The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (110 page)

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.