24
Such difficulties as did arise in negotiating the treaties came less from differences with the French than from differences among the American negotiators. Indeed it was fortunate the United States and France pledged themselves to mutual amity when they did, for little such sentiment existed among the American commissioners, and its absence increasingly undermined Franklin’s effectiveness.
Silas Deane was the occasion of the friction, but Arthur Lee was the cause. Deane’s ambiguous position as commissioner and entrepreneur, combined with his friendship for the equally ambiguous Beaumarchais, convinced Lee that Deane and his fellow profit-seekers had their own interests, rather than those of the United States, closest to heart. “Let me whisper to you that I have reason to suspect there is jobbing both with you and with us,” Lee confided to Sam Adams, who was always happy to spot conspiracy and did not like Deane’s politics besides. “The public concerns and the public money are perhaps sacrificed to private purposes.” Congress should insist on separating the commissioners from the commerce of the war. To his brother, Richard Henry Lee, Arthur Lee was more specific. “If in the arrangement of things I could be continued here, and Mr. D. removed to some other place, it would be pleasing to me, and disconcert effectually their wicked measures.”
Lee’s distrust of Franklin was more diffuse but of longer standing. From their days in London he still resented Franklin’s primacy with the Massachusetts House of Representatives. At that time he had suspected Franklin of collusion with the British; now he thought Franklin too cozy with the French. The fact that Franklin frequently sided with Deane against Lee on the three-man commission convinced Lee that Franklin must be colluding with Deane and probably Beaumarchais.
Lee’s style was not to accuse openly but to insinuate; not to adduce evidence but to accumulate slights. He was constantly complaining of being bypassed by Franklin and Deane; when Deane, during Lee’s absence, moved into an apartment next to Franklin’s, one that Lee himself had coveted, Lee read perfidy into proximity.
Lee’s sniping drove Franklin to distraction. By the spring of 1778, after another complaint by Lee that he was being left out, Franklin could stand it no longer. “It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters,” he wrote.
I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. If I have often received and borne your magisterial snubbings and rebukes without reply, ascribe it to the right causes, my concern for the honour and success of our mission, which would be hurt by our quarrelling; my love of peace; my respect for your good qualities; and my pity for your sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself with its jealousies, suspicions and fancies that others mean you ill, wrong you or fail in respect for you. If you do not cure your self of this temper, it will end in insanity, of which it is the symptomatic forerunner, as I have seen in several instances. God preserve you from so terrible an evil; and for his sake pray suffer me to live in quiet.
As he had a few years earlier with his angry letter to William Strahan, Franklin held this draft till his temper cooled, and ultimately decided against sending it. Fate—and the Congress—had thrown him together with Lee; until fate and Congress changed their minds, he would make the best of the situation.
As it happened, even as Franklin was filing this unsent letter, a new commissioner was making his way from Nantes to Paris. Franklin wished that Lee were the one being replaced; instead it was Deane, the victim of Lee’s slanders and his own carelessness at accounting, which made Lee’s accusations plausible. (Deane could take some ironic solace in the knowledge that when it came to carelessness he was no match for Lee, who on a mission to Prussia allowed his personal papers to be stolen by an agent of the British.)
The new man was John Adams, who had decided that being a commissioner of the United States in France was not beneath him after all. Adams was a Puritan at heart, and as touchy in his own way as Arthur Lee. His opinion of Franklin reflected both aspects of his personality. “That he was a great genius, a great wit, a great humourist and a great satirist, and great politician is certain,” Adams wrote later. “That he was a great philosopher, a great moralist and a great statesman is more questionable.”
Part of Adams’s objection was that Franklin got all the credit. “On Dr. F. the eyes of all Europe are fixed, as the most important character in American affairs in Europe,” he recorded contemporaneously. “Neither L. [Lee] nor myself are looked upon of much consequence.” At first Adams did not particularly question this state of affairs. “The attention of the Court seems most to F., and no wonder. His long and great reputation, to which L.’s and mine are in their infancy, are enough to account for this.”
Yet the more time he spent in France the more it annoyed him. His mood did not improve from constantly having to explain to curious French men and women that he was not the “famous Adams”—Sam Adams. He preserved sufficient sense of humor to remark afterward, “No body went so far in France or England as to say I was the infamous Adams”; but not enough to keep from grumbling, “It was a settled point at Paris and in the English news papers that I was not the famous Adams, and therefore the consequence was settled absolutely and unalterably that I was a man of whom no body had ever heard before, a perfect cypher, a man who did not understand a word of French—awkward in his figure—awkward in his dress—no abilities—a perfect bigot—and fanatic.”
In the summer of 1779 the obscure Adams fell into conversation with a French gentleman, a “Mr. M.,” who remarked that in France foreign ambassadors were free to hold religious services in their own way. “But Mr. Franklin never had any,” the Frenchman said, with evident surprise.
“No, said I, laughing,” Adams recorded in his diary, “because Mr. F. had no—I was going to say, what I did not say, and will not say here. I stopped short and laughed.”
“No, said Mr. M., Mr. F. adores only great nature, which has interested a great many people of both sexes in his favour.”
“Yes, said I, laughing, all the atheists, deists and libertines, as well as the philosophers and ladies are in his train—another Voltaire and Hume.”
“Yes, said Mr. M., he is celebrated as the great philosopher and the great legislator of America.”
“He is, said I, a great philosopher, but as a legislator of America he has done very little. It is universally believed in France, England and all Europe that his electric wand has accomplished all this revolution, but nothing is more groundless. He has done very little. It is believed that he made all the American constitutions, and their confederation. But he made neither. He did not even make the constitution of Pennsylvania, bad as it is.”
Adams could never forgive Franklin for receiving too much credit for events. He held a similar grudge against Washington, and in the last year of Franklin’s life complained to Benjamin Rush, “The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures and war.”
The acid of Adams’s envy continued to corrode his impression of Franklin; all the same, the sketch he drew of Franklin in his autobiography caught a substantial measure of truth, and what it missed revealed much about a man whom chance—and that Congress again—teamed with Franklin during some critical episodes of American history. Adams was unsparing.
The life of Dr. Franklin was a scene of continual dissipation. I could never obtain the favour of his company in a morning before breakfast, which would have been the most convenient time to read over the letters and papers, deliberate on their contents, and decide upon the substance of the answers. It was late when he breakfasted, and as soon as breakfast was over, a crowd of carriages came to his levee, or if you like the term better, his lodgings, with all sorts of people; some philosophers, academicians and economists; some of his small tribe of humble friends in the literary way whom he employed to translate some of his ancient compositions, such as his Bonhomme Richard [Poor Richard] and for what I know his Polly Baker &c.; but by far the greater part were women and children, come to have the honour to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his simplicity, his bald head and scattering straight hairs, among their acquaintances.
These visitors occupied all the time, commonly, till it was time to dress to go to dinner. He was invited to dine abroad every day and never declined unless we had invited company to dine with us. I was always invited with him, till I found it necessary to send apologies, that I might have some time to study the French language and do the business of the mission. Mr. Franklin kept a horn book always in his pocket in which he minuted all his invitations to dinner, and Mr. Lee said it was the only thing in which he was punctual.
Here Adams interjected that he often required days to get Franklin to supply something as simple as a signature to a paper he—Adams—had drafted. Franklin’s social schedule was too full for mere commission business.
He went according to his invitation to his dinner and after that went sometimes to the play, sometimes to the philosophers, but most commonly to visit those ladies who were complaisant enough to depart from the custom of France so far as to procure sets of tea gear, as it is called, and make tea for him…. After tea the evening was spent in hearing the ladies sing and play upon their piano fortes and other instruments of music, and in various games as cards, chess, backgammon &c. &c. Mr. Franklin I believe however never played at any thing but chess or checquers.
In these agreeable and important occupations and amusements the afternoon and evening was spent, and he came home at all hours from nine to twelve o’clock at night. This course of life contributed to his pleasure and I believe to his health and longevity. He was now between seventy and eighty [seventy-two when Adams arrived], and I had so much respect and compassion for his age that I should have been happy to have done all the business, or rather all the drudgery, if I could have been favoured with a few moments in a day to receive his advice concerning the manner in which it ought to be done. But this condescension was not attainable.
If Adams could not enjoy the pleasures of Paris, Franklin certainly could. After a brief sojourn in the Hôtel d’Hambourg, in the rue de l’Université, he moved to the village of Passy, just outside the city, on the way to Versailles. Passy was a comparatively rustic retreat from the crowds, smells, and noises of the capital; a ten-minute carriage ride transported the well-to-do and well connected to the villas and châteaux they had tucked among the wooded hills and vineyards overlooking the Seine. Franklin’s landlord was both well-to-do and well connected—the latter on account of the former. The humble but ambitious Jacques Donatien Leray of Nantes had made a fortune in the India trade, and with his pile had purchased the Loire château of Chaumont, which came with the “de Chaumont” suffix he added to his name. As a nouveau riche, Chaumont worked harder at his responsibilities than the true aristocrats; while they glided smugly toward the doom of the ancien régime, Chaumont improved his properties, winning support of the peasants that would save him from the guillotine. Government officials appreciated his gifts—both those nature bestowed on him and those he bestowed on them—and awarded him assorted honors and appointments. Vergennes found his Anglophobia a useful asset in plotting France’s revenge against the English.
It was probably Vergennes who suggested that Chaumont invite Franklin to stay at the Hôtel de Valentinois, the elegant property Chaumont had recently purchased at Passy. Chaumont gallantly refused to accept rent from the American commissioner, saying they could settle the bill once the United States confirmed its independence. If this arrangement placed Franklin under a certain obligation to one of France’s leading merchants (of whom a Paris paper said, “He would grasp, if he could, the commerce of the thirteen united colonies for himself alone”), Franklin did not mind—even if Arthur Lee and John Adams did. (Adams tut-tutted at “the magnificence of the place, and tried to discover how much it was costing the American people. Failing, he wrote, “It was universally expected to be enormously high.”)
Chaumont did not simply shelter Franklin but promoted him avidly. He arranged for the famous sculptor, Giovanni Battista Nini, whom he had lured from Italy to the Loire, to produce a series of medallions memorializing Franklin’s stay in France. One version showed the subject in a fur cap, with the simple inscription, “B. Franklin, Américain.” Another lacked the cap but contained the motto already popularized by Turgot, “Eripuit Coelum Fulmen Septrumque Tyrannis (“He snatched the lightning from heaven and the scepter from tyrants”). Chaumont persuaded the royal portaitist, Joseph Siffrède Duplessis, to paint Franklin in both oil and pastel.
Chaumont introduced Franklin to his family, and also to the neighbors at Passy—the crowd Adams found so “dissipated.” Madame Chaumont was a Franklin favorite from the start; so too the daughter of the lord of the manor of Passy, a young lady commonly called the Mademoiselle de Passy. Even John Adams noticed her; she was, he said, “one of the most beautiful young ladies I ever saw in France.” Franklin noticed too, as Adams could not resist recording. “Mr. Franklin, who at the age of seventy had neither lost his love of beauty nor his taste for it, called Mademoiselle de Passy his favourite and his flame and his love and his mistress, which flattered the family and did not displease the young lady.” Madame Chaumont observed the interplay between seventy and seventeen, and when the mademoiselle was married off to the Marquis de Tonnerre, she punned, “Alas! All the rods of Mr. Franklin could not prevent the lightning [tonnerre] from falling on Mademoiselle de Passy.”
Franklin’s flirtations survived this fall, not least because they had numerous other objects. Madame Chaumont had a sister, Madame Foucault, who found Franklin charming. Temple Franklin, visiting the Chaumonts in the Loire, wrote his grandfather, “All the family send their love to you, and the beautiful Madame Foucault accompanies hers with an English kiss.” This presumably signified an actual touching of lips, rather than the neck-pecking the French ladies preferred, so as not to ruin their rouge. Franklin replied, “My best respects to Madame de Chaumont and my love to the rest of the family. Thanks to Madame Foucault for her kindness in sending me the kiss. It was grown cold by the way. I hope for a warm one when we meet.” Whether or not Franklin received his warm English kiss on that next occasion, his thoughts of Madame Foucault were kept warm by a friend, Monsieur Brillon, who subsequently wrote from “Paris, across the street from Madame Foucault”: “By Jove, what a splendid sight to be across the street from! We saw her yesterday. She is marvelously plump once again”—evidently she had previously lost weight—“and has just acquired new curves. Very round curves, very white.”
Monsieur Brillon could laugh with Franklin about eyeing Madame Foucault partly because he was unaware that Franklin was eyeing Madame Brillon. And one reason for his unawareness was that he himself was busy chasing, and catching, the governess of his children. John Adams described the ménage.
Madame Brillon was one of the most beautiful women in France, a great mistress of music, as were her two little daughters. The dinner was luxury, as usual in that country. A large cake was brought in, with three flags flying. On one of them, “Pride subdued”; on another, “Haec dies, in qua fit Congressus, exultemus et potemus in ea.”
Mr. Brillon was a rough kind of country squire. His lady all softness, sweetness and politeness. I saw a woman in company, as a companion of Madame Brillon, who dined with her and was considered as one of the family. She was very plain and clumsy. When I afterwards learned both from Dr. Franklin and his grandson, and from many other persons, that this woman was the amie of Mr. Brillon, and that Madame Brillon consoled herself by the amitié of Mr. Le Vailliant [Le Veillard], I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats. But I did not know the world. I soon saw and heard so much of these things in other families and among almost all the great people of the kingdom that I found it was a thing of course.
Franklin, observing the same mores, determined to make himself at home. His pursuit of Madame Brillon commenced with a conversation on theology and the afterlife. She, a devout Catholic, was mildly shocked at his deism. He suggested, perhaps suggestively, that she take charge of his soul. She responded in like vein. “You were kind enough yesterday, my dear brother, to entrust me with your conversion,” she wrote. “I will not be stern, I know my penitent’s weak spot, I shall tolerate it! As long as he loves God, America, and me above all things, I absolve him of all his sins, present, past, and future; and I promise him Paradise where I shall lead him along a path strewn with roses.”
She listed the cardinal sins, and absolved him of the first six. The seventh—lust—was not so easy to dispose of. “All great men are tainted with it; it is called their weakness,” she said. “You have loved, my dear brother; you have been kind and lovable; you have been loved in return! What is so damnable about that? Go on doing great things and loving pretty women—provided that, pretty and lovable though they may be, you never lose sight of my principle: always love God, America, and me above all.”
Franklin thanked his confessor for her leniency, remarking particularly that it covered sins yet to be committed. To her litany of the cardinal sins he riposted the Ten Commandments, although he said he had been taught that there were really twelve. “The first was: Increase and multiply,and replenish the earth. The twelfth is: A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another. It seems to me that they are a little misplaced, and that the last should have been the first.” Yet he had never made any difficulty on that point. “I was always willing to obey them both whenever I had an opportunity.” He wondered whether some bargain might be struck. “Pray tell me, my dear Casuist, whether my keeping religiously these two commandments, though not in the Decalogue, may not be accepted in compensation for my breaking so often one of the ten, I mean that which forbids coveting my neighbor’s wife, and which I confess I break constantly, God forgive me, as often as I see or think of my lovely confessor. And I am afraid I should never be able to repent of the sin, even if I had the full possession of her.” He added another argument. “I will mention the opinion of a certain Father of the Church, which I find myself willing to adopt, though I am not sure it is orthodox. It is this, that the most effectual way to get rid of a certain temptation is, as often as it returns, to comply with and satisfy it.”
Madame Brillon saw she was losing ground in theology. She appealed to natural law. “Let us start from where we are. You are a man, I am a woman, and while we might think along the same lines, we must speak and act differently. Perhaps there is no great harm in a man having desires and yielding to them; a woman may have desires, but she must not yield.” Switching back to the commandments, she reminded Franklin she was married. “My friendship, and a touch of vanity, perhaps, prompt me strongly to pardon you; but I dare not decide the question without consulting that neighbour whose wife you covet; because he is a far better casuist than I am. And then, too, as Poor Richard would say, ‘In weighty matters, two heads are better than one.’”
Though denying herself to Franklin—or at least such of herself as the lover in him desired—Madame Brillon complained when he turned his attentions elsewhere.
The dangerous system you are forever trying to demonstrate, my dear papa—that the friendship a man has for women can be divided ad infinitum—this is something I shall never put up with. My heart, while capable of great love, has chosen few objects on which to bestow it. It has chosen them well; you are at the head of the list. When you scatter your friendship, as you have done, my friendship does not diminish, but from now on I shall try to be somewhat sterner toward your faults.
He refused to repent. “You renounce and exclude arbitrarily every thing corporal from our amour, except such a merely civil embrace now and then as you would permit to a country cousin. What is there then remaining that I may not afford to others without a diminution of what belongs to you?” He compared his affection toward women to her playing on the pianoforte: several people might enjoy it without any being cheated from the others’ partaking.
Switching metaphors, he employed a figure of speech that could have been interpreted doubly, and—given his care with words—was almost certainly intended to be. “My poor little boy, whom you ought methinks to have cherished, instead of being fat and jolly like those in your elegant drawings, is meagre and starved almost to death for want of the substantial nourishment which you his mother inhumanly deny him!”
Adopting yet another analogy, he likened their sparring to war, and proposed a preliminary peace treaty.
Art. 1. There shall be eternal peace, friendship and love between Madame B. and Mr. F.
Art. 2. In order to maintain the same inviolably, Made. B. on her part stipulates and agrees that Mr. F. shall come to her whenever she sends for him.
Art. 3. That he shall stay with her as long as she pleases.
A few more concessions on his part, then:
Art. 8. That when he is with her he will do what he pleases.
Art. 9. And that he will love any other woman as far as he finds her amiable.
Let me know what you think of these preliminaries. To me they seem to express the true meaning and intention of each party more plainly than most treaties. I shall insist pretty strongly on the eighth article, though without much hope of your consent to it. And on the ninth also, though I despair of ever finding another woman that I could love with equal tenderness.
On another day he offered still another analogy. She had said she loved him more than he loved her. He responded:
Judge, by a comparison I am going to make, which of us two loves the most. If I say to a friend: “I need your horses to take a journey, lend them to me,” and he replies: “I should be very glad to oblige you, but I fear that they will be ruined by this journey and cannot bring myself to lend them to anyone,” must I not conclude that the man loves his horses more than he loves me? And if, in the same case, I should willingly risk my horses by lending them to him, is it not clear that I love him more than my horses, and also more than he loves me? You know that I am ready to sacrifice my beautiful, big horses.
Madame Brillon managed to resist this offer of Franklin’s “beautiful, big horses,” but she did grant him permission to drive them elsewhere. He was an Epicurean, she said, while she, a married woman, must remain a Platonist. “Platonism may not be the gayest sect, but it is a convenient defence for the fair sex. Hence, the lady, who finds it congenial, advises the gentleman to fatten up his favorite at other tables than hers, which will always offer too meagre a diet for his greedy appetites.”
Finally Franklin got the message. Perhaps he tired of the game; perhaps he suspected that even in Paris it might appear foolish for a man of seventy-two to be chasing after a woman less than half his age. Certainly the question of age colored a letter he sent her in the autumn of 1778, in which he essentially agreed to her platonic terms. Some weeks before, Franklin had spent a day with her (and others) at Moulin-Joli, the estate of a mutual friend, situated on the Seine a short distance from Paris. The visit occurred at a time when mayflies were hatching. The French called the species Éphémère for the very short life span of the individuals; to Franklin the insects supplied a metaphor for human lives as well.
“You remember, my dear friend,” he wrote Madame Brillon, “that when we lately spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin-Joli, I stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an Ephemere, all whose successive generations we were told were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues; my too great application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress I have made in your charming language.” He went on to explain how the younger insects were speaking three or four at a time, which made it difficult for him to understand. Fortunately the youngsters were not the only ones around. “I turned from them to an old greyheaded one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I have put it down in writing.”
It was, says he, the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin-Joli, could not itself subsist more than 18 hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the apparent motion of the great Luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our Earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction.
I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than 420 minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them, for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above 7 or 8 minutes longer.
What now avails all my toil and labour in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriots, inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! For in politics, what can laws do without morals? Our present race of Ephemeres will in a course of minutes become corrupt like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy, how small our progress! Alas, art is long, and life short!
My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me, and they tell me I have lived long enough, to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an Ephemere who no longer exists? And what will become of all history, in the 18th hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin-Joli, shall come to its end, and be buried in universal ruin?
To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but the reflections of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good Lady Ephemeres, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante.
At his age Franklin may not really have expected to catch the swift Brillante, but he seems to have had higher hopes regarding another woman—who shocked John Adams even more than Madame Brillon did. Madame Helvétius was a wealthy widow who made a great show of lamenting her departed husband. “That she might not be, however, entirely without the society of gentlemen,” Adams recorded, “there were three or four handsome abbes who daily visited the house, and one at least resided there.” Such personal confessors were customary among families of distinction, Adams discovered, although he could not help observing that they seemed to have as much power to commit sins as to pardon them. “Oh Mores! I said to myself. What absurdities, inconsistencies, distractions and horrors would these manners introduce into our republican governments in America. No kind of republican government can ever exist with such national manners as these. Cavete Americani.”
Franklin fit right in, which simply reinforced Adams’s disgust at the libertine life his fellow commissioner was leading. Yet such was Adams’s eventual mastery of the diplomatic arts that after leaving Paris he wrote Franklin asking him to convey his compliments to Madame Helvétius—and Madame Brillon—“ladies for whose characters I have a very great respect.”
Adams’s wife, Abigail, labored under no such constraints. Mrs. Adams supplied a fuller, but no more flattering, picture of Madame Helvétius.
She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air; upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, “Ah, mon Dieu, where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?” You must suppose her speaking all this in French. “How I look!” said she, taking hold of a chemise made of tiffany, which she had on over a blue lute-string, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman; her hair was frizzled; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty gauze half-handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze, than ever my maids wore, was bowed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders. She ran out of the room; when she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other; upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, “Helas! Franklin”; then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief of the conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hand into the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both the gentlemen’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor’s neck.
I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from affectation or stiffness of behavior, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor’s word; but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although sixty years of age, and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.
After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog, who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite, and whom she kissed. This is one of the Doctor’s most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him.
Madame Helvétius, born Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d’Autricourt, belonged to an aristocratic but straitened family of Lorraine; as the tenth of twenty children she lacked the dowry required for a match to a man of equivalent social rank. So she was placed in a convent where, all supposed, she would spend her life in prayer and contemplation. But even that prim prospect failed when the pension that supported her ran out. Luckily an aunt took pity and brought her to Paris, where her genteel poverty found a mate in a man of means but insufficient (in his eyes) station—one of the group of Farmers General that would subsidize the American Revolution. Monsieur Helvétius established his wife at Auteuil, not far from Passy, attracted an assortment of intellectuals and artists, and died. Madame Helvétius, in her late fifties on Franklin’s appearance, currently maintained the salon.
Franklin was first drawn by the company. The economist and finance minister Turgot was a regular; in fact, Turgot had once wooed the lady but failed to pass the means test. Yet still he hovered about, hoping for a second chance now that she had all the money she needed. Diderot and d’Alembert took time from their Encyclopédie; Condorcet dropped by for the Tuesday dinners that commenced at two and lasted long into the night. David Hume occasionally found his way from Edinburgh. The writer Fontenelle, well into his nineties, captured the spirit of the gatherings with the witticism, uttered upon catching the casual hostess in one of her not uncommon states of undress: “Oh, to be seventy again!”
Franklin found intellectual pleasure in “l’académie d’Auteuil”; he sought pleasure of another sort in “Notre Dame d’Auteuil,” as he called Madame Helvétius. “If Notre Dame is pleased to spend her days with Franklin, he would be just as pleased to spend his nights with her,” he wrote. “And since he has already given her so many of his days, although he has so few left to give, she seems very ungrateful in never giving him one of her nights, which keep passing as a pure loss, without making anyone happy except Poupon [her cat].”
With Madame Brillon, whose husband was still very much alive—and a Franklin friend as well—Franklin could hope only for a liaison. With Madame Helvétius he hoped for something more permanent. Or perhaps his proposals were merely foreplay. In one letter he described his disappointment at her canceling an engagement, and the impatience with which he awaited his next meeting with her. “He will be there early, to watch her enter, with that grace and dignity which have charmed him,” he wrote. “He even plans to capture her there and keep her to himself for life.”
In a variation of the “Ephemere” letter he sent Madame Brillon (one wonders if the two women were comparing notes), he assumed the role of spokesman for the flies who lived in his apartment at Passy. The flies sent their respects to Madame Helvétius, who had taken pity on the untidy Doctor Franklin and ordered his apartment swept. This scattered the spiders that had preyed on the flies. “Since that time we have lived happily, and have enjoyed the beneficence of the said bonhomme F. without fear. There remains only one thing for us to wish in order to assure the stability of our fortune; permit us to say it, ‘Bizz, izzz ouizz a ouizzzz izzzzzzz, etc.’ It is to see both of you forming at last but one ménage.”
Madame Helvétius deflected Franklin’s entreaties with the memory of her husband. Franklin concocted another approach.
Saddened by your barbarous resolution, stated so positively last night, to remain single the rest of your life, in honour of your dear husband, I went home, fell on my bed, believing myself dead, and found myself in the Elysian Fields.
I was asked if I had a wish to see some important persons.
“Take me to the philosophers.”
“There are two who reside quite near here, in this garden. They are very good neighbours and very good friends of each other.”
“Who are they?”
“Socrates and H. [Madame Helvétius’s late husband].”
“I have prodigious esteem for both of them, but let me see H. first, for I understand some French and not a word of Greek.”
He received me with great courtesy, having known me by reputation, he said, for some time. He asked me a thousand questions on war, and on the present state of religion, of liberty, and of the government in France.
“But you are not enquiring at all about your dear friend Madame H.; yet she is excessively in love with you, and I was with her but an hour ago.”
“Ah,” said he, “you are bringing back to my mind my former felicity. But one must forget, in order to be happy in this place. For several of the first years, I thought of nobody but her. Well, now I am consoled. I have taken another wife. One as similar to her as I could find. She is not, to be sure, quite as beautiful, but she has just as much common sense, a little more wisdom, and she loves me infinitely. Her continuous endeavour is to please me; and she has gone out right now to search for the best nectar and ambrosia to regale me with tonight. Stay with me and you shall see her.”
“I notice,” said I, “that your former friend is more faithful than you, for several matches have been offered her, and she has turned them all down. I confess that I, for one, loved her madly; but she was harsh towards me and rejected me absolutely for the love of you.”
“I pity you,” said he, “for your misfortunes, for she is truly a good and lovely woman, and most amiable. But Abbé de la R. and Abbé M., aren’t they any more in her home, now and then?”
“Yes, of course; for she has not lost a single of your friends.”
“Now, if you had won over Abbé M. (with coffee and cream) [this was a standing joke], and got him to plead your cause, you might have met with success, for he is as subtle a debater as Duns Scotus or St. Thomas; he puts his arguments in such good order that they become almost irresistible. Or, better still, if you had convinced Abbé de la R. (by the gift of some fine edition of an old classic) [this second priest was a bibliophile] to argue against you, for I have always observed that when he advises something she has a strong tendency to do the exact opposite.”
As he was saying this, the new Madame H. came in with the nectar. I recognized her instantly as Madame F., my former American friend [that is, Deborah Franklin]. I claimed her.
But she said coldly, “I have been a good wife to you for forty-nine years and four months, almost half a century. Be content with that. I have formed a new connection here, that will last for eternity.”
Grieved by this rebuke from my Euridyce, I resolved there and then to abandon those ungrateful shadows, and to come back to this good world, to see the sun again, and you. Here I am! Let us avenge ourselves!
Franklin had no more success with Madame Helvétius than with Madame Brillon. Whether his pursuit of other women in Paris had a different outcome is impossible to know. Certainly he achieved a reputation there as a great lover of women, and considering the determination with which he wooed Madames Brillon and Helvétius, any failure would hardly have been for lack of trying. And considering the mores of French society at the time, he could hardly have wanted for willing partners.
On the other hand, Franklin appreciated the degree to which he was playing a role. John and Abigail Adams might be shocked at how the senior American commissioner was taking French liberties when he should have been promoting American liberty, but he understood that in doing the one he was doing the other. America was asking France to fight a war on America’s behalf (and France’s, to be sure), and even under monarchs wars require popular support. For the French, Franklin embodied America. If the French wanted to attribute the Articles of Confederation and all the state constitutions to him, he was not the one to correct them. (John Adams was more than happy to assume this chore.) If they saw in the septuagenarian gallant a reflection of what they hoped to be at his age—a lover of life, in all its glorious ramifications—that could only redound to America’s benefit.
Franklin’s cause was popular in France but not uniformly so. King Louis had let himself be persuaded to adopt an anti-British policy, but as the descendant of Louis XIV, the Sun King, he had little love for an America whose present revolution challenged the very principle of monarchical legitimacy. Shortly after Franklin and his fellow commissioners exchanged signatures with Vergennes on the two treaties, Louis received the American trio at court. A decade earlier Franklin had been an honored guest at an elegant ceremony hosted by Louis’s grandfather; the present reception displayed no such protocol. Arthur Lee wrote of the current king: “He had his hair undressed, hanging down on his shoulders, no appearance of preparation to receive us, nor any ceremony in doing it.” But another eyewitness—interestingly, a French aristocrat—read the reception differently.
The King, who had been in prayer, stopped and assumed a noble posture. M. de Vergennes introduced M. Franklin, M. Deane and M. Lee, and two other Americans. The King spoke first, with more care and graciousness than I have ever heard him speak. He said: “Firmly assure Congress of my friendship. I hope this will be for the good of the two nations.” M. Franklin, very nobly, thanked him in the name of America, and said: “Your Majesty may count on the gratitude of Congress and its faithful observance of the pledges it now takes.”
Gracious or not, the king made little subsequent effort to hide his distaste for the republicans from across the water. According to a well-placed source, he presented one of Franklin’s female admirers—a countess who, Louis thought, should have known better—a chamber pot with Franklin’s face gazing up from the bottom.
Louis may have understood—or only sensed—the full threat Franklin represented to the ancien régime. Others were at least as prescient. “Franklin wore a russet velvet coat, white stockings, his hair hanging loose, his spectacles on his nose, and a white hat under his arm,” Madame du Deffand wrote of the royal reception of the commissioners. “Is that white hat a symbol of liberty?” Apparently it was, and within weeks it began to have an effect. France’s recognition of the American confederation caused Britain to withdraw its ambassador, who besides representing King George was an old friend of Madame du Deffand. “I most sincerely curse that American negotiator, le Seigneur Franklin,” she wrote.
The suspicions Franklin aroused were only increased by his association with one of the most prominent subversive organizations in the French capital. The Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters had been the brainchild of the late husband of Madame Helvétius. Named for the muses of the arts and sciences, the lodge deliberately embraced philosophers of all disciplines; among its members were some of the freest-thinkers in the realm. This, and the secrecy the lodge shared with all Masonic affiliates, rendered it suspect in the eyes of the keepers of the status quo. Franklin was aware of these suspicions, and as senior American commissioner he took them into consideration. But as a longtime Mason, a lover of all nine sisters, and an incorrigible free-thinker, he could not decline membership. He was inducted during the spring of 1778 as the 106th member.
He came in the door just behind the most famous French subversive of the age. Voltaire had been skewering orthodoxies of various sorts for decades, making him persona non grata with the monarchs of France and Prussia, to name two in particular. At Franklin’s arrival in 1776 Voltaire had been exiled from Paris for a quarter century. Yet as he felt the life flowing out of his bony frame—whether retarded or accelerated by the fifty cups of coffee he was said to drink each day, no one knew—he insisted on returning to the capital.
Franklin met him shortly thereafter. The rendezvous provoked considerable comment, not least among persons who disliked both the patriarch of the Enlightenment and the republican from America. Franklin brought along Benny Bache and, according to most accounts, asked Voltaire’s blessing on the boy. In Voltaire’s version, “When I gave the benediction to the grandson of the illustrious and wise Franklin, the man of all America most to be respected, I pronounced only the words: God and Liberty. All who were present shed tears of tenderness.” Another version had him calling Benny “my child” and adding, after “God and Liberty,” that “this is the only appropriate benediction for the grandson of M. Franklin.” Yet an unfriendly Paris paper reported differently, asserting that Franklin, “by a base, indecent and puerile adulation, and, according to certain fanatics, by a derisive impiety, asked Voltaire to give his benediction to the child. The philosopher, playing out the scene no less thoroughly than the doctor, got up, placed his hands on the head of the little innocent, and pronounced with emphasis these three words, ‘God, Liberty, and Tolerance.’”
Another meeting between Franklin and Voltaire was more public and, indeed, more staged. In late April the two attended a session of the French Academy of Sciences. “There presently arose a general cry that Monsieur Voltaire and Monsieur Franklin should be introduced to each other,” John Adams wrote, in his typically jaundiced voice.
This was done and they bowed and spoke to each other. This was no satisfaction. There must be something more. Neither of our Philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected. They however took each other by the hand. But this was not enough. The clamour continued, until the explanation came out, “Il faut s’embrasser, a la francoise.” The two aged actors upon this great theater of philosophy and frivolity then embraced each other by hugging one another in their arms and kissing each other’s cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the cry immediately spread through the whole kingdom and I suppose over all Europe: Qu’il etoit charmant. Oh! il etoit enchantant, de voir Solon et Sophocle embrassans. How charming it was! Oh, it was enchanting to see Solon and Sophocles embracing!
It must indeed have been a sight—the full-fleshed Franklin, a veritable oak of robustness next to the frail, pale, obviously dying Voltaire. In fact Voltaire expired within the month, and created one last uproar in passing. A career anticleric, he waved the priests away from his deathbed, which raised difficulties as to where he should be buried and how remembered. He barely beat a bishop’s interdict into the ground, and when the Academy feted his memory, the prelates were outraged.
The Lodge of the Nine Sisters added to the outrage when it conducted a memorial ceremony. Franklin attended, either from respect for the deceased or because he did not recognize how much it would annoy Louis. (Several of his French friends, including Diderot, d’Alembert, and Condorcet, thought better and stayed away.) The service took place in a hall dressed in black, lit by candles. Admirers delivered one eulogy after another. Lest the meaning of the life be lost, the poet Roucher read parts of a forthcoming work that slashed the clergy in true Voltairean fashion. The philosopher’s niece—allowed in under a special waiving of the rules against women—presented the lodge a bust of her uncle by Houdon. A large painting of the apotheosis of Voltaire was unveiled. Franklin had just received a Masonic crown; he laid it at the foot of the ascending philosopher. The company adjourned to a banquet room, where Roucher then read a verse honoring Franklin, which elicited an ovation for the sage who yet lived.
The entire affair evoked the wrath of the Church and of the government. The Nine Sisters Lodge nearly lost its Masonic charter, and its current head, or Vénérable, received a harsh reprimand. The controversy subsided only when Franklin, by maneuverings revealed solely to Sisters, was selected Vénérable in May 1779. His prestige helped shield the lodge, as did his understanding that an American envoy ought not make himself (any more) odious to his host monarch. That he counted the chief of Paris police, the man charged with enforcing any edicts against the lodge, as a personal friend did not hurt either.
From the mysterious first appearance of Silence Dogood in the New England Courant when he was fifteen, Franklin had never gone long without seeing his thoughts in print. The foreignness of the French language initially deterred him from continuing the custom in Paris, as did the constraints of his position as American commissioner. Yet if the presses of others were problematic, he would have his own. Sometime during his first year at Passy he set up a printing press. Soon followed a foundry, where he cast his own type. He hired help, and before long was back in his old business.
But this business was really a hobby, and although the press produced the official forms the commission required, it also printed light literature composed by the printmaster. Most noteworthy of this genre were small pieces he called “bagatelles.” The Ephemera,his reflection to Madame Brillon on the swift passage of time was one; likewise the letters to Madame Helvétius on the flies that inhabited his house, and on the Elysian Fields. To Madame Brillon he addressed the story of his childhood whistle and how he had paid too much for it.
Madame Brillon was also the inspiration for perhaps the most famous of the bagatelles, Dialogue Between the Gout and M. Franklin. She had been chiding him for the excesses beneath his chronic condition; he initially retorted that not excess but deficiency was to blame. “When I was a young man and enjoyed more of the favours of the fair sex than I do at present, I had no gout. Hence, if the ladies of Passy had shown more of that Christian charity that I have so often recommended to you in vain, I should not be suffering from the gout right now.” He expanded this argument in a bagetelle composed amid an excruciating recurrence of his malady that kept him awake for nights and days at a time.
The dialogue commences with Franklin moaning on his bed. “My God! What have I done to deserve these cruel sufferings?” he wails.
The Gout, cast as a disembodied feminine voice, replies, “You have eaten too much, drunk too much, and too much indulged your legs in their indolence.”
“Who is it that speaks to me?” the feverish Franklin asks in wonder.
“It is I myself, the Gout.”
“My enemy in person!”
“Not your enemy.”
Franklin insists that it must be his enemy; the Gout explains that if any enemy is involved in the matter, it is Franklin himself.
Franklin defends himself, saying that people know him as neither glutton nor tippler.
“People judge as they please,” the Gout replies. “But I know well that what is not too much to drink nor too much to eat for a man who takes a reasonable amount of exercise, is too much for a man who takes scarcely any.”
“I take—ow! ow!—as much exercise—ow!—as I can, Madame Gout. You are acquainted with my sedentary existence, and it seems to me that accordingly you could, Madame Gout, spare me a little, considering that it is not entirely my fault.”
“Not at all. Your rhetoric and your politeness are equally lost. Your excuse is worth nothing. If your position is sedentary, your amusements, your recreation, should be active. You should go promenading on foot or on horseback; or if you are pressed for time, play billiards.” The Gout upbraids Franklin in terms that sound surprisingly modern even two centuries later—yet at the same time characteristically Franklin.
Let us examine your course of life. While the mornings are long, and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast: four dishes of tea with cream, and one or two buttered toasts with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested.
Immediately afterwards you sit down to write at your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise….
What is your practice after dinner? Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have dined would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours! This is your perpetual recreation, which is the least eligible of any for a sedentary man.
One school of medical thought in Franklin’s day contended that attacks of gout signified the body’s efforts to cleanse itself of ill humors built up through want of exercise and other unhealthy habits. The Gout subscribed to this view, and reprimanded Franklin for being not merely foolish but ungrateful. If not for the gout, Franklin would have been visited by palsy, dropsy, or apoplexy—“one or other of which would have done for you long ago.” She stabs him again.
“Pray, Madame, a truce with your corrections!” he cries in distress.
“No, sir, no—I will not abate a particle of what is so much for your good.”
He pleads that he does take exercise—in his carriage.
“That, of all imaginable exercises, is the most slight and insignificant.” Showing herself remarkably well versed in his theories, she throws back at him his argument about the efficiency of exercise being linked to the degree of heat produced. Why, even his female companions get more exercise than he. “Behold your fair friend at Auteuil, a lady who received from bounteous nature more really useful science than half a dozen such pretenders to philosophy as you have been able to extract from all your books.” (This was a reminder to Madame Brillon that she had a rival.) “When she honours you with a visit, it is on foot. She walks all hours of the day, and leaves indolence and its concomitant maladies to be endured by her horses. In this you see at once the preservative of her health and personal charms. But when you go to Auteuil you must have your carriage, though it is no farther from Passy to Auteuil than from Auteuil to Passy.”
Franklin complains that this reasoning grows tiresome to one so afflicted as he.
“I stand corrected,” says the Gout. “I will be silent and continue my office. Take that! And that!”
He writhes and moans again.
She scolds him for ignoring the repeated invitations of “the charming lady” of the Brillon household to walk at evening through the gardens, up the steps and down. “You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in your conduct.” She stings him once more.
What should I do with my carriage, if not ride in it?, he asks, flinching.
“Burn it if you choose.” Or better yet, send it to transport the poor old peasants of Passy home from the vineyards at night. “This is an act that will be good for your soul; and at the same time, after your visit to the Brillons, if you return on foot, that will be good for your body.” Another jab.
“Oh! Oh! For Heaven’s sake, leave me! And I promise faithfully never more to play at chess, but to take exercise daily, and live temperately.”
“I know you too well. You promise fair, but after a few months of good health, you will return to your old habits. Your fine promises will be forgotten like the forms of the last year’s clouds. Let us then finish the account, and I will go. But I leave you with an assurance of visiting you again at a proper time and place, for my object is your good, and you are sensible now that I am your real friend.”
Franklin’s literary reputation had long preceded him to Paris—although in some cases the reality outreached the reputation. One such instance led to the discovery of the true identity of Polly Baker. Franklin and Silas Deane one day were remarking the numerous mistakes in Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, when the author himself happened in the door. Franklin was diplomatic enough to drop the subject, but Deane was not. “The Doctor and myself, Abbé, were just speaking of the errors of fact into which you have been led in your history.”
“Oh, no, sir,” the abbé replied. “That is impossible. I took the greatest care not to insert a single fact for which I had not the most unquestionable authority.”
“Why, there is the story of Polly Baker,” Deane said, “and the eloquent apology you have put into her mouth when brought before a court of Massachusetts to suffer punishment under a law which you cite, for having had a bastard. I know there never was such a law in Massachusetts.”
“Be assured you are mistaken, and that that is a true story. I do not immediately recollect indeed the particular information on which I quote it, but I am certain that I had for it unquestionable authority.”
Franklin’s diplomatic discretion failed him at this point. Laughing aloud, he said, “I will tell you, Abbé, the origin of that story. When I was a printer and editor of a newspaper, we were sometimes slack of news, and to amuse our customers I used to fill up our vacant columns with anecdotes and fables, and fancies of my own. This of Polly Baker is a story of my making on one of these occasions.”
The abbé listened with horror quickly hidden by aplomb. “Oh, very well, Doctor,” he declared. “I had rather relate your stories than other men’s truths.”
Raynal himself refuted his own certitude in another instance. Conventional philosophical wisdom in Europe held that the races of men and animals degenerated in the New World, becoming smaller and less fit. The abbé was convinced of this, and at a dinner party hosted by Franklin at Passy held forth at length on the subject. Franklin had designed his guest list to include as many Americans as French; while Raynal ran on, Franklin noticed something interesting about the seating arrangement and comparative statures of the two nationalities represented.
“Come, Monsieur l’Abbé,” he said, “let us try this question by the fact before us. We are here one half Americans and one half French, and it happens that the Americans have placed themselves on one side of the table, and our French friends are on the other. Let both parties rise, and we will see which side nature has degenerated.”
Thomas Jefferson, who heard this story from Franklin, and who knew several of the guests (and who, moreover, was as determined to refute this alleged New World degeneracy as Raynal was to confirm it), explained the rest. “It happened that his American guests were Carmichael, Harmer, Humphreys, and others of the finest stature and form; while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbé himself particularly was a mere shrimp.”
To the initial surprise of his French guests, Franklin typically deferred to others in conversation. This reticence reflected both his temperament and his incomplete mastery of the French language, acquired initially from books and self-study. “If you Frenchmen would only talk no more than four at a time, I might understand you, and would not come out of an interesting party without knowing what they were talking about,” he explained to a friend. Not surprisingly, the relative rarity of his spoken mots made them the more precious.
One that was long remembered came from a chess match between Franklin and the elderly Duchess of Bourbon. Inexpert, she illegally placed her king in check. Franklin, in the spirit of rule-breaking, captured it. She, knowing enough to realize that this was not permitted, declared that in France “we do not take kings.”
With a sly smile he responded, “We do in America.”