Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  There was one aspect of his popularity which Franklin freely admitted to his sister Jane he hoped to preserve as long as he stayed in France, “the regard . . . of the French ladies, for their society and conversation when I have time to enjoy it, is extreamly agreeable.”

  Franklin had long since perceived one of the fundamental facts of French society, that women played an extremely important role in forming and creating public opinion, and even in influencing political decisions. They promptly became one of the prime targets of his publicity campaign. Simultaneously, he found himself delighted by their wit and intelligence, and their enormous enthusiasm for him. This reciprocal flow of electricity created the historical phenomenon of a man of seventy becoming something close to a matinee idol. To puritanical Americans such as John Adams, always ready to suspect the worst, this automatically made Franklin a lecher. But it is hard to believe that a man of seventy, even a Franklin, could be orgiastic on the scale that Adams intimated. Nor does it seem likely, if he was in continual pursuit of sexual pleasure, that he could have discussed it so offhandedly with his deeply religious sister, among others.

  To a Boston niece Franklin wrote cheerfully, “You mention the kindness of the French ladies to me. I must explain that matter. This is the civilest nation upon earth. Your first acquaintances endeavour to find out what you like, and they tell others. If ‘tis understood that you like mutton, dine where you will you find mutton. Somebody, it seems, gave it out that I lov’d ladies; and then everybody presented me their ladies (or the ladies presented themselves) to be embrac’d, that is to have their necks kiss’d. For as to kissing of lips or cheeks, it is not the mode here, the first is reckon’d rude & the other may rub off the paint. The French ladies have, however, 1000 other ways of rendering themselves agreeable; by their various attentions and civilities, & their sensible conversation. ‘Tis a delightful people to live with.”

  There were times when this female enthusiasm became almost overwhelming. Once, no less than 300 ladies swarmed around Franklin, crowned his head with laurels, and chose the prettiest among them to kiss him on both cheeks. A French neighbor of Franklin’s in Passy said the women “flocked to see him, to speak to him for hours on end, without realizing that he did not understand much of what they said, because of his scant knowledge of our language.” But Franklin was, in spite of this handicap, equal to the challenge. The shrewd French neighbor noted that “he greeted each one of them with a kind of amiable coquettishness that they loved.” Whenever one madame or mademoiselle asked him if he did not care for them more than any of the others, Franklin had an answer that was a diplomatic masterpiece. “Yes, when you are closest to me, because of the force of attraction.”

  Franklin created a family out of the circle of French women who lived near him in Passy. Again, the phenomenon sounds that note of almost compulsive paternalism, that enormous authority which enabled Franklin to bind others to him emotionally, with all the force and permanence of a blood relationship. It was a repetition of his life in Craven Street, where he had created a similar bond between himself and the Stevensons. But in Passy the atmosphere was more supercharged, thanks to the added ingredient of French wit and emotion. French women responded instinctively to Franklin’s fondness for playing romantic games with words, and, occasionally, with other equally available resources.

  His first and closest friend was Madame Brillon de Jouy, an exquisitely beautiful woman of thirty-five who was considered one of the most talented amateur pianists in Europe. Some of the leading musicians of the era dedicated compositions to her, and she composed her own sonatas for the harpsichord and the piano. She was married to a tall, hearty French treasury official, who was twenty-four years older than she. This, plus a moody, artistic temperament and an overwhelming devotion to a father who had recently died, left her vaguely restless and discontented, in that plaintive romantic manner that was gradually becoming the vogue in Europe. She first attracted Franklin with her music. He began visiting her house, which was only a short distance away from the Hotel Valentinois, to hear her play the piano and listen to her two pretty daughters sing. Franklin was soon calling these visits “my opera.” They found other things in common, a fondness for chess and religious discussion.

  But the erotic was never far from Franklin’s mind, even when he talked religion, and Madame Brillon, being French, found herself more than disposed to play the same titillating game. One night, as they sat on the terrace of the Brillon mansion, with its hundred steps running down into a peaceful garden, Franklin soberly informed Madame Brillon that if the Catholic religion was true, he felt himself damned because he was constantly committing one or another of the seven deadly sins; pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. Gaily, Madame Brillon replied that he needed a spiritual director, such as all devout Catholics of that time, and even a few today, depended upon to win salvation. Would Madame Brillon be his spiritual director? Franklin playfully asked. Why not, said the lovely lady, and forthwith heard his “confession,” in which he described to her his sins, placing special emphasis on his weakness for pretty women. The next day, she sent him a delightful absolution. “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.”

  Franklin replied by shifting his ground from the capital sins to the Ten Commandments. He told Madame Brillon that he believed there were twelve. The two extras were: Increase and multiply and Love one another. “Come to think of it, they are a bit misplaced, and shouldn’t the last have been first,” he said. “However, I never made any difficulty about that, but was always willing to obey them both, whenever I had an opportunity.”

  Then, the Ambassador took the offensive. “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....” There was, he added, an opinion of a certain father of the church that the best way to get rid of temptation was to give in to it. “Pray instruct me how far I may venture to practice upon this principle.”

  Madame Brillon responded with witty finesse. She told him that she was inclined to pardon him but she felt that she should consult “that neighbor 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.”

  But Franklin was hard to discourage. He returned with a whole list of sins, all in the coveting and pursuing category, of other women. He argued that the sort of friendship she was imposing on him could be divided ad infinitum without being unfaithful. He compared it to “the sweet sounds brought forth from the pianoforte by your clever hands.” Twenty people could enjoy this music if they happened to be within hearing, in spite of the fact that Madame Brillon intended it only for Franklin. The same was true of his affection or tenderness. Her only fault, Franklin told her, “was this kind of avarice which leads you to seek a monopoly on all my affections, and not to allow me any for the agreeable ladies of your country.” Obviously, Franklin was hoping that jealousy would succeed where curiosity had failed. But the lady was immovable. “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,” she insisted.

  Gradually but inevitably, the relationship between this remarkable woman and equally remarkable man shifted from gaily erotic fooling to something much deeper and more profound. Madame Brillon began calling Franklin mon cher Papa, my dear Papa, and he began calling her his daughter. Gently, with perfect delicacy, he retreated from his first tone of physical urgency, but he knew too much about women ever to abandon it completely. She in turn continued to give him her kisses, and she sat on his lap so o
ften, several local gossips began talking about it. Franklin retaliated by tempting her with the story of an archbishop who refused to give even a farthing to a beggar. He accused Madame Brillon of being equally stingy. “You who are as rich as an archbishop in all Christian and moral virtues, you could sacrifice for my sake a little portion of those virtues without the loss being sensible, but you tell me it is asking too much. Such is your charity toward an unfortunate who used to enjoy plenty and is now reduced to begging your alms.” But Madame Brillon was immovable. “My dear Papa, your bishop was a rascal,” she said.

  Then, in mid-1779, came a crisis which, if Franklin had been a dedicated lecher, would have given him what he kept saying he wanted so badly. Madame Brillon discovered that her husband was baying an aft air with her daughters’ governess. It was a blow that almost destroyed her mental and physical health. Frantically she turned to the only person in whom she could confide, Franklin. “My soul is very sick,” she cried. “You are my father. It is the father’s love that I need more than ever.” Like a patient going to a psychiatrist, she made an appointment with Franklin for ten in the morning, and poured out her agony. Franklin’s response refutes forever the musical-comedy caricature that has him leaping from bed to bed throughout his years in Paris. No one is easier to seduce than a wife who has been wronged, but such an unscrupulous act would have completely destroyed this fragile woman, with her acute Catholic conscience. She was groping for spiritual strength, and Franklin gave it to her, out of his rich reserve.

  He urged her to forgive her husband, to continue to be a “good mother, good wife, good friend, good neighbor, good Christian, etc. (without forgetting to be a good daughter to your Papa) and to neglect and forget, if you can, the wrongs you may be suffering at present.” He urged on her his old doctrine, which he had written in Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1749 and practiced throughout his life, in personal quarrels. “Doing an injury puts you below your enemy; revenging one makes you but even with him; forgiving it sets you above him.” To teach her a more philosophic attitude toward life, he told his old story of the whistle, and what he had learned from it as a boy. The best thing, he advised her, was to get all the good we can from this world, and not waste our time pursuing whistles, whether they be high honors, riches, or in Madame Brillon’s case, recrimination and revenge.

  The ironic, essentially spiritual nature of Franklin’s relationship with Madame Brillon was summed up for all time in an essay he wrote for her, after a visit to a lovely island in the Seine called Moulin Joli. During their strolls around the island, they had seen swarms of a little fly called Ephemera who lived only a day. Espousing his magician’s role, Franklin told Madame Brillon, “You know that I understand all the inferior animal tongues.” Poking fun at himself, he added, “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.” Franklin told how he had listened to a conversation among a group of Ephemera, who were arguing about the merits of two foreign musicians, not unlike the French of that decade, who were bitterly divided over the virtues of Gluck and Piccini, but he was more interested in the discourse of an old gray-headed Ephemera, who was sitting alone on another leaf, talking to himself.

  It was, said 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 eighteen 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 toward 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 four hundred and twenty minutes of time.

  How few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grand-children 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 seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labour in amassing honeydew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engag’d in for the good of my compatriot 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 Ephemerae 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 is 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 Ephemera who no longer exists? And what will become of all history, in the eighteenth 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 reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good lady Ephemerae, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante....”

  Nearby, in the village of Auteuil, lived a totally different kind of woman, with whom Franklin had a very un-paternal relationship. Aristocratic Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d’Autricourt, daughter of one of the royal families of Lorraine and widow of Claude Adrian Helvetius, one of France’s leading intellectuals, was a woman who ruled men with an imperious will and a flashing temper. In her fifties, she was no longer a great beauty, her enemies called her “the ruins of Palmyra,” but she was quintessentially French, spawned by the best traditions of the ancien regime, which gave to gifted women a role they had not achieved in any other society. Madame Helvetius ran a unique household in Auteuil. It consisted of two free-thinking abbes, Andre Morellet, whom Franklin had met at Lord Shelburne’s house in England a decade earlier, and Martin Lefebvre de la Roche, a handsome ex-Benedictine in his late thirties who was a disciple of the late Helvetius’s decidedly atheistic philosophy. Also aboard was Pierre Georges Cabanas, a twenty-two-year-old student of medical theory.

  The economist Turgot, who was in love with Madame Helvetius and who had twice proposed in vain, brought Franklin to Auteuil. He was instantly captivated with this rare woman who combined the hauteur of the aristocrat with the abandon of the bohemian. Her household was in a continuous state of chaotic disorder. Her three acres of gardens were thronged with flowers in the erratic romantic English manner, in deliberate contrast to France’s traditional formality. The house and grounds literally crawled with animals; cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, pigeons, deer, and a veritable zoo of birds in huge aviaries. Add to this a stream of brilliant, important guests who wandered in and out for impromptu lunches, teas, and dinners, and you quickly see what Franklin perceived and loved —the house at Auteuil was more than a house, it was a world presided over by a kind of goddess. He promptly gave the goddess a slightly blasphemous name, “Notre Dame d’Auteuil.”

  Never before in his life had Franklin had the opportunity to meet such a woman intimately. His analytic mind groped to explain the source of her fascination to “statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets and men of learning” who attached themselves to her “as straws to a fine piece of amber.” She had no pretensions to learning. She could not even spell correctly. She made no attempt to charm them. “Artless simplicity” was the “striking part” of her character. He could only decide that there was something about her, a kind of vital life force, that made simply being in her company such a pleasure, that all these men of genius were not only pleased with her, “but better pleased with one another and with themselves.”

  What Franklin liked most aside from the lady of the house was the talk. The Abbe Morellet won every argument with outrageously specious reasoning, while spooning
ninety percent of the cream into his coffee or onto his fruit. The house could burn down all around Abbe de la Roche, and he would not even notice the flames, until they reached the book he was reading. He was the solemn, serious young straight man who saw himself trying to bring some order into the chaos, but actually spent most of his time talking to Franklin and nibbling sweetmeats. Cabanas played the role of Franklin’s intellectual son, prying endless stories of his boyhood and youth from him. Franklin immediately plunged into this melee, dealing out insults, compliments, and jokes and epigrams with magnificent abandonment.

  But for Franklin the dominant note soon became his adoration of the lady in charge. Accepting an invitation to a party from Abbe de la Roche, he wrote: “M. Franklin never forgets any party at which Madame Helvetius is to appear. He even believes that if he were to go to Paradise that morning, he would beg to be allowed to remain on earth until half past one, to receive the embrace she was kind enough to promise him at their last meeting in M. Turgot’s house.”

  There was none of Madame Brillon’s coyness about Madame Helvetius. “Do you want, my dear friend, to have dinner with me on Wednesday?” she would write to Franklin. “I have the greatest desire to see you and embrace you, and a little bit your son [Temple] too.” Franklin would instantly accept with an equally bold note. “I get too much pleasure from seeing you, hearing you, too much happiness from holding you in my arms, to forget such a precious invitation.”

  Throughout 1779, Franklin’s fascination escalated, and so did his daring. Knowing that nothing was sacred in Auteuil, Franklin used Cabanas and the abbes as message bearers. He told the young doctor, “If Notre Dame is pleased to spend her days with Franklin, he would be just as pleased to spend his nights with her; 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 [the cat].” Soon he was warning Cabanas that he planned to capture Madame for life. Then came a delicious essay, an appeal from the flies of the apartment of Monsieur Franklin.