Benjamin Franklin: Self-Revealed, Volume 1 — Chapter 7, Franklin's French Friends, Part 2

But, after all, it was the circle of intimate friends, to which Franklin promised to introduce John Jay on the arrival of Jay in France, that constitutes the chief interest of the former's social life in France.

Three of these friends were Madame Helvétius, Madame Brillon and the Comtesse d'Houdetot.

With Madame Helvétius, he dined every Saturday at Auteuil, with Madame Brillon twice a week at the home of her husband, not far from his, and with the Comtesse d'Houdetot frequently at Sanois, in the Valley of Montmorency.

Madame Helvétius was known to her friends as "Our Lady of Auteuil."

She was the widow of Helvétius, the philosopher, who had left her a handsome fortune, amassed by him when one of the farmers-general.

In testimony of her affection for him, she kept under glass, on a table in her bedroom, a monument erected to his memory, with his picture hung above it.

Her _salon_ was one of the best-known in France, and it was maintained on such a sumptuous scale that, in one of his letters, after his return to America, Franklin told her that often in his dreams he placed himself by her side on one of her thousand sofas.

It was at Auteuil that he passed some of his happiest hours in France, plying its mistress with flattery and badinage, and enjoying the music of her two daughters, known to the household as "the Stars," and the conversation of her friends, the younger Cabanis, and the Abbés Morellet and de la Roche.

One of the amusements of the inner circle at Auteuil was to read aloud to each other little trifles, full of point and grace which they had composed.

Thus, though after Franklin had returned to America, was ushered into the world the Abbé Morellet's _Very Humble Petition to Madame Helvétius from her Cats_--animals which appear to have had a position in her home as assured as that of "the Stars" or the Abbés themselves; and several of the wittiest of the productions, which Franklin called his Bagatelles, originated in the same way.

If homage, seasoned with delightful humor and wit, could have kept the mistress of Auteuil, at the age of sixty, from incurring the malice of the female contemporary, who, we are told by Miss Adams, compared her with the ruins of Palmyra, that of Franklin would assuredly have done it.

When she complained that he had not been to see her for a long time, he evaded the reproach of absence by replying, "I am waiting, Madame, until the nights are longer."

Whatever others might think, she was to him, "his fair friend at Auteuil," who still possessed "health and personal charms."

What cleverer application could there be than this of the maxim of Hesiod that the half is sometimes more than the whole: Very dear Friend, we shall have some good music to-morrow morning at breakfast.

Can you give me the pleasure of sharing in it.

The time will be half past ten.

This is a problem that a mathematician will experience some trouble in explaining; In sharing other things, each of us has only one portion; but in sharing pleasures with you, my portion is doubled.

The part is more than the whole.

On another occasion, when Madame Helvétius reminded Franklin that she expected to meet him at Turgot's, he replied, "Mr. Franklin never forgets any party at which Madame Helvétius is expected.

He even believes that, if he were engaged to go to Paradise this morning, he would pray for permission to remain on earth until half-past one, to receive the embrace promised him at the Turgots."

Poor Deborah seems altogether lost, and forgotten when we read these lines that he wrote to the Abbé de la Roche: I have often remarked, when reading the works of M. Helvétius, that, although we were born and reared in two countries so remote from each other, we have frequently had the same thoughts; and it is a reflection very flattering to me that we have loved the same studies, and, as far as we have both known them, the same friends, and the same woman.

But the image of Deborah was not so completely effaced from Franklin's memory that he could not conjure up her shade for a moment to excite a retaliatory impulse in the breast which he had found insensible to his proposals of marriage, serious, or affected.

If Madame Helvétius, who was illiterate like Deborah, did not appreciate the light, aërial humor of the following dream from the pen of the author of _The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams_, we may be sure that her witty Abbés did: Mortified by your cruel resolution, declared by you so positively yesterday evening, to remain single the rest of your life, out of respect for your dear husband, I retired to my home, threw myself upon my bed, and dreamt that I was dead and in the Elysian Fields.

I was asked whether I wished to see any persons in particular.

"Conduct me to the philosophers," I replied.

"There are two who live here close by in this garden; they are very good neighbors and very friendly with each other," I was told.

"Who are they?"

"Socrates and Helvétius."

"I esteem them both immensely, but let me see Helvétius first, because I understand a little French, but not a word of Greek."

He received me with much courtesy, having known me, he said, by reputation for some time past.

He asked me a thousand questions about the war, the present state of religion, of liberty, and politics in France.

"You do not ask me then," I said, "anything about your dear _amie_, Madame Helvétius; yet she loves you still exceedingly, and I was at her home only an hour ago."

"Ah," said he, "you bring back to me my past happiness, but it must be forgotten to be happy here.

During several of my first years here, I thought only of her, but at length I am consoled.

I have taken another wife, one as much like her as I could find.

She is not, it is true, quite so handsome, but she has as much good sense, and much _esprit_, and she loves me infinitely.

Her continuous aim is to please me, and she is at this moment gone to look up the best nectar and ambrosia to regale me with this evening; stay here awhile, and you will see her."

"I perceive," said I, "that your former _amie_ is more faithful than you are; for she has had several good offers, but has refused them all.

I confess that I myself have loved her to distraction, but she was obdurate, and has rejected me peremptorily for love of you."

"I pity your misfortune," said he, "for in truth she is a good and handsome woman, and very lovable."

"But are not the Abbé de la R---- and the Abbé M---- still some times at her house?"

"Yes, to be sure, for she has not lost a single one of your friends."

"If you had induced the Abbé M----(with some good coffee and cream) to say a word for you, you would, perhaps, have succeeded; for he is as subtle a reasoner as Duns Scotus or St. Thomas; he marshals his arguments in such good order that they become almost irresistible.

And if the Abbé de la R---- had been induced (by some fine edition of an old classic) to say a word against you, that would have been better; for I have always observed that when he advised her to do anything she had a very strong inclination to do the reverse."

As he was saying this, the new Madame Helvétius entered with the nectar, and I recognized her instantly as my former American _amie_, Mrs. Franklin.

I laid claim to her but she said to me coldly: "I was a good wife to you for forty-nine years and four months, almost a half century; be content with that.

I have formed a new connection here which will last to eternity."

Indignant at this refusal of my Eurydice, I at once resolved to quit those ungrateful shades, and to return to this good world, and to gaze again upon the sun and you.

Here I am; let us avenge ourselves.

It is an animated picture, too, that Franklin strikes off of Our Lady of Auteuil in a letter to Cabanis, when the latter had been absent for a time from Auteuil: We often talk of you at Auteuil, where everybody loves you.

I now and then offend our good lady who can not long retain her displeasure, but, sitting in state on her sopha, extends graciously her long, handsome arm, and says "la; baisez ma main: Je vous pardonne," with all the dignity of a sultaness.

She is as busy as ever, endeavoring to make every creature about her happy, from the Abbés down thro' all ranks of the family to the birds and Poupon.

Poupon was one of the fair lady's eighteen cats.

This letter ends with the request that Cabanis present to his father the writer's thanks to him for having gotten so valuable a son.

A lively note to Cabanis is in the same vein: M.

Franklin risen, washed, shaved, combed, beautified to the highest degree, of which he is capable, entirely dressed, and on the point of going out, with his head full of the four Mesdames Helvétius, and of the sweet kisses that he proposes to snatch from them, is much mortified to find the possibility of this happiness being put off until next Sunday.

He will exercise as much patience as he can, hoping to see one of these ladies at the home of M. de Chaumont Wednesday.

He will be there in good time to see her enter with that grace and dignity which charmed him so much seven weeks ago in the same place.

He even plans to seize her there, and to keep her at his home for the rest of her life.

His remaining three Mesdames Helvétius at Auteuil can suffice for the canaries and the Abbés. Another note to Cabanis illustrates how readily pleasantry of this kind ran in the eighteenth century into gross license: M.

Franklin is sorry to have caused the least hurt to those beautiful tresses that he always regards with pleasure.

If that Lady likes to pass her days with him, he would like as much to pass his nights with her; and since he has already given many of his days to her, although he had such a small remnant of them to give, she would seem ungrateful to have never given him a single one of her nights, which run continually to pure waste, without promoting the good fortune of any one except Poupon.

When the reader is told that this letter ended with the words, "to be shown to our Lady of Auteuil," his mind is not unprepared for the graphic description by Abigail Adams of a dinner at which Madame Helvétius was the central figure: She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air; upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, "Ah, mon Dieu, where is Franklin?

Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?"

You must suppose her speaking all this in French.

"How I look!"

said she, taking hold of a chemise made of tiffany, which she had on over a blue lutestring, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman; her hair was frizzled; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty gauze half-handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever my maids wore was bowed on behind.

She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders.

She ran out of the room;

when she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other; upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, "Hélas!

Franklin;" then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead.

When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams.

She carried on the chief of the conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hands into the Doctor's, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both the gentlemen's chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor's neck.

I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from affectation or stiffness of behaviour, and one of the best women in the world.

For this I must take the Doctor's word; but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although sixty years of age, and a widow.

I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.

After dinner, she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet.

She had a little lapdog, who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite.

This she kissed, and when he wet the floor she wiped it up with her chemise.

This is one of the Doctor's most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him.

She is rich, and is my near neighbour; but I have not yet visited her.

Thus you see, my dear, that manners differ exceedingly in different countries.

I

hope however, to find among the French ladies manners more consistent with my ideas of decency, or I shall be a mere recluse.

This, of course, in part, was but the New England snowdrop expressing its disapproval of the full-blown red rose of France, but it is impossible for all the pigments in the picture, painted by the skilful hand of Abigail Adams, to have been supplied by the moral austerity of Puritanism.

Miss Adams, we might add, followed up her mother's impression with a prim ditto in her journal: "Dined at Mr. Franklin's by invitation; a number of gentlemen and Madame Helvétius, a French lady sixty years of age.

Odious indeed do our sex appear when divested of those ornaments, with which modesty and delicacy adorn us."

But we suspect that the Doctor was right in saying that Madame Helvétius, free and tawdry as she seemed to Abigail Adams and her daughter, was one of the best women in the world; that is to say her world.

We are told that, when she was convalescing from an illness, four hundred persons assembled at Auteuil to express the pleasure they felt at the prospect of her recovery.

Beneath the noisy, lax manners, which Mrs. Adams delineates so mercilessly, there must have been another and a very different Madame Helvétius to have won such a tribute as the following from a man who had known what it was to be tenderly beloved by more than one pure, thoroughly refined and accomplished woman: And now I mention your friends, let me tell you, that I have in my way been trying to form some hypothesis to account for your having so many, and of such various kinds.

I see that statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets, and men of learning of all sorts are drawn around you, and seem as willing to attach themselves to you as straws about a fine piece of amber.

It is not that you make pretensions to any of their sciences; and if you did, similarity of studies does not always make people love one another.

It is not that you take pains to engage them; artless simplicity is a striking part of your character.

I would not attempt to explain it by the story of the ancient, who, being asked why philosophers sought the acquaintance of kings, and kings not that of philosophers, replied that philosophers knew what they wanted, which was not always the case with kings.

Yet thus far the comparison may go, that we find in your sweet society that charming benevolence, that amiable attention to oblige, that disposition to please and be pleased, which we do not always find in the society of one another.

It springs from you; it has its influence on us all, and in your company we are not only pleased with you, but better pleased with one another and ourselves.

There can be no doubt that the friendship between the two was a real, genuine sentiment.

When Franklin was doubting whether he was not too old and decrepit to cross the Atlantic, she was one of the three friends who urged him to spend his last days in France, and live with them.

It was hardly fair, therefore, when she exclaimed after the departure of Franklin from France, in the presence of Madame Brillon, "Ah, that great man, that dear man, we shall see him no more," for Madame Brillon to retort, "It is entirely your fault, Madame."

From Havre he sent back tender farewells to his "très chere amie."

They were awaiting, he said, their baggage and fellow-voyager, Mr. Houdon, the sculptor.

"When they come, we shall quit France, the country of the world that I love the best; and I shall leave there my dear Helvetia.

She can be happy there.

I am not sure of being happy in America; but it is necessary for me to go there.

Things seem to me to be badly arranged here below, when I see beings so well constituted to be happy together compelled to separate."

Then after a message of friendship to "the Abbés the good Abbés," the _vale_ dies out in these fond words: "I do not tell you that I love you.

I might be told that there was nothing strange or meritorious in that, because the whole world loves you.

I only hope that you will always love me a little."

Nor did the separation worked by the Atlantic produce any change in these feelings.

In the letters written by Franklin to Madame Helvétius, and the members of her circle, after his return to Philadelphia, there is the same spirit of affection for her and for them, as well as a wistful retrospect of his chats with her on her thousand sofas, his walks with her in her garden, and the repasts at her table, always seasoned by sound sense, sprightliness and friendship.

One of his commissions seems to have been to obtain a cardinal red bird for the "good dame," as he calls her in a letter to the Abbé Morellet from Philadelphia.

"The good Dame, whom we all love, and whose Memory I shall love and honour as long as I have any Existence," were his words.

But the commission was difficult of execution.

The Virginia cardinal, he wrote to the Abbé, was a tender bird that stood the sea but poorly.

Several sent out to France for their dame by Mr. Alexander, in his tobacco ships, had never arrived, he understood, and, "unless a Friend was going in the Ship who would take more than common Care of them," he supposed, "one might send an hundred without landing one alive."

They would be very happy, I know [he said], if they were once under her Protection; but they cannot come to her, and she will not come to them.

She may remember the Offer I made her of 1,000 Acres of Woodland, out of which she might cut a great Garden and have 1,000 Aviaries if she pleased.

I have a large Tract on the Ohio where Cardinals are plenty.

If I had been a Cardinal myself perhaps I might have prevail'd with her.

In his efforts to transport the Cardinal, Franklin even enlisted the services of Mr. Paradise, who, if contemporary gossip is reliable, might well have pleaded the preoccupation imposed upon him of protecting himself from the beak of his own termagant wife.

Madame Helvétius, however, was not so eager for a cardinal as not to be willing to wait until one could be brought over by a proper escort.

"I am in no hurry at all," she wrote to Franklin; "I will wait; for I am not willing to be the death of these pretty creatures.

I will wait."

In this same letter, there is an amusing mixture of tenderness and banter.

Declining health and advancing years, she said, would but enable them the sooner to meet again as well as to meet again those whom they had loved, she a husband and he a wife; "but I believe," she wipes the moisture from her eyes long enough to say, "that you who have been a rogue (_coquin_) will be restored to more than one."

From what we have said, it is plain enough that the friendship felt by Madame Helvétius for the Abbés Morellet and de la Roche was shared by Franklin.

When he touched at Southampton, after leaving Havre, on his return to America, he wafted another fond farewell to Madame Helvétius; "I will always love you," he said, "think of me sometimes, and write sometimes to your B. F."

This letter, too, contained the usual waggish reference to the Abbés. "Adieu, my very, very, very dear amie.

Wish us a good voyage, and tell the good Abbés to pray for us, since that is their profession."

The _Very Humble Petition to Madame Helvétius from her Cats_ was long ascribed to Franklin, but it was really written by the Abbé Morellet.

After reading it, Franklin wrote to the Abbé that the rapidity, with which the good lady's eighteen cats were increasing, would, in time, make their cause insupportable, and that their friends should, therefore, advise them to submit voluntarily either to transportation or castration.

How deeply the Abbé Morellet was attached to Franklin is feelingly revealed in the letters which he wrote to him after the latter had arrived safely in America; to say nothing of the Abbé's Memoirs.

May your days [he wrote in one of these letters] be prolonged and be free from pain; may your friends long taste the sweetness and the charm of your society, and may those whom the seas have separated from you be still happy in the thought that the end of your career will be, as our good La Fontaine says, "the evening of a fine day."

Then, after some political reflections, suggested by the liberal institutions of America, the Abbé indulges in a series of gay comments on the habit that their Lady of Auteuil had, in her excessive love of coffee, of robbing him of his share of the cream, on the vicious bulldog brought over by Temple to France from England and on the host of cats, that had multiplied in the woodhouse and woodyard at Auteuil, under the patronage of their mistress, and did nothing but keep their paws in their furred gowns, and warm themselves in the sun.

Friends of liberty, these cats, the Abbé said, were entirely out of place under the governments of Europe.

Nothing could be more suitable than to load a small vessel with them and ship them to America.

Another letter from the Abbé concluded with these heartfelt words: I shall never forget the happiness I have enjoyed in knowing you, and seeing you intimately.

I write to you from Auteuil, seated in your arm-chair, on which I have engraved, _Benjamin Franklin hic sedebat_, and having by my side the little bureau, which you bequeathed to me at parting, with a drawer full of nails to gratify the love of nailing and hammering, which I possess in common with you.

But believe me, I have no need of all these helps to cherish your endeared _remembrance_, and to love you, "Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos reget artus."

During their jolly intercourse in France, the Abbé Morellet and Franklin touched glasses in two highly convivial productions.

On one of the anniversaries of the birth of Franklin, or of American liberty, the Abbé could not remember which, the Abbé composed a drinking song in honor of Franklin, and among the letters written by Franklin when he was in France was one to the Abbé in which wine is lauded in terms of humorous exaggeration.

One of the verses of the Abbé's production refers to the American War, and has been translated in these words by Parton: "Never did mankind engage In a war with views more sage;

They seek freedom with design, To drink plenty of French wine;

Such has been The intent of Benjamin."

The other verses are no better and no worse, and the whole poem is even more inferior in wit to Franklin's letter to the Abbé than the _Very Humble Petition to Madame Helvétius from her Cats_, clever though it be, is to Franklin's _Journey to the Elysian Fields_.

If we had nothing but these bibulous productions to judge by, we might infer that love of wine, quite as much as love of Madame Helvétius was the tie of connection between the Abbé Morellet and Franklin.

Indeed, in the letter to Franklin with respect to the cats, the Abbé was quite as candid about expressing his partiality for one form of spirits as Franklin was in his unblushing eulogy of wine.

He did not know, he said, what duties his cats, in the unsettled condition of the commercial relations between France and the United States, would be made to pay on arriving at Philadelphia; "and then," he continued, "if my vessel should find nothing to load with among you but grain, it could not touch at our islands to take in sugar, or to bring me back good rum either, which I love much."

When the Abbé de la Roche made a gift to Franklin of a volume of Helvétius' poems, Franklin was quick to give him a recompense in the form of a little drinking song which he had composed some forty years before.

The plan of this poem is for the chorus, whenever the singer dwells upon any other source of gratification, to insist so vociferously upon friends and a bottle as the highest as to finally, so to speak, drown the singer out.

Thus: SINGER

"Fair Venus calls; her voice obey, In beauty's arms spend night and day.

The joys of love all joys excel, And loving's certainly doing well.

CHORUS

"Oh!

no!

Not so!

For honest souls know, Friends and a bottle still bear the bell."

In a letter to William Carmichael, enclosing his brilliant little bagatelle, _The Ephemera_, Franklin described Madame Brillon in these terms: The person to whom it was addressed is Madame Brillon, a lady of most respectable character and pleasing conversation; mistress of an amiable family in this neighbourhood, with which I spend an evening twice in every week.

She has, among other elegant accomplishments, that of an excellent musician; and, with her daughters, who sing prettily, and some friends who play, she kindly entertains me and my grand son with little concerts, a cup of tea, and a game of chess.

I call this _my Opera_, for I rarely go to the Opera at Paris.

Madame Brillon was the wife of a public functionary much older than herself, who yet, as her own letters to Franklin divulge, did not feel that strict fidelity to her was necessary to soften the difference in their ages.

My father [she wrote on one occasion to Franklin], marriage in this country is made by weight of gold.

On one end of the scale is placed the fortune of a boy, on the other that of a girl; when equality is found the affair is ended to the satisfaction of the relatives.

One does not dream of consulting taste, age, congeniality of character; one marries a young girl whose heart is full of youth's fire and its cravings to a man who has used them up; then one exacts that this woman be virtuous--my friend, this story is mine, and of how many others!

I shall do my best that it may not be that of my daughters, but alas, shall I be mistress of their fate?

The correspondence between Madame Brillon and Franklin was very voluminous.

Among the Franklin papers in the possession of the American Philosophical Society, there are no less than 119 letters from her to him, and in the same collection there are also the rough drafts of some of his letters in French to her.

More than one of them are marked with corrections by her hand.

Repeated statements of hers show that she took a very indulgent view of his imperfect mastery of the French language.

When he sent to the Brillons his French translation of his _Dialogue between the Gout and M. Franklin_, she returned it to him, "corrected and made worse in several particulars by a savant, and devoted to destruction by the critical notes of a woman who is no savant," and she took occasion at the same time to say: Your dialogue has greatly amused me, but your corrector of French has spoiled your work.

Believe me, leave your productions as they are, use words which mean something, and laugh at the grammarians who enfeeble all your phrases with their purisms.

If I had the brains, I should utter a dire diatribe against those who dare to touch you up, even if it were the Abbé de la Roche, or my neighbor Veillard.

And after reading _The Whistle_ of Franklin, she wrote to him, "M. Brillon has laughed heartily over the Whistle: we find that what you call your bad French often gives a piquant flavor to your narrative by reason of a certain turn of phraseology and the words you invent."

It may well be doubted whether there is anything more brilliant in literary history than the letters which make up the correspondence between Madame Brillon and Franklin, and the marvel is that the intellectual quality of his letters should, in every respect, be as distinctly French as that of hers.

His easy, fleeting touch, his unflagging vivacity, his wit, his fertility of invention, his amative coloring are all as thoroughly French as bonbons or champagne.

The tame domesticity of his forty-nine years of sober American wedlock, the calm, well-regulated flow of his thoughts and habits in conservative England, under the roof of Mrs. Stevenson, and at the country seat of the "Good Bishop," the Philosophy of Poor Richard, the Art of Virtue, are exchanged for a character which, except when a suitable match was to be found for M. Franklinet, as Madame Brillon called William Temple Franklin, apparently took no account of anything but the pursuit of pleasure, as pleasure was pursued by the people, who have, of all others, most nearly succeeded in giving to it the rank of a respectable divinity.

In all the letters of Franklin to Madame Brillon, there is not a sentiment with a characteristic American or English inflection in it.

How far his approaches to the beautiful and clever wife of M. Brillon were truly erotic, and how far merely the conventional courtship of a gifted but aged man, who had survived everything, that belongs to passion but its language, it is impossible to say.

We only know that, if his gallantry was specious merely, he maintained it with a degree of pertinacity, which there is only too much reason to believe might have had a different issue if it had been more youthful and genuine.

A handsome, talented Frenchwoman, of the eighteenth century, burdened with a faithless husband, not too old for the importunity of a heart full, to use her own expression, of youth's fire and cravings, and tolerant enough to sit on an admirer's knees, and to write responsive replies to letters from him, accompanied by a perpetual refrain of sexuality, would, to say the least, have been in considerable danger of forgetting her marriage vows if her Colin had been younger.

As it was, the tenderness of Madame Brillon for her "cher Papa" appears to have produced no results worse than a series of letters from her pen, as finished as enamel, which show that in every form of defensive warfare, literary or amorous, she was quite a match for the great man, who was disposed to forget how long he had lingered in a world which has nothing but a laugh for the efforts of December to pass itself off as May.

"Do you know, my dear Papa," she wrote to him on one occasion, "that people have criticized my pleasant habit of sitting on your lap, and yours of asking me for what I always refuse?"

In this world, she assured him, she would always be a gentle and virtuous woman, and the most that she would promise was to be his wife in Paradise, if he did not ogle the maidens there too much while waiting for her.