Innumerable abuses had crept in, so that instead of a ninth, it was well proved that often the author received less than a twentieth part of the returns of the play. The position of the comedians was strengthened by the current opinion that it was degrading to the high art of literature to bring it down to a financial basis. Profiting by this and abusing their privileges, the _Comédie-Française_ had gone on confiscating the productions of authors without serious opposition, although their actions had given rise in more than one instance to very serious trouble. Such was the condition of affairs in 1775.
"The richest of the dramatic authors," says Loménie, "Beaumarchais, for whom the theater had never been anything but a form of recreation, and who had made a present of his first two plays to the comedians, could not be taxed with cupidity in taking in hand the cause of his brothers of the pen. This is what determined him. We soon shall see him defending, for the first time, the rights of others more than his own, and hazarding himself in a new combat against adversaries more difficult to conquer than those against whom he had fought already; he will conquer nevertheless, but not for many years, and only with the aid of the Revolution will he succeed in getting the better of the kings and queens of the theater, in restraining the cupidity of the directors, and in establishing the rights of authors, until this time so unjustly despoiled.
"To the end of his life he did not cease to demand that the law surround with its protection a kind of property, no less inviolable than other forms, but before his fervid pleadings, completely sacrificed.
"The society of dramatic authors to-day so powerful, so strongly organized, which rightly, or wrongly is sometimes accused of having replaced the tyranny of the actors and directors of the theatre by a tyranny exactly the reverse, do not know perhaps all they owe to the man who was the first to unite into a solid body the writers who up to that time had lived entirely isolated."
Beaumarchais had long lived on terms of intimacy with the comedians of the _Théâtre-Français_; that he continued to do so during the years when his suit against them was in progress, is proved by the following letter from Mlle. Doligny, written in 1779.