Crossword-Solution: BEAUMARCHAIS 12 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 21

Beaumarchais, whose penetrating wit left few subjects untouched, makes his Figaro put the subject aside with "Je me presse de rire de tout, de peur d'etre oblige d'en pleurer." The author of this little volume pretends to settle no disputes, aims at inaugurating no reforms.

Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of your creations.

Merely to see him would have been enough to tell you that Beaumarchais’ _Figaro_, Moliere’s _Mascarille_, Marivaux’s _Frontin_, and Dancourt’s _Lafleur_--those great representatives of audacious swindling, of cunning driven to bay, of stratagem rising again from the ends of its broken wires--were all quite second-rate by comparison with this giant of cleverness and meanness.

Though Pascal was both a great mathematician and a great writer, though Beaumarchais was a good man of business, and Zamet a profound courtier, these rare exceptions prove the general principle of the specialization of brain faculties.

And such an achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.