A Benjamin Franklin Reader (36 page)

Franklin’s other great female friend in Paris was Madame Helvétius, the widow of a noted French philosophe. She was a lively, outgoing and free-spirited bohemian who enjoyed projecting an earthy aura even at age 60. Franklin did more than flirt with her; by September of 1779, he was ardently proposing marriage in a way that was more than half-serious but retained enough ironic detachment to preserve their dignities. She led him on lightly. “I hoped that after putting such pretty things on paper,” she scrawled, “you would come and tell me some.” But she declined his marriage proposal, citing her loyalty to her late husband. That prompted Franklin to write her one of his most amusing bagatelles, Elysian Fields, in which he recounted a dream about going to heaven and discussing the matter with her late husband and his late wife, who had themselves married. Praising Madame Helvétius’s looks over those of his departed wife, he suggested they take revenge.

T
O
M
ADAME
H
ELVÉTIUS
, D
ECEMBER
7, 1778

The Elysian Fields

Vexed by your barbarous resolution, announced so positively last evening, to remain single all your life in respect to your dear husband, I went home, fell on my bed, and, believing myself dead, found myself in the Elysian Fields.

I was asked if I desired to see anybody in particular. “Lead me to the home of the philosophers.”

“There are two who live nearby in the garden: they are very good neighbors, and close friends of each other.”

“Who are they?”

“Socrates and H———.”

“I esteem them both prodigiously; but let me see first H———, because I understand a little French, but not one word of Greek.”

He received me with great courtesy, having known me for some time, he said, by the reputation I had there. He asked me a thousand things about the war, and about the present state of religion, liberty, and the government in France.

“You ask nothing then of your dear friend Madame H———; nevertheless she still loves you excessively and I was at her place but an hour ago.”

“Ah!” said he, “you make me remember my former felicity. But it is necessary to forget it in order to be happy here. During several of the early years, I thought only of her. Finally I am consoled. I have taken another wife. The most like her that I could find. She is not, it is true, so completely beautiful, but she has as much good sense, a little more of Spirit, and she loves me infinitely. Her continual study is to please me; and she has actually gone to hunt the best Nectar and the best Ambrosia in order to regale me this evening; remain with me and you will see her.”

“I perceive,” I said, “that your old friend is more faithful than you: for several good offers have been made her, all of which she has refused. I confess to you that I myself have loved her to the point of distraction; but she was hard-hearted to my regard, and has absolutely rejected me for love of you.”

“I pity you,” he said, “for your bad fortune; for truly she is a good and beautiful woman and very loveable. But the Abbé de la R———, and the Abbé M———, are they not still sometimes at her home?”

“Yes, assuredly, for she has not lost a single one of your friends.”

“If you had won over the Abbé M———(with coffee and cream) to speak for you, perhaps you would have succeeded; for he is a subtle logician like Duns Scotus or St. Thomas; he places his arguments in such good order that they become nearly irresistible. Also, if the Abbé de la R———had been bribed (by some beautiful edition of an old classic) to speak against you, that would have been better: for I have always observed, that when he advises something, she has a very strong penchant to do the reverse.”

At these words the new Madame H———entered with the Nectar: at which instant I recognized her to be Madame F———, my old American friend. I reclaimed to her. But she told me coldly, “I have been your good wife forty-nine years and four months, nearly a half century; be content with that. Here I have formed a new connection, which will endure to eternity.”

Offended by this refusal of my Eurydice, I suddenly decided to leave these ungrateful spirits, to return to the good earth, to see again the sunshine and you. Here I am! Let us revenge ourselves.

One of Franklin’s duties in Paris was overseeing John Paul Jones, the brave and erratic sea commander who was conducting naval raids against Britain from a base in France. On one of these raids, Jones decided to kidnap a Scottish earl named Lord Selkirk, but the man was away, so the crew instead forced his wife to hand over the family silver. In a fit of noble guilt, Jones decided to buy the booty from his crew so that he could return it to the family. Franklin tried to help Jones resolve the problem, but it led to such a convoluted exchange of letters with the outraged earl that the silver was not returned until after the end of the war.

Franklin was able to help secure for Jones, in February of 1779, an old 40-gun man-of-war named the
Duras,
which Jones rechristened the
Bonhomme Richard
in his patron’s honor. Jones was so thrilled that he paid a visit to Franklin’s home in the Paris suburb of Passy to thank Franklin and his landlord Chaumont, who had helped supply Jones with uniforms and funds. There was perhaps another reason for the visit: Jones may have been having an illicit affair with Madame de Chaumont.

During this stay, an incident occurred that resembled a French farce. A wizened old woman, who was the wife of the Chaumonts’ gardener, alleged that Jones tried to rape her. Franklin made a passing allusion to the alleged incident in a postscript to a letter, and Jones mistakenly assumed that “the mystery you so delicately mention” referred to the controversy that surrounded his killing of a rebellious crewmember years earlier. So he provided a long and anguished account of that old travail.

Franklin, bemused by Jones’s detailed explanation about impaling the mutineer, replied that he had never heard that story and informed Jones that the “mystery” he alluded to referred, instead, to an allegation made by the gardener’s wife that Jones had “attempted to ravish her” in the bushes of the estate. But Jones should not worry, Franklin said, because everyone at Passy found the tale to be the subject of great merriment. Madame Chaumont, whose own familiarity with Jones’s sexual appetites did not prevent her from a great display of French insouciance, declared that “it gave a high idea of the strength of appetite and courage of the Americans.”

They all ended up concluding, Franklin assured Jones, that it must have been a case of mistaken identity. As part of the Mardi Gras festivities, a chamber girl had apparently dressed up in one of his uniforms and, so they surmised, attacked the gardener’s wife as a prank. It seems quite implausible that the gardener’s wife, even in the dimness of early evening, could have been so easily fooled, but the explanation was satisfactory enough that the event was not mentioned in subsequent letters.

T
O
J
OHN
P
AUL
J
ONES
, M
ARCH
14, 1779

Dear Sir,

I yesterday received your favor of the 6th. I did not understand from M. Alexander that Lord Selkirk had any particular objection to receiving the plate from you. It was general, that though he might not refuse it if offered him by a public body, as the Congress, he could not accept it from any private person whatever. I know nothing of m. Alexander’s having any enmity to you, nor can I imagine any reason for it. But on the whole it seems to me not worth your while to give yourself any farther trouble about Lord Selkirk. You have now the disposal of what belongs to the Congress; and may give it with your own share if you think fit, in little encouragements to your men on particular occasions…

I have looked over the copy of my letter to you of February 24, not being able to imagine what part of it could give you the idea that I hinted at an affair I never knew. Not finding any thing in the letter, I suppose it must have been the postscript of which I have no copy; and which I know now that you could not understand, though I did not when I wrote it. The story I alluded to is this: l’abbé Rochon had just been telling me & Madame Chaumont that the old gardener & his wife had complained to the curate, of your having attacked her in the garden about 7 o’clock the evening before your departure; and attempted to ravish her, relating all the circumstances, some of which are not fit for me to write. The serious part of it was that three of her sons were determined to kill you, if you had not gone off; the rest occasioned some laughing: for the old woman being one of the grossest, coarsest, dirtiest & ugliest that one may find in a thousand, Madame Chaumont said it gave a high idea of the strength of appetite & courage of the Americans. A day or two after, I learnt that it was the femme de chambre of Mademoiselle Chaumont who had disguised herself in a suit I think of your clothes, to divert herself under that masquerade, as is customary the last evening of carnival: and that meeting the old woman in the garden, she took it into her head to try her chastity, which it seems was found proof.

As to the unhappy affair of which you give me an acct., there is no doubt but the facts being as you state them, the person must have been acquitted if he had been tried, it being merely
se defendendo.

I wish you all the imaginable success in your present undertaking; being ever with sincere esteem &c.

B. Franklin

Among Franklin’s cards was his fame, and he was among a long line of statesmen, from Richelieu to Mettemich to Kissinger, to realize that with celebrity came cachet, and with that came influence. His lightning theories had been proved in France in 1752, his collected works published there in 1773, and a new edition of Poor Richard’s
The Way to Wealth,
entitled
La Science du Bonhomme Richard,
was published soon after his arrival.

His fame was so great that, all of fashionable Paris seemed to desire some display of his benign countenance. Medallions were struck in various sizes, engravings and portraits were hung in homes, and his likeness graced snuff boxes and signet rings. “The numbers sold are incredible,” he wrote his daughter Sarah “Sally” Franklin Bache. The fad went so far as to mildly annoy, though still amuse, the King himself. He gave a female friend, who had bored him with her praise of Franklin, a Sevres porcelain chamber pot with his cameo embossed inside.

In his letter to Sally, Franklin praises her industriousness, but he lapses into stern outrage at her request that she send him some fashionable French finery and instead offers an amusing solution to creating feathers and lace on her own. He also talks of his grandchildren. Temple, the illegitimate son of his own illegitimate son William, was serving as his secretary in Paris. But his enemies in Congress were trying to have Temple recalled, partly because his father had remained a loyalist. Sally’s son Benjamin Bache was also in Paris, and Franklin was overseeing his education. Her other son, Will, was a toddler back in Philadelphia, and she had written an account of how he was offering his evening prayers to Hercules.

T
O
S
ARAH
“S
ALLY
” F
RANKLIN
B
ACHE
, P
ASSY
, J
UNE
3, 1779

Dear Sally,

I have before me your letters of Oct. 22, and Jan. 17th: they are the only ones I received from you in the course of eighteen months. If you knew how happy your letters make me, and considered how many miscarry, I think you would write oftener…

The clay medallion of me you say you gave to Mr. Hopkinson was the first of the kind made in France. A variety of others have been made since of different sizes; some to be set in lids of snuff boxes, and some so small as to be worn in rings; and the numbers sold are incredible. These, with the pictures, busts, and prints, (of which copies upon copies are spread every where) have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon, so that he durst not do any thing that would oblige him to run away, as his phiz would discover him wherever he should venture to show it. It is said by learned etymologists that the name
Doll,
for the images children play with, is derived from the word IDOL; from the number of
dolls
now made of him, he may be truly said,
in that sense,
to be
i-dollized
in this country.

I think you did right to stay out of town till the summer was over for the sake of your child’s health. I hope you will get out again this summer during the hot months; for I begin to love the dear little creature from your description of her.

I was charmed with the account you give me of your industry, the tablecloths of your own spinning, &c. but the latter part of the paragraph, that you had sent for linen from France because weaving and flax were grown dear; alas, that dissolved the charm; and your sending for long black pins, and lace, and
feathers!
disgusted me as much as if you had put salt into my strawberries. The spinning, I see, is laid aside, and you are to be dressed for the ball! you seem not to know, my dear daughter, that of all the dear things in this world, idleness is the dearest, except mischief.

The project you mention of removing
Temple
from me was an unkind one; to deprive an old man sent to serve his country in a foreign one, of the comfort of a child to attend him, to assist him in health and take care of him in sickness, would be cruel, if it was practicable. In this case it could not be done; for as the pretended suspicions of him are groundless, and his behavior in every respect unexceptionable; I should not part with the child, but with the employment. But I am confident that whatever may be proposed by weak or malicious people, the Congress is too wise and too good to think of treating me in that manner.

Ben,
if I should live long enough to want it, is like to be another comfort to me: as I intend him for a Presbyterian as well as a Republican, I have sent him to finish his education at Geneva. He is much grown, in very good health, draws a little, as you will see by the enclosed, learns Latin, writing, arithmetic and dancing, and speaks French better than English. He made a translation of your last letter to him, so that some of your works may now appear in a foreign language. He has not been long from me. I send the accounts I have of him, and I shall put him in mind of writing to you. I cannot propose to you to part with your own dear
Will:
I must one of these days go back to see him; happy to be once more all together! But futurities are uncertain. Teach him however in the mean time to direct his worship more properly, for the deity of
Hercules
is now quite out of fashion.

The present you mention as sent by me, was rather that of a merchant at Bourdeaux, for he would never give me any account of it, and neither Temple nor I know any thing of the particulars.

When I began to read your account of the high prices of goods,
a pair of gloves seven dollars, a yard of common gause twenty-four dollars, and that it now required a fortune to maintain a family in a very plain way,
I expected you would conclude with telling me, that every body as well as yourself was grown frugal and industrious; and I could scarce believe my eyes in reading forward, that
there never was so much dressing and pleasure going on;
and that you yourself wanted
black pins and feathers from France,
to appear, I suppose, in the mode! This leads me to imagine that perhaps, it is not so much that the goods are grown dear, as that the money is grown cheap, as every thing else will do when excessively plenty; and that people are still as easy nearly in their circumstances as when a pair of gloves might be had for half a crown. The war indeed may in some degree raise the prices of goods, and the high taxes which are necessary to support the war may make our frugality necessary; and as I am always preaching that doctrine, I cannot in conscience or in decency encourage the contrary, by my example, in furnishing my children with foolish modes and luxuries. I therefore send all the articles you desire that are useful and necessary, and omit the rest; for as you say you should
have great pride in wearing any thing I send, and showing it as your father’s taste;
I must avoid giving you an opportunity of doing that with either lace or feathers. If you wear your cambric ruffles as I do, and take care not to mend the holes, they will come in time to be lace; and feathers, my dear girl, may be had in America from every cocks tail.

If you happen again to see General Washington, assure him of my very great and sincere respect, and tell him that all the old Generals here amuse themselves in studying the accounts of his operations, and approve highly of his conduct.

Present my affectionate regards to all friends that enquire after me, particularly Mr. Duffield and family, and write oftener, my dear child, to Your loving father,

B. Franklin