"He inherited something from the second who was a very charming woman, whom he adored. She left him a son, whom he lost soon after his wife's death. I do not know why no one ever accused him of poisoning the child, that crime was necessary to complete the other. It is evident, even if he had not loved his wife, that in keeping her alive he had everything to gain, as her fortune was in the main hers only during life.
"These are public facts of which I am sure, but hatred does not look for the truth, and it knows that it will not be required of it by the thoughtless. Where are we, great Heavens, if a man cannot have the misfortune to inherit from his wife without having poisoned her?..."
When Voltaire, who had heard the calumny, read the memoirs of Beaumarchais, he said, "This man is not a poisoner, he is too gay."
La Harpe adds, "Voltaire could not know as I do, that he was also too good, too sensible, too open, too benevolent to commit any bad act, although he knew very well how to write very amusing and very malicious things against those who blackened him."
Compelled to defend himself and to prove himself innocent of a crime so horrible that its name could scarcely be forced to pass his lips, he replies with a gentleness, but a power of eloquence which confounds his adversaries. "Cowardly enemies, have you then no resource but base insult? Calumny machinated in secret and struck out in the darkness? Show yourselves then, but once, if for nothing more than to tell me to my face that it is out of place for any man to defend himself. But all honest people know very well that your fury has placed me in an absolutely privileged class. They will excuse me for taking this occasion to confound you, where forced to defend a moment of my life I am about to spread a luminous daylight over the rest. Dare then to contradict me. Here is my life in a few words.
"For the last fifteen years I honor myself with being the father and the sole support of a numerous family, and far from being offended at this avowal which is torn from me, my relatives take pleasure in publishing that I have always shared my modest fortune with them without ostentation and without reproach.
"O you who calumniate me without knowing me, come and hear the concert of benedictions which fall upon me from a crowd of good hearts and you will go away undeceived.