We have formed already the acquaintance of Julie whom Beaumarchais especially loved and who shared with him to the end all the vicissitudes of his career.
Julie is spoken of as charming, witty, and vivacious; a good musician, speaking Italian and Spanish with fluency, improvising songs and composing verses, "more remarkable by their gaiety than by their poetic value." Later in life she appeared before the public in a serious little volume entitled _Reflections on Life, or Moral Considerations on the Value of Existence_, but at the present time--1763--the tone of her letters distinctly betokens one not yet disenchanted with the gay world of which her brother formed the center.
The youngest sister of all, Jeanne Marguerite Caron, seems to have received a more brilliant education than the rest. M. de Loménie says of her that, "She was a good musician, playing very well on the harp, that she had a charming voice and more than that she was very pretty. She loved to compose verses like her sister Julie, and without being equally intelligent she possessed the same vivid, gay _esprit_ which distinguished the family. In her infancy and girlhood she was called 'Tonton.' When her brother, now a courtier, had associated Julie with the graceful name of Beaumarchais, he found an even more aristocratic name for his youngest sister, he called her Mademoiselle de Boisgarnier, and it was under this name that Mlle. Tonton appeared with success in several salons.
"In her correspondence as a girl, Mlle. Boisgarnier appears to us as a small person, very elegant, slightly coquettish, slightly indolent, somewhat sarcastic, but still very attractive. The whole tone of her letters is that of the _petite bourgeoise_, of quality, very proud to have for a brother a _Secrétaire du roi, Lieutenant-général des chasses_, and in relation to whom she says in one of her letters, '_Comment se gouverne la petite société? Le frère charmant en fait-il toujours les délices?_'"
An older sister, Françoise, already had married a celebrated watchmaker of Paris, named Lépine, with whom the family tie was never broken. Her home served as a place of rendezvous for the scattered members of the family during those cruel years, of which we shall have to speak, when the property of Beaumarchais was seized and he himself degraded from his rights as citizen.