Note 95 — Part I (continued 7)

Franklin writes to William Carmichael (Passy, June 17, 1780): "The Moulin Joli is a little island in the Seine about two leagues hence, part of the country-seat of another friend [Claude-Henri Watelet], where we visit every summer, and spend a day in the pleasing society of the ingenious, learned, and very polite persons who inhabit it. At the time when the letter was written, all conversations at Paris were filled with disputes about the music of Gluck and Picini, a German and Italian musician, who divided the town into violent parties. A friend of this lady [Madame Brillon] having obtained a copy of it, under a promise not to give another, did not observe that promise; so that many have been taken, and it is become as public as such a thing can well be, that is not printed; but I could not dream of its being heard of at Madrid! The thought was partly taken from a little piece of some unknown writer, which I met with fifty years since in a newspaper, and which the sight of the Ephemera brought to my recollection" (Writings, VIII, 100). A. H. Smyth observes that it is generally thought that the Ephemera is a reworking of an essay on "Human Vanity" which appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Dec. 4, 1735. Also see M. K. Jackson, op. cit; 75; and L. S. Livingston, Franklin and His Press at Passy (New York, 1914), 30. Compare Wm. Bartram's similar description of Ephemera in his Travels ed. by M. Van Doren (An American Bookshelf), New York, 1928, 88-9. See H. H. Clark's Introduction to Poems of Freneau (New York, 1929), xlvii-lviii, for provocative discussion of the degree to which naturalism may motivate an obsession with transience, mutability, and death.