his age - works so subversive that monarchs banned them, and so brilliant that Mozart later set one to music. This 1922 biography captures a man who moved through the dying world of aristocratic France with impossible energy: publishing Voltaire, arming American revolutionaries, plotting against tyrants while serving one, and penning plays that helped tear down the old order. He was idealist and scoundrel, libertine and visionary. Rivers gives us a portrait of the revolutionary era's most protean figure - a man too vivid for any single category, whose greatest creation was himself.