Volume 1 — CHAPTER VII (continued 2)

People commonly speak of Ten Commandments.—I have been taught that there are twelve. The first was increase & multiply & replenish the earth. The twelfth is, A new Commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. It seems to me that they are a little misplaced, And that the last should have been the first. However I never made any difficulty about that, but was always willing to obey them both whenever I had an opportunity. Pray tell me dear Casuist, whether my keeping religiously these two commandments tho' 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 neighbour's wife, and which I confess I break constantly God forgive me, as often as I see or think of my lovely Confessor, and I am afraid I should never be able to repent of the Sin even if I had the full Possession of her.

And now I am Consulting you upon a Case of Conscience I will mention the Opinion of a certain Father of the church which I find myself willing to adopt though I am not sure it is orthodox. It is this, that the most effectual way to get rid of a certain Temptation is, as often as it returns, to comply with and satisfy it.

Pray instruct me how far I may venture to practice upon this Principle?

But why should I be so scrupulous when you have promised to absolve me of the future?

Adieu my charming Conductress and believe me ever with the sincerest Esteem & affection.

Your most obed't hum. Serv. B F

It would be easy enough to treat this correspondence too seriously. When we recall the social sympathies and diversions which drew the parties to it together, the advanced age of Franklin, the friendly relations sustained by him to all the members of the Brillon household, his attempt to bring about a matrimonial union between Temple Franklin and the daughter of Madame Brillon, the good-humored complaisance of M. Brillon, the usages of Parisian society at that time, the instinctive ease with which Franklin adopted the tone of any land in which he happened to be, and the sportive grace and freedom, brought by his wit and literary dexterity to every situation that invited their exercise, we might well infer that, perhaps, after all, on his part, as well on that of the clever coquette, whose bodkin was quite as keen as his sword, it was understood that the liaison was to be only a paper one—an encounter of wit rather than of love. From first to last, the attitude of Madame Brillon towards Franklin was simply that of a beautiful and brilliant woman, to whom coquetry was an art, and whose intellectual activity had been stimulated, and vanity gratified, by the homage of a brilliant, magnetic and famous man, who possessed to a remarkable degree the faculty of rendering his splendid intellectual powers subservient to purely social uses. It was no slight thing to a woman such as Madame Brillon to be the Vainqueur du Vainqueur de la Terre, and little less than this did all France at that time insist that Franklin was. There is nothing in her letters to Franklin to indicate that she ever really had any thought of allowing him any greater degree of intimacy with her than he actually enjoyed. On that point she was apparently as firm as she was in her courteous and kindly but inflexible opposition to a marriage between her daughter and William Temple Franklin.

I despise slanderers [she wrote to Franklin on one occasion], and am at peace with myself, but that is not enough, one must submit to what is called propriety (that word varies in each century in each country) to sit less often on your knees. I shall certainly love you none the less, nor will our hearts be more or less pure; but we shall close the mouth of the malicious, and it is no slight thing even for the sage to silence them.

On the other hand there is much to support the idea that the motive at the back of Franklin's letters to Madame Brillon was very much the same as that which inspired the Journey to the Elysian Fields and the Ephemera. They were to a great extent, at any rate, mere literary bagatelles as those performances were—the offerings of an opulent wit and fancy at the shrine of beauty and fashion, which to be successful in an academic sense had to be informed by the spirit, and attuned to the note, of the time and place. All the same, the letters from Franklin to Madame Brillon are painful reading. Like not a little else in his life, they tend to confirm the impression that upright, courageous, public-spirited, benevolent, loving and faithful in friendship as he was, on the sensual side of his nature he was lamentably callous to the moral laws and conventions and the personal and social refinements which legitimize and dignify the physical intercourse of the sexes. The pinchbeck glitter, the deceitful vacuity of his moral regimen and Art of Virtue, assume an additional meaning, when we see him mumbling the cheek of Madame Brillon, and month after month and year after year writing to her in strains of natural or affected concupiscence. It was things of this sort which have assisted in strengthening the feeling, not uncommon, that Franklin's Art of Virtue was a purely counterfeit thing, and the moralist himself an untrustworthy guide to righteous conduct.

In a letter to M. de Veillard, Franklin after his return to America from France referred to the Brillon family as "that beloved family." Restored to his home surroundings, he forgot his French lines, and was again as soberly American as ever in thought and speech. Who would recognize the lover of Madame Brillon in this russet picture that he paints of himself in his eighty-third year in a letter to her?

You have given me Pleasure by informing me of the Welfare and present agreable Circumstances of yourself and Children; and I am persuaded that your Friendship for me will render a similar Account of my Situation pleasing to you. I am in a Country where I have the happiness of being universally respected and beloved, of which three successive annual Elections to the Chief Magistracy, in which Elections the Representatives of the People in Assembly and the Supreme Court join'd and were unanimous, is the strongest Proof; this is a Place of Profit as well as of Honour; and my Friends chearfully assist in making the Business as easy to me as possible.

After a word more with regard to the dwelling and the dutiful family, so often mentioned in his twilight letters, he concludes in this manner:

My Rents and Incomes are amply sufficient for all my present Occasions; and if no unexpected Misfortunes happen during the time I have to live, I shall leave a handsome Estate to be divided among my Relatives. As to my Health, it continues the same, or rather better than when I left Passy; but being now in my 83rd year, I do not expect to continue much longer a Sojourner in this world, and begin to promise myself much Gratification of my Curiosity in soon visiting some other.

In this letter, Franklin was looking forward, we hardly need say, to a very different world from the one where Madame Brillon was to be the second Mrs. Franklin, and they were to eat together apples of Paradise roasted with butter and nutmeg. And it is only just to the memory of Madame Brillon to recall the genuine words, so unlike the tenor of her former letters to Franklin, in which she bade him farewell, when he was leaving the shores of France:

I had so full a heart yesterday in leaving you that I feared for you and myself a grief-stricken moment which could only add to the pain which our separation causes me, without proving to you further the tender and unalterable affection that I have vowed to you for always. Every day of my life I shall recall that a great man, a sage, was willing to be my friend; my wishes will follow him everywhere; my heart will regret him incessantly; incessantly I shall say I passed eight years with Doctor Franklin; they have flown, and I shall see him no more! Nothing in the world could console me for this loss, except the thought of the peace and happiness that you are about to find in the bosom of your family.

It was to the Comtesse d'Houdetot of Rousseau's Confessions, however, that Franklin was indebted for his social apotheosis in France. In a letter to her after his return to America, he calls her "ma chere & toujours—amiable Amie," and declares that the memory of her friendship and of the happy hours that he had passed in her sweet society at Sanois, had often caused him to regret the distance which made it impossible for them to ever meet again. In her letters to him, after his return to America, she seeks in such words as "homage," "veneration" and "religious tenderness" to express the feelings with which he had inspired her. In these letters, there are also references to the fête champêtre which she gave in his honor at her country seat at Sanois on the 12th day of April, in the year 1781, and which was one of the celebrated events of the time. When it was announced that Franklin's carriage was approaching the château, the Countess and a distinguished retinue of her relations set out on foot to meet him. At a distance of about half a mile from the château, they came upon him, and gathered around the doors of his carriage, and escorted it to the grounds of the château, where the Countess herself assisted Franklin to alight. "The venerable sage," said a contemporary account, "with his gray hairs flowing down upon his shoulders, his staff in his hand, the spectacles of wisdom on his nose, was the perfect picture of true philosophy and virtue." As soon as Franklin had descended from the carriage, the whole company grouped themselves around him, and the Countess declaimed, with proper emphasis we may be sure, these lines:

All then wended their way through the gardens of the Countess to the château, where they were soon seated at a noble feast. With the first glass of wine, a soft air was played, and the Countess and her relations rose to their feet, and sang in chorus these lines, which they repeated in chorus after every succeeding glass of wine:

When the time for the second glass of wine came, the Countess sang this quatrain:

And at the third glass, the Vicomte d'Houdetot sang these words:

And at the fourth glass, the Vicomtesse d'Houdetot sang these words:

And at the fifth glass, Madame de Pernan sang these words:

And at the sixth glass, the aged Comte de Tressan sang these words:

And at the seventh glass, the Comte d'Apché sang these lines, in which some violence was done to the facts of English History, and the French Revolution was foreshadowed:

And so quatrain preceded glass and chorus followed quatrain until every member of the eulogistic company had sung his or her song. The banqueters then rose from the table, and the Countess, followed by her relations, conducted Franklin to an arbor in her gardens, where he was presented with a Virginia locust by her gardener, which he was asked to honor the family by planting with his own hands. When he had done so, the Countess declaimed some additional lines, which were afterwards inscribed upon a marble pillar, erected near the tree:

On their way back to the château, the concourse was met by a band which played an accompaniment, while the Countess and her kinsfolk sang this song:

This over, all returned to the château where they were engaged for some time in agreeable conversation. In the late afternoon, Franklin was conducted by the Countess and the rest to his carriage, and, when he was seated, they gathered about the open door of the vehicle, and the Countess addressed her departing guest in these words:

The door of the carriage was then closed, and Franklin returned to Paris duly deified but as invincibly sensible as ever.

Another French woman with whom Franklin was on terms of familiar affection was the wife of his friend, Jean Baptiste Le Roy. His endearing term for her was petite femme de poche (little pocket wife), and, in a letter after his return to Philadelphia, she assured him that, as long as his petite femme de poche had the breath of life, she would love him.

On one occasion, when he was in France, she wrote to him, asking him to dine with her on Wednesday, and saying that she would experience great pleasure in seeing and embracing him. Assuredly, he replied, he would not fail her. He found too much pleasure in seeing her, and in hearing her speak, and too much happiness, when he held her in his arms, to forget an invitation so precious.

In another letter to her, after his return to America—the letter which drew forth her declaration that her love for him would last as long as her breath—he told her that she was very courageous to ascend so high in a balloon, and very good, when she was so near heaven, not to think of quitting her friends, and remaining with the angels. Competition might well have shunned an effort to answer such a flourish as that in kind, but a lady, who had been up in a balloon among the angels, was not the person to lack courage for any experiment. She only regretted, she said, that the balloon could not go very far, for, if it had been but able to carry her to him, she would have been among the angels, and would have given him proofs of the respect and esteem for him, ineffaceably engraved upon her heart. Sad to relate, in the same letter she tells Franklin that her husband had proved hopelessly recreant to every principle of honor and good feeling. We say, "sad to relate," not for general reasons only, but because Franklin, when he had heard in 1772 that Le Roy was well and happily married, had felicitated him on the event, and repeated his oft-asserted statement that matrimony is the natural condition of man; though he omitted this time his usual comparison of celibacy with the odd half of a pair of scissors. The estrangement between his little pocket wife and her husband, however, did not affect his feeling of devoted friendship for Jean Baptiste Le Roy. Some two years and five months later, when the wild Walpurgis night of the French Revolution was setting in, he wrote to Le Roy to find out why he had been so long silent. "It is now more than a year," he said, "since I have heard from my dear friend Le Roy. What can be the reason? Are you still living? Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge, for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?" The fact that Le Roy, who was a physicist of great reputation, was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society, led Franklin in one of his letters to address him as his "Dear double Confrère." Le Roy's three brothers, Pierre, Charles and David were also friends of Franklin. Indeed, in a letter to Jean Baptiste, Franklin spoke of David, to whom he addressed his valuable paper entitled Maritime Observations, as "our common Brother."

Other friendships formed by Franklin with women in France were those with Madame Lavoisier, Madame de Forbach and Mademoiselle Flainville. Madame Lavoisier was first the wife of the famous chemist of that name, and, after he was guillotined, during the French Revolution, the wife of the equally famous Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. She painted a portrait of Franklin, and sent it to him at Philadelphia.

It is allowed by those, who have seen it [he wrote to her], to have great merit as a picture in every respect; but what particularly endears it to me is the hand that drew it. Our English enemies, when they were in possession of this city (Philadelphia) and my house, made a prisoner of my portrait, and carried it off with them, leaving that of its companion, my wife, by itself, a kind of widow. You have replaced the husband, and the lady seems to smile as well pleased.

So his Eurydice, as soon as the enchantments of the French sorceress lost their power, was re-united to him after all.

Among his French friends, Madame de Forbach, the Dowager Duchess of Deux-Ponts, was conspicuous for the number of the presents that she made to him. Among others, was the fine crab-tree walking stick, surmounted with a gold head, wrought in the form of a cap of liberty, which he bequeathed to Washington. Other gifts of hers are alluded to in a letter from Franklin to her, acknowledging the receipt of a pair of scissors.

It is true [he said] that I can now neither walk abroad nor write at home without having something that may remind me of your Goodness towards me; you might have added, that I can neither play at Chess nor drink Tea without the same sensation: but these had slipt your Memory. There are People who forget the Benefits they receive, Mad^e d^e Forbach only those she bestows.

His only letter to Mademoiselle Flainville is addressed to "ma chere enfant," and is signed "Your loving Papa." It helps, along with innumerable other kindred scraps of evidence, to prove how infirm is the train of reasoning which seeks to establish a parental tie between Franklin and anyone simply upon the strength of his epistolary assumption of fatherhood. He might as well be charged with polygamy because he addressed so many persons as "my wife" or "ma femme." This letter also has its interest, as exemplifying the natural manner in which he awaited the sedan chair that was to bear him away from his fleshly tenement. "I have been harassed with Illness this last Summer," he told her, "am grown old, near 83, and find myself very infirm, so that I expect to be soon call'd for."

This is far from being a complete list of the French women with whom Franklin was on terms of affectionate intimacy. To go no further, we know that Madame Brillon, in addition to writing to him on one occasion, "Give this evening to my amiable rival, Madame Helvétius, kiss her for yourself and for me," granted him on another a power of attorney to kiss for her until her return, whenever he saw them, her two neighbors, Le Veillard, and her pretty neighbor, Caillot.

The truth is that Franklin had a host of friends of both sexes in France.

When Thomas Paine visited that country, after the return of Franklin to America, he wrote to the latter that he found his friends in France "very numerous and very affectionate"; and we can readily believe it. Among them were Buffon, Condorcet, Lafayette, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Lavoisier, Chastellux, Grand, Dupont, Dubourg and Le Veillard.

To Buffon, the great naturalist, Franklin was drawn by common scientific sympathies. Like Franklin, he became a sufferer from the stone, and one of the results was a letter in which the former, in reply to an inquiry from him as to how he obtained relief from the malady, stated that his remedy was to take, on going to bed, "the Bigness of a Pigeon's Egg of Jelly of Blackberries"; which, in the eyes of modern medical science was, as a palliative, hardly more effective than a bread pill.

With Condorcet, the philosopher, Franklin was intimate enough to call him, and to be called by him, "My dear and illustrious Confrère"; and it was he, it is worthy of mention, who happily termed Franklin "the modern Prometheus."

For Lafayette, that winning figure, forever fixed in the American memory, despite his visit to America in old age, in immortal youth and freshness, like the young lover and the happy boughs on Keats's Grecian Urn, Franklin had a feeling not unlike that of Washington. In referring to the expedition against England, in which Temple Franklin was to have accompanied Lafayette, Franklin said in a letter to the latter, "I flatter myself, too, that he might possibly catch from you some Tincture of those engaging Manners that make you so much the Delight of all that know you." In another letter, he observed in reply to the statement by Lafayette that the writer had had enemies in America, "You are luckier, for I think you have none here, nor anywhere." When it became his duty to deliver to Lafayette the figured sword presented to the latter by Congress, he performed the office, though ill-health compelled him to delegate the actual delivery of the gift to his grandson, in the apt and pointed language which never failed him upon such occasions. "By the help," he said, "of the exquisite Artists France affords, I find it easy to express everything but the Sense we have of your Worth and our Obligations to you. For this, Figures and even Words are found insufficient." Through all his letters to Lafayette there is a continuous suggestion of cordial attachment to both him and his wife. When Lafayette wrote to him that Madame de Lafayette had just given birth to a daughter, and that he was thinking of naming her Virginia, he replied, "In naming your Children I think you do well to begin with the most antient State. And as we cannot have too many of so good a Race I hope you & M^me de la Fayette will go thro the Thirteen." This letter was written at Passy. In a later letter to Lafayette, written at Philadelphia, he concluded by saying, "You will allow an old friend of four-score to say he loves your wife, when he adds, and children, and prays God to bless them all."

For the Duc de la Rochefoucauld he entertained the highest respect as well as a cordial feeling of friendship. "The good Duke," he terms him in a letter to Dr. Price. And it was to the judgment of the Duke and M. le Veillard in France, as it was to that of Vaughan and Dr. Price in England, as we shall see, that he left the important question as to whether any of the Autobiography should be published, and, if so, how much. Among the many tributes paid to his memory, was a paper on his life and character read by the Duke before the Society of 1789. One of the Duke's services to America was that of translating into French, at the request of Franklin, for European circulation all the constitutions of the American States.

Lavoisier was a member with Franklin of the commission which investigated the therapeutic value of mesmerism, and exposed the imposture of Mesmer. There are no social incidents in the intercourse of the two men, friendly as it was, so far as we know, worthy of mention; but, in a passage in one of Franklin's letters to Jan Ingenhousz, we have a glimpse of the master, of whom, when guillotined, after the brutal declaration of Coffinhal, the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, that the Republic had no need for savants, Lagrange remarked, "They needed but a moment to lay that head low, and a hundred years, perhaps, will not be sufficient to reproduce its like." Speaking of an experiment performed by Lavoisier, Franklin wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "He kindled a hollow Charcoal, and blew into it a Stream of dephlogisticated Air. In this Focus, which is said to be the hottest fire human Art has yet been able to produce, he melted Platina in a few Minutes."

Franklin's friend, the Chevalier (afterwards Marquis) de Chastellux, who served with the Comte de Rochambeau in America, and was the author of the valuable Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 81 and 82, succeeded in making himself as agreeable to American women as Franklin succeeded in making himself to French women. There is an echo of this popularity in one of Franklin's letters to him. "Dare I confess to you," he said, when he was still at Passy, and the Chevalier was still in America, "that I am your rival with Madame G——? (Franklin's Katy). I need not tell you, that I am not a dangerous one. I perceive that she loves you very much; and so does, dear Sir, yours, &c."

Through the influence of Leray de Chaumont, Ferdinand Grand, who was a Swiss Protestant, became the banker of our representatives in France, and, after Franklin's return to America, he remained entrusted with some of Franklin's private funds upon which the latter was in the habit of drawing from time to time. The correspondence between Franklin and himself is almost wholly lacking in social interest, but it indicates a deep feeling of affection upon Franklin's part.

For Dupont de Nemours, the distinguished economist, and the founder of the family, which has been so conspicuous in the industrial, military and naval history of the United States, Franklin cherished a feeling distinctly friendly. His acquaintance with Dupont as well as with Dubourg, who, like Dupont, was a member of the group of French Economists, known as the Physiocrats, was formed, as we have seen, before his mission to France. The correspondence between Franklin and Dupont, however, like that between Franklin and Grand, has but little significance for the purposes of this chapter.[40]

This, however, is not true of the relations between Dr. Barbeu Dubourg, a medical practitioner of high standing, and Franklin. They not only opened their minds freely to each other upon a considerable variety of topics, but their intercourse was colored by cordial association. Of all the men who came under the spell of Franklin's genius, Dubourg, who was, to use Franklin's own words, "a man of extensive learning," was one of the American philosopher's most enthusiastic pupils. "My dear Master," was the term that he habitually used in speaking of him, and his reverence for the object of his admiration led him to translate into French, with some additions, the edition of Franklin's scientific papers, brought out in London by David Henry in 1769. Nothing that he had ever written, he told his master, had been so well received as the preface to this compilation. "So great," he declared, "is the advantage of soaring in the shadow of Franklin's wings." We pass by the communications from Franklin to Dubourg on purely scientific subjects. One letter from the former to him brings to our knowledge a curious habit into which Franklin was drawn by the uncompromising convictions that he entertained in regard to the origin of bad colds and the virtues of ventilation, of which we shall hereafter speak more particularly.

You know [he said] the cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic; but the shock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the least painful, but, on the contrary, agreeable; and, if I return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night's rest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined. I find no ill consequences whatever resulting from it, and that at least it does not injure my health, if it does not in fact contribute much to its preservation.

Another letter from Franklin to Dubourg is a dissertation on swimming—the only form of outdoor exercise, to which he was addicted—but in which he was, throughout his life, such an adept that he could even make the following entry in his Journal, when he was at Southampton on his return to America from France: "I went at noon to bathe in Martin's salt-water hot-bath, and, floating on my back, fell asleep, and slept near an hour by my watch without sinking or turning! a thing I never did before, and should hardly have thought possible. Water is the easiest bed that can be!" In the letter to Dubourg, he recalls the assertion of a M. Robinson that fat persons with small bones float most easily upon the water, makes a passing reference to the diving bell and the swimming waist-coat, now known as the life-preserver, and suggests the comfort of varying the progressive motion of swimming by turning over occasionally upon one's back, and otherwise. He also states that the best method of allaying cramp is to give a sudden vigorous and violent shock to the affected region; which may be done in the air as the swimmer swims along on his back, and recalls an incident illustrative of the danger of throwing one's self, when thoroughly heated, into cold spring water.

The exercise of swimming [he declared] is one of the most healthy and agreeable in the world. After having swam for an hour or two in the evening, one sleeps coolly the whole night, even during the most ardent heat of summer. Perhaps, the pores being cleansed, the insensible perspiration increases and occasions this coolness. It is certain that much swimming is the means of stopping a diarrhœa, and even of producing a constipation.

In this letter, too, Franklin tells Dubourg how, when he was a boy, he quickened his progress in swimming by aiding the stroke of his hands with oval palettes, and attempted to do so by attaching a kind of sandals to the soles of his feet; and also how in his boyhood, on one occasion, he lay on his back in a pond and let his kite draw him across it without the least fatigue, and with the greatest pleasure imaginable. He thought it not impossible to cross in this manner from Dover to Calais.

Another letter from Franklin to Dubourg on what he calls the doctrines of life and death is a delightful example of both his insatiable inquisitiveness and the readiness with which he could give a pleasant fillip to any subject however grave. He is speaking of some common flies that had been drowned in Madeira wine, apparently about the time when it was bottled in Virginia to be sent to London, where the writer was:

At the opening of one of the bottles, at the house of a friend where I then was [he said], three drowned flies fell into the first glass that was filled. Having heard it remarked that drowned flies were capable of being revived by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment upon these; they were therefore exposed to the sun upon a sieve, which had been employed to strain them out of the wine. In less than three hours, two of them began by degrees to recover life. They commenced by some convulsive motions of the thighs, and at length they raised themselves upon their legs, wiped their eyes with their fore feet, beat and brushed their wings with their hind feet, and soon after began to fly, finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how they came thither. The third continued lifeless till sunset, when, losing all hopes of him, he was thrown away.

I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they may be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to any ordinary death, the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time, to be then recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But since in all probability we live in an age too early and too near the infancy of science, to hope to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection, I must for the present content myself with the treat, which you are so kind as to promise me, of the resurrection of a fowl or turkey cock.

The friendship of Dubourg for Franklin bore good fruit for America, when the American Revolution came on; for a sanguine letter from him exerted a determining influence in inducing Congress to send Franklin to France.

Le Veillard, who was a neighbor of Franklin at Passy, was one of the friends whom Franklin loved as he loved Hugh Roberts or John Hughes, Strahan or Jan Ingenhousz. And this feeling, as usual, included the members of his friend's family. Public cares, he wrote to Le Veillard, after his return to America, could not make him forget that he and Le Veillard loved one another. In the same letter, he spoke of Madame Le Veillard, as "the best of good women," and of her daughter as the amiable daughter, who, he thought, would tread in her footsteps. In a later letter, he told Le Veillard that he could not give him a better idea of his present happiness in his family than by informing him that his daughter had all the virtues of a certain good lady whom Le Veillard allowed him to love; the same tender affections and intentions, ingenuity, industry, economy, etc. "Embrace that good dame for me warmly, and the amiable daughter," he added. "My best wishes attend the whole family, whom I shall never cease to love while I am B. Franklin." This wealth of affection was richly repaid. The closest relations existed between Franklin and the Le Veillard family, while he was in France, and, when he left that country, Le Veillard was not content to accompany him simply to the seacoast, but was his companion as far as Southampton. To him, Abel James, Benjamin Vaughan and the Shipleys we are beholden for the fact that the Autobiography was brought down to the year 1757; there to stop like the unfinished tower which tantalized the world with a haunting sense of its rare worth and incompleteness. Like a faithful, good wife, who avails herself of her intimacy with her husband to bring the continuous pressure of her influence to bear upon him for the purpose of arousing him to a proper sense of his duty, Le Veillard spared neither entreaty nor reproach to secure additions to the precious sibylline leaves of the Autobiography. "You blame me for writing three pamphlets and neglecting to write the little history," Franklin complained. "You should consider they were written at sea, out of my own head; the other could not so well be written there for want of the documents that could only be had here." After this bit of self-defense, Franklin goes on to describe his physical condition. He realized that the stone in his bladder had grown heavier, he said, but on the whole it did not give him more pain than when he was at Passy, and, except in standing, walking or making water, he was very little incommoded by it. Sitting or lying in bed, he was generally quite easy, God be thanked, and, as he lived temperately, drank no wine, and used daily the exercise of the dumb-bell, he flattered himself that the stone was kept from augmenting so much as it might otherwise do, and that he might still continue to find it tolerable. "People who live long," the unconquerable devotee of human existence declared, "who will drink of the cup of life to the very bottom, must expect to meet with some of the usual dregs."

The view taken by Franklin in this letter of his physical condition was entirely too cheerful to work any alteration in the resolution of Le Veillard that the Autobiography should be completed, if the unremitting appeal of an old friend could prevail. In a subsequent letter, Franklin tells him that in Philadelphia his time was so cut to pieces by friends and strangers that he had sometimes envied the prisoners in the Bastile. His three years of service as President, however, would expire in the succeeding October, and he had formed the idea of retiring then to Temple's farm at Rancocas, where he would be free from the interruption of visits, and could complete the work for Le Veillard's satisfaction. In the meantime, in view of the little remnant of life left to him, the accidents that might happen before October, and Le Veillard's earnest desire, he had resolved to proceed with the Autobiography the very next day, and to go on with it daily until finished. This, if his health permitted, might be in the course of the ensuing summer.

In a still later letter, Franklin declared that Le Veillard was a hard taskmaster to his friend. "You insist," he said, "on his writing his life, already a long work, and at the same time would have him continually employed in augmenting the subject, while the time shortens in which the work is to be executed." Some months later, he is able to send to Le Veillard the joyful intelligence that he had recently made great progress in the work that his friend so urgently demanded, and that he had come as far as his fiftieth year. Indeed, he even stated that he expected to have the work finished in about two months, if illness, or some unforeseen interruption, did not prevent. This expectation was not realized, and the reason for it is stated in painful terms in a subsequent letter from Franklin to Le Veillard.

I have a long time [he said] been afflicted with almost constant and grevious Pain, to combat which I have been obliged to have recourse to Opium, which indeed has afforded me some Ease from time to time, but then it has taken away my Appetite and so impeded my Digestion that I am become totally emaciated, and little remains of me but a Skeleton covered with a Skin. In this Situation I have not been able to continue my Memoirs, and now I suppose I shall never finish them. Benjamin has made a Copy of what is done, for you, which shall be sent by the first safe Opportunity.

The copy was subsequently sent to Le Veillard, and, after the death of Franklin, was given by him to William Temple Franklin, to whom Franklin bequeathed most of his papers, in exchange for the original manuscript of the Autobiography. The motive for the exchange was doubtless the desire of Temple to secure the most legible "copy" that he could find for the printer of his edition of his grandfather's works. The original manuscript finally became the property by purchase of the late John Bigelow. There is reason to believe that, even after the receipt of the copy of the Autobiography, Le Veillard still cherished the hope that the work might be brought down to a later date. Writing to Le Veillard only a few days before Franklin's death, Jefferson said:

I wish I could add to your happiness by giving you a favourable account of the good old Doctor. I found him in bed where he remains almost constantly. He had been clear of pain for some days and was chearful and in good spirits. He listened with a glow of interest to the details of your revolution and of his friends which I gave him. He is much emaciated. I pressed him to continue the narration of his life and perhaps he will.

That Le Veillard had a lively mind we may well infer from an amusing paragraph in one of his letters to Franklin in which he pictures the jealousy with which Madame Helvétius and Madame Brillon regarded each other after the departure of Franklin from France.

You had two good friends here [he said] who might have lived harmoniously enough with each other, because they almost never saw each other, and you assured each of them privately that it was she that you loved the best; but do you venture to write to one and keep silent to the other? The first does not fail to brag and show her letter everywhere; what do you wish to become of the other? Two women draw their knives, their friends take sides, the war becomes general, now see what you have done. You set fire with a bit of paper to one half of the world, you who have so effectively aided in pacifying the other half!

It was a singularly unhappy prophecy that Franklin, after his return to Philadelphia, made to this friend whose lips were so soon to be dyed with the red wine of the guillotine. "When this fermentation is over," he wrote to him with regard to the popular tumults in which France was then involved, "and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and good, and cheer the hearts of those who drink it."

A bright letter from the daughter of Le Veillard merits a passing word. In reply to the statement of Franklin that she did not embrace him with a good grace, she says:

You know doubtless a great number of things; you have travelled much; you know men, but you have never penetrated the head of a French girl. Well! I will tell you their secret: When you wish to embrace one and she says that it does not pain her, that means that it gives her pleasure.

Very dear, too, to Franklin, was Dr. Jan Ingenhousz, the eminent scientist and physician to Maria Theresa. Many years after Franklin made his acquaintance, he received from Franklin the assurance that he had always loved him ever since he knew him, with uninterrupted affection, and he himself in a previous letter to Franklin styled him in his imperfect English "the most respectful" of all his friends. Only a few of the numerous letters that Franklin must have written to this friend are known to be in existence, and these are not particularly interesting from a social point of view. In one respect, however, they strikingly evince the kindness of heart which made Franklin so lovable. As was true of many other Europeans of his time, Ingenhousz incurred considerable pecuniary loss in American business ventures, and, like King David, who in his haste called all men liars, he was disposed at one time to call all Americans knaves. One of his American debtors, as we have already stated, was Samuel Wharton, of Philadelphia.

I know we should be happy together [wrote Franklin to Ingenhousz when the writer was about to return to America], and therefore repeat my Proposition that you should ask Leave of the Emperor to let you come and live with me during the little Remainder of Life that is left me. I am confident his Goodness would grant your Request. You will be at no expence while with me in America; you will recover your Debt from Wharton, and you will make me happy.

And the letter concludes with the request that Ingenhousz, who shared his enthusiasm for electrical experiments, would let him know soon whether he would make him happy by accepting his invitation. "I have Instruments," he declared, in terms that remind us of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, when they were planning their future military diversions together, "if the Enemy did not destroy them all, and we will make Plenty of Experiments together."

Such were the more conspicuous of the friendships which clustered so thickly about the life of Franklin.[41] When we remember that all these men and women have with him said "good-night" to his Landlord of Life and Time, and gone off to their still chambers, we experience a feeling something like that of Xerxes when he gazed upon his vast army and reflected that not a man in it might return from Greece. The thought that there might never again be any movement in those cheerless rooms, nor any glimmer of recurring day was well calculated to make one, who loved his friends as Franklin did, exclaim, "I too with your Poet trust in God." The wide sweep of his sympathies and charities, the open prospect ever maintained by his mind, are in nothing made clearer to us than in the extent and variety of his friendships. They were sufficiently elastic, as we have seen, to include many diverse communities, and such extremes as Joseph Watson and James Ralph, George Whitefield and Lord le Despencer, John Jay and General Charles Lee, Polly and Madame Brillon. The natural, instinctive side of his character is brought to our attention very plainly in a letter from him to David Hartley, which reveals in an engaging manner the profound effect worked upon his imagination by a poor peasant, but véritable philosophe, who had walked all the way to Paris from one of the French provinces for the purpose of communicating a purely benevolent project to the world. But, at the same time, he never found any difficulty in accommodating himself to aberrant or artificial types of character, or to alien usages, customs and modes of thought. He belonged to the genus homo not to the species homo Americanus or Britannicus. Like the politic and much-experienced Ulysses of Tennyson, familiar with

he could say,

Wherever he went into the world, he realized his own aspiration that the time might come when a philosopher could set his foot on any part of the earth, and say, "This is my Country." Wherever he happened to be, he was too exempt from local bias, thought thoughts, cherished feelings, and spoke a language too universal not to make a strong appeal to good will and friendship.

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