Bouncy castles in Spain

Hugh Thomas is widely known as the author of scholarly blockbusters 1,000 pages long. He now excels in what he calls an intermezzo, a learned and lively book of 192 pages, full of good things including splendid pen portraits of worthies: of Choiseul, the easygoing foreign minister of France; of King Charles III of Spain, rising at dawn to spend the day shooting game and going to bed early after a frugal dinner. It concerns the visit to Spain in 1764 of Pierre Augustin Caron, later to be known, the result of assiduous social climbing, as de Beaumarchais.

Beaumarchais’ father was a famous Parisian watchmaker in an age when possession of a fine pocket watch, a technological breakthrough, was for a nobleman as necessary an indication of status as fine clothes and a wig. His father’s clients were rich French and Spanish aristocrats. Beaumarchais used this connection to further his social ambitions.