When Beaumarchais arrived in Paris he hastened to Versailles to receive the reward of his activity. He found the old King attacked by a fatal disease, and in a few days he was no more. "I admire," he wrote the same day, "the strangeness of the fate which follows me. If the King had lived in health eight days longer, I would have been reinstated in the rights which iniquity has taken from me, I had his royal word."
A few days later he wrote to Morande, "Restored to my family and friends, my affairs are quite as little advanced as before my voyage to England, through the unexpected death of the King. I seize the first instant of repose to write to you and to compliment you, Monsieur, very sincerely upon your actual condition. Each one of us has done his best; I to tear you from the certain misfortune which menaced you and your friends, and you to prove a return with good faith to the sentiments and conduct of a true Frenchman.... There only remains to me for total recompense the satisfaction of having fulfilled my duty as an honest man and a good citizen.... What consoles me is that the time of intrigue and cabal is over. Restored to my legal defense the new King will not impose silence on my legitimate reclamations; I shall obtain, _by force of right_, and _by title of justice_ that which the late King was only willing to accord me as a favor." (Quoted from Lintilhac, _Beaumarchais et ses oeuvres_, p. 62.)
Here as elsewhere, true to the instincts of his nature, he accepted the inevitable, while looking about him to see what remained to be done. Realizing that the service accomplished for Louis XV could have small interest for the virtuous young monarch just ascending the throne, he had no thought for the moment of pressing for his rehabilitation, but preferred to wait until some opportunity offered for making himself useful, and if possible necessary, to the young King.
In November of the same year, he had the satisfaction of seeing the parliament abolished which had degraded him. More than this, his opinion was sought as to the best means to be employed in the re-establishment of the ancient magistracy. Gudin, in his life of Beaumarchais says, "The ministers were divided in opinion as to the best means to employ in recalling the parliaments; they consulted Beaumarchais, and demanded of him a short, elementary memoir, where his principles should be exposed in a way proper to instruct every clear mind.... He obeyed and gave them under the title of--_Idées élementaires sur le rappel du parlement_--a memoir, which contains the most just ideas, the purest principles upon the establishment of that body, and the limitations of its powers...." The Ministers, however, did not dare to follow the simplicity of the principles he laid down. After much discussion the parliaments were recalled, and though the liberties of the people received but slight attention, "Everyone was too flattered by the return of the ancient magistracy, to think of the future."
