The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (16 page)

His hesitation was grim evidence of the damage inflicted by the smear campaign Arthur Lee, John Adams, and his other enemies had waged against him. William Franklin’s defection was another reason to avoid mocking or accusatory eyes. How could a man who failed to persuade his only son to be a patriot hope for praise from his countrymen?

As we shall see, Franklin was not the only founder who felt that his fame had been diminished by the vagaries and rivalries of the Revolution. Today most historians are ready to say his diplomatic achievements in France place him just behind George Washington in the pantheon of those who contributed most to winning independence. But this was by no means apparent in 1784. Few Americans understood or appreciated what he had accomplished in his years as ambassador to France.

VIII

“The moment that an American minister gives loose to his passion for women, that moment he is undone; he is instantly at the mercy of the spies of the court, and the tool of the most profligate of the human race.” John Adams struck this lowest of low blows against Franklin on September 3,
1783, the very day that a definitive peace treaty with England was signed in Paris.
¹⁷

More than two hundred years later, has any worthwhile evidence emerged that substantiates this vicious portrait of Franklin’s love life? Scholars who have devoted decades to studying Franklin in France have not found a single diary entry, memoir, or letter from anyone who claimed to have had an affair or even a one-night liaison with him. In a country where love has always been a topic openly and almost continuously discussed, this surely is evidence that nothing even approaching Adams’s innuendo occurred.

This conclusion has not prevented playwrights, novelists, and screenwriters from portraying Franklin as, in the words of one reviewer of a recent TV portrayal, “somewhere between a phony and a dirty old man.”
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Our current view of sex as an irresistible drive to which everyone succumbs has endorsed this mythical Franklin to the point where, in the words of the best historian of this aspect of his career, it has “become part of our national heritage.” This fable deprives Franklin of his “rich and complex humanity.”

The French understood and still understand the variety of love that Franklin was practicing in his old age. They call it
amitié amoureuse
. It is sometimes described as a game; a better term would be art. It is a branch of love that has added spice to the lives of men and women of all ages—and it is by no means confined to France.
¹⁹

Perhaps the best insight into Franklin’s French love life comes from an anecdote told by Thomas Jefferson. Not long after he arrived in France to replace Franklin as ambassador, the Virginian watched while a group of French women showered their favorite American with kisses. With a smile, Jefferson asked Franklin if he could arrange to transfer “these privileges” to him when he took over his post. “You are too young a man,” Franklin said.
²⁰

VIII

Another factor in Franklin’s struggle to decide whether to stay in France or return home was his health. He suffered repeated attacks of gout and had developed painful bladder stones. He wondered whether he could survive a two- or three-month ocean voyage. But he found himself yearn
ing for his Philadelphia family, his daughter, Sally, and her husband and children. “Who will close my eyes if I die in a foreign land?” he asked Madame Brillon, who replied, “I will.”

Finally, Franklin made up his mind. He told Madame Helvetius he wanted to be buried in his own country. One is tempted to wonder whether he also wanted to make amends to Sally Franklin for the harsh words he had written to her. More probable was a desire to see the four grandchildren Sally had borne since he left America. She had sent him a stream of lively letters full of their sayings and antics.
²¹

Temple was also on Franklin’s mind. In the letters he sent to Congress asking for a replacement, he had added numerous pleas for a government appointment for his grandson. The ambassador argued that Temple’s fluency in French and his seven years’ experience as embassy secretary would make the young man an excellent
chargé d’affaires
of an American legation in Europe. Congress ignored him.

Temple had become a handsome young man, with a passion for expensive clothes and an eye for pretty women. When he went to England to visit his father, he took with him a list of the best tailors, bootmakers, and hatters compiled by a French friend. Appended was another list that Temple also undoubtedly put to good use: “And when lewd, go to the following safe girls, who I think are very handsome.”

In Passy, Temple had fathered an illegitimate son by the daughter of a French neighbor. The baby died of smallpox a few months after it was placed in the care of a country family. Instead of sympathizing with the heartbroken mother, Temple blamed her for the child’s death and broke off the affair. This was not the sort of conduct that would persuade Congress’s numerous puritans to approve Temple as a representative of the United States in France or any other European country. Temple’s plight played an important part in Franklin’s decision to go home. If he could not find a place for the young man in Europe, he would do his best to help him in America.

Also in the picture was Sally Franklin Bache’s oldest son, fourteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache. He had spent most of his time in Europe at school in Geneva, Switzerland, where he had often been miserably homesick. Franklin had brought him to Passy when peace arrived and found Benny a startling reproduction of himself. He had his grandfather’s intelligence and wry humor, and he became an ardent and expert swimmer.
Swimming had been Ben’s favorite hobby in his Boston boyhood. Franklin decided to train him as a printer and set him up in the newspaper business in America.

So the day of departure arrived. The queen of France, Marie Antoinette, sent a special litter pulled by snow-white Spanish mules to carry Franklin to the seacoast. His bladder stones made riding in a jolting carriage agony. King Louis XVI sent a miniature of his royal personage, encircled by more than four hundred diamonds. On July 12, 1785, Franklin climbed into his traveling bed while his Passy neighbors gathered to say farewell. “A solemn silence reigned around him, interrupted only by sobs,” Benny Bache wrote in his diary. The leave-taking at Auteuil had been equally mournful. “Many honorable tears were shed on both sides,” wrote the young doctor, Cabanis.

Madame Helvetius found the separation almost unbearable. A day later, she dashed off a frantic letter and sent it in pursuit of her rejected lover. “I picture you in the litter…already lost to me and to those who love you so much…I fear you are in pain…If you are, mon cher ami, come back to us.”
²²

But the decision was irrevocable. In a week Franklin was in Le Havre, waiting for 128 crates of baggage to be loaded onto a ship from London. The ex-ambassador’s thoughts were of Madame Helvetiuis. “I am not sure I will be happy in America,” he wrote. “But I must go back. I feel sometimes that things are badly arranged in this world when I consider that people so well matched to be happy together are forced to separate.

“I will not tell you of my love. For one would say there is nothing remarkable or praiseworthy about it, since everybody loves you. I only hope you will always love me some…”
²³

IX

In Southampton, many of Franklin’s English friends gathered to say goodbye to him. Refreshed by the voyage across the channel, Franklin partied and joked and drank with them for four days at the Star Tavern. Then came a visitor who dampened everyone’s spirits: William Franklin. In the privacy of Ben’s room, father and son faced each other and both saw there would be no forgiveness. There was not even an attempt to achieve it. The only subject they discussed was money.

Ben had decided that Temple might be happiest living on the six-hundred-acre farm that the ex-governor still owned in New Jersey. The state had never confiscated it, probably because William was Benjamin Franklin’s son. There may also have been some twinges of conscience for New Jersey’s role in Elizabeth Downes Franklin’s death. Ben announced he wanted to buy the farm for Temple—and drove the hardest imaginable bargain. He paid less than William had paid in the 1760s. Then he presented William with a bill for fifteen hundred pounds—money he had advanced to him during his governorship. With Parliament still sitting on his claims, William was virtually penniless. He was forced to sign over to Temple valuable lands he had purchased in northern New York. Another parcel of good farmland in New Jersey went to Ben in return for cancelling the remainder of his debt. It was Ben’s bitter way of severing William’s last connections with America. In a letter to his sister Sally a few days later, William wrote: “My fate has thrown me on a different side of the globe.”

The voyage across the Atlantic was smooth and pleasant. The ship glided up the Delaware River to Philadelphia, where Ben’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, came aboard to greet the travelers. Another ship had outrun Franklin’s vessel and informed the city of his imminent arrival. There was a cheering crowd on the dock as they came ashore. Church bells rang and cannon boomed. Joy coursed through Franklin’s aged heart. His enemies’ smears about his love life had not ruined his fame, as he feared. An enormous crowd lined the streets and applauded until Sally Franklin Bache embraced her father in the doorway of his house. The greeting was “far beyond my expectations,” he admitted in a letter a few days later.

Even better news awaited him. Within six weeks his friends had nominated and elected him chief executive of Pennsylvania. “This universal and unbroken confidence of a whole people” was immensely pleasing to him. It was some compensation for the ambassador’s secret wounds.

X

The next three years added fresh achievements to Franklin’s fame. When the new nation’s rickety constitution, The Articles of Confederation, proved inadequate, he joined the call for a constitutional convention. The conclave met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, with George Wash
ington as the presiding officer. Franklin played a key role in working out compromises that persuaded deadlocked delegates to agree on thorny issues such as a strong presidency and equal representation for small states in the senate. In a witty speech at the close of the convention, Franklin admitted there were some things he disliked in the final version of the charter, but he planned to sign the document and urged everyone to do likewise. This spirit of compromise played a crucial role in persuading the states to ratify the Constitution and launch the new government in 1789, with George Washington as the first president.

Alas, this added fame could not prevent the slow decline of Franklin’s body. The bladder stones that tormented him in France became more and more painful. Soon he was confined to his bed most of the time. His daughter, Sally, was constantly at his bedside. Polly Stevenson Hewson had followed him to America with her three children, and was another hovering presence. Temple frequently visited from his farm in New Jersey, concealing from his grandfather his unhappiness with rural life.

After Franklin’s death, Temple sold his farm and returned to England, where he tried to become reconciled with his father. William had married again, and Temple seduced the second wife’s sister, who became pregnant. After the child, a girl, was born, William and Temple quarreled. Temple deserted mother and child and retreated to his favorite city, Paris, for the rest of his troubled life. William raised the abandoned child as his daughter.

In Paris, Temple lived for most of his later years with an Englishwoman whom he married on his deathbed, to give her a claim on his meager estate. More than once, he expressed his detestation of marriage as a source of unique misery. Was he haunted by guilt for deserting Elizabeth Downes Franklin? When Franklin’s sister, Jane, heard about Elizabeth’s death, she had remarked, “Temple will mourn for her much.”

XI

Toward the close of these final years, Franklin said farewell to the women he had loved. To Madame Helvetius, he wrote: “I cannot let this chance [to send a letter] go by, my dear friend, without telling you that I love you always…I think endlessly of the pleasures I enjoyed in the sweet society of Auteil. And often, in my dreams, I dine with you, I sit beside you on one of your thousand sofas, or I walk with you in your beautiful garden.”

Madame Helvetius spoke of her love for him with the same frankness: “I am getting old, my dear, but I don’t mind it, I am coming closer to you, we will meet again all the sooner.”

He did not forget the woman who had first stirred romantic yearning in his soul. Catherine Ray had married William Greene, a member of one of Rhode Island’s most distinguished families. After the Revolution, Greene served as governor of the state for eight years. Catherine had six children, but neither motherhood nor a busy social life prevented her from writing occasional letters to Franklin. She signed them “your friend who loves you dearly.” In one letter she told him, “I impute [a] great part of the happiness of my life to the pleasing lessons you gave me.” Franklin responded by telling her, “Among the felicities of my life I reckon your friendship.”
²⁴

XII

Polly Stevenson Hewson was at Franklin’s bedside when he died. For her he was an incandescent combination of lost father and almost lover, the man she wished she could have married. After his death, she became disenchanted with America. Without Franklin, the country repelled her. She thought women could look forward to only “insignificance or slavery” here. The political brawls of the 1790s convinced her that the nation was only a step removed from anarchy.

Polly told one of her children that “I…repent I ever brought you to this country.” But the three young Hewsons differed emphatically with their mother. They all married Americans. Even the son who went back to England to study medicine returned to Philadelphia, declaring that Dr. Franklin had inspired an “enthusiasm for America” that became the lodestar of his life. Margaret Stevenson would have been pleased by this denouement of her troubled love story.