Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (45 page)

Temple arrived at his stepmother’s house at the end of July, typically forgetting some of his clothes on the way. (“There seems to be,” his grandfather wrote, “a kind of fatality attending the conveyance of your things between Amboy and Philadelphia.”) The elder Franklin sent along some money for Elizabeth, but she begged for something more. Couldn’t he “sign a parole” so that William would be permitted to return to his family? “Consider, my Dear and Honored Sir, that I am now pleading the cause of your son and my beloved husband.” Franklin refused, and he dismissed her pitiful complaints about her plight by noting that others were suffering far worse at the hands of the British. Nor did he make any effort to see her when he passed through Amboy on his way to meet Lord Howe. Ever since her marriage to his son, he had shown little desire to befriend her, visit her, or correspond with her, much less engage in any of the flatteries he usually lavished on younger women.
⁵¹

Temple was more sympathetic. In early September, he made plans to travel to Connecticut so he could visit his captive father and bring him a letter from Elizabeth. But Franklin forbade him to go, saying that it was important for him to resume his studies in Philadelphia soon. Temple kept pushing. He had no secret information, just a letter he wanted to deliver. His grandfather remained unmoved. “You are mistaken in imagining that I am apprehensive of your carrying dangerous intelligence to your father,” he chided. “You would have been more in the right if you could have suspected me of a little tender concern for your welfare.” If Elizabeth wanted to write her husband, he added, she could do so in care of the Connecticut governor, and he even included some franked stationery for that purpose.

Franklin, in fact, realized that his grandson had other motives—one bad, the other honorable—for wanting to go see his father: “I rather think the project takes its rise from your own inclination to ramble and disinclination for returning to college, joined with a desire I do not blame of seeing a father you have so much reason to love.” Not blaming him for wanting to see his father? Saying he had so much reason to love him? For Franklin, such sentiments with regard to William were somewhat surprising, even poignant. They did, however, come in a letter that had denied William’s son the right to visit him.
⁵²

The dispute became moot less than a week later. Careful about keeping the news of his appointment as envoy to France secret, Franklin was cryptic. “I hope you will return hither immediately and your mother will make no objections to it,” he wrote. “Something offering here that will be much to your advantage.”

In deciding to take Temple to France, Franklin never consulted with Elizabeth, who would die a year later without seeing her husband or stepson again. Nor did he inform William, who did not learn until later of the departure of his sole son, a lad he had gotten to know for only a year. It is a testament to the powerful personal force exerted by Benjamin Franklin, a man so often callous about the feelings of his family, that William was so pitifully accepting of the situation. “If the old gentleman has taken the boy with him,” he wrote to his forlorn wife, “I hope it is only to put him in some foreign university.”
⁵³

Franklin also decided to take along his other grandson, Benny Bache. So it was an odd trio that set sail on October 27, 1776, aboard a cramped but speedy American warship aptly named
Reprisal:
a restless old man about to turn 71, plagued by poor health but still ambitious and adventurous, heading for a friendless land from whence he was convinced he would never return, accompanied by a high-spirited, frivolous lad of about 17 and a brooding, eager-to-please child who had just turned 7. The experience in Europe would be good for his grandchildren, he hoped, and their presence would be comforting to him. Two years later, writing of Temple but using words that applied to both boys, Franklin explained one reason he wanted them along: “If I die, I have a child to close my eyes.”
⁵⁴

Paris, 1776–1778

The rough winter crossing aboard the
Reprisal,
though a fast thirty days, “almost demolished me,” Franklin later recalled. The salt beef brought back his boils and rashes, the other food was too tough for his old teeth, and the small frigate pitched so violently that he barely slept. So, on sighting the coast of Brittany, an exhausted Franklin, unwilling to wait for winds to take him closer to Paris, had a fishing boat ferry him and his two bewildered grandchildren to the tiny village of Auray. Until he could get to Paris by coach, he wrote John Hancock, he would avoid taking “a public character” and try to keep a low profile, “thinking it prudent first to know whether the court is ready and willing to receive ministers publicly from the Congress.”
¹

France was not a place, however, where the world’s most famous American would find, nor truly seek, anonymity. When his carriage reached Nantes, the city feted him at a hastily arranged grand ball, where Franklin reigned as a celebrity philosopher-statesman and Temple marveled at the height of the women’s ornately adorned coiffures. After seeing Franklin’s soft fur cap, the ladies of Nantes began wearing wigs that imitated it, a style that became known as the
coiffure à la Franklin.

To the French, this lightning-defying scientist and tribune of liberty who had unexpectedly appeared on their shores was a symbol both of the virtuous frontier freedom romanticized by Rousseau and of the Enlightenment’s reasoned wisdom championed by Voltaire. For more than eight years he would play his roles to the hilt. In a clever and deliberate manner, leavened by the wit and joie de vivre the French so adored, he would cast the American cause, through his own personification of it, as that of the natural state fighting the corrupted one, the enlightened state fighting the irrational old order.

Into his hands, almost as much as those of Washington and others, had been placed the fate of the Revolution. Unless he could secure the support of France—its aid, its recognition, its navy—America would find it difficult to prevail. Already the greatest American scientist and writer of his time, he would display a dexterity that would make him the greatest American diplomat of all times. He played to the romance as well as the reason that entranced France’s
philosophes,
to the fascination with America’s freedom that captivated its public, and to the cold calculation of national interest that moved its ministers.

With its 440-year tradition of regular wars with England, France was a ripe potential ally, especially because it yearned to avenge the loss it suffered in the most recent American outcropping of these struggles, the Seven Years’ War. Just before he left, Franklin learned that France had agreed to send some aid to the American rebels secretly through a cutout commercial entity.

But convincing France to do more was not going to be easy. The nation was now financially strapped, ostensibly at peace with Britain, and understandably cautious about betting big on a country that, after Washington’s precipitous retreat from Long Island, looked like a loser. In addition, neither Louis XVI nor his ministers were instinctive champions of America’s desire, which might prove contagious, to cast off hereditary monarchs.

Among Franklin’s cards was his fame, and he was among a long line of statesmen, from Richelieu to Metternich to Kissinger, to realize that with celebrity came cachet, and with that came influence. His lightning theories had been proved in France in 1752, his collected works published there in 1773, and a new edition of Poor Richard’s
The Way to Wealth,
entitled
La Science du Bonhomme Richard,
was published soon after his arrival and reprinted four times in two years. His fame was so great that people lined the streets hoping to get a glimpse of his entry into Paris on December 21, 1776.

Within weeks, all of fashionable Paris seemed to desire some display of his benign countenance. Medallions were struck in various sizes, engravings and portraits were hung in homes, and his likeness graced snuffboxes and signet rings. “The numbers sold are incredible,” he wrote his daughter, Sally. “These, with the pictures, busts and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere), have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.” The fad went so far as to mildly annoy, though still amuse, the king himself. He gave the Comtesse Diane de Polignac, who had bored him often with her praise of Franklin, a Sèvres porcelain chamber pot with his cameo embossed inside.
²

“His reputation was more universal than that of Leibniz, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more loved and esteemed,” John Adams would recall many years later, after his own jealousy of Franklin’s fame had somewhat subsided. “There was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in the kitchen who was not familiar with Franklin’s name.”
³

The French even tried to claim him as one of their own. He always assumed, as noted at the beginning of this book, that his surname came from the class of landowning English freemen known as franklins, and he was almost surely correct. But the
Gazette
of Amiens reported that the name Franquelin was common in the province of Picardie, from which many families had emigrated to England.

Various groups of French philosophers, in addition to the disciples of Voltaire and Rousseau, also made intellectual claims on him. Most notable were the physiocrats, who pioneered the field of economics and developed the doctrine of laissez-faire. The group became for him a new Junto, and he wrote essays for their monthly journal.

One of the most famous physiocrats, Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours (who emigrated in 1799 and with his son founded the Du-Pont chemical company), described his friend Franklin in almost mythic terms. “His eyes reveal a perfect equanimity,” he wrote, “and his lips the smile of an unalterable serenity.” Others were awed by the fact that he dressed so plainly and wore no wig. “Everything in him announced the simplicity and the innocence of primitive morals,” marveled one Parisian, who added the perfect French compliment about his love of silence: “He knew how to be impolite without being rude.”

His taciturnity and unadorned dress led many to mistake him for a Quaker. One French cleric reported shortly after Franklin’s arrival, “This Quaker wears the full dress of his sect. He has a handsome physiognomy, glasses always on his eyes, very little hair, a fur cap, which he always wears.” It was an impression he did little to correct, for Franklin knew that fascination about the Quakers was fashionable in France. Voltaire had famously extolled their peaceful simplicity in four of his “Letters on England,” and as Carl Van Doren has noted, “Paris admired the sect for its gentle and resolute merits.”
⁴

Franklin was well aware of, and amused by, the image he created for himself. Picture me, he wrote a friend, “very plainly dressed, wearing my thin gray straight hair that peeps out under my only coiffure, a fine fur cap, which comes down to my forehead almost to my spectacles. Think how this must appear among the powdered heads of Paris.” It was a very different image from the one he had adopted, and wrote Polly about, during his first visit in 1767, when he bought “a little bag wig” and had his tailor “transform me into a Frenchman.”
⁵

Indeed, his new rustic look was partly a pose, the clever creation of America’s first great image-maker and public relations master. He wore his soft marten fur cap, the one he had picked up on his trip to Canada, during most of his social outings, including when he was received at the famous literary salon of Madame du Deffand shortly after his arrival, and it became a feature in the portraits and medallions of him. The cap, like that worn by Rousseau, served as his badge of homespun purity and New World virtue, just as his ever-present spectacles (also featured in portraits) became an emblem of wisdom. It helped him play the part that Paris imagined for him: that of the noble frontier philosopher and simple backwoods sage—even though he had lived most of his life on Market Street and Craven Street.

Franklin reciprocated France’s adoration. “I find them a most amiable nation to live with,” he wrote Josiah Quincy. “The Spaniards are by common opinion supposed to be cruel, the English proud, the Scotch insolent, the Dutch avaricious, etc., but I think the French have no national vice ascribed to them. They have some frivolities, but they are harmless.” As he put it to a Boston relative, “This is the civilest nation upon earth.”
⁶

In England, Franklin had set up a cozy household with a surrogate family. In France, he quickly assembled not merely a household but a miniature court. It was situated, both figuratively and geographically, between the salons of Paris and the palace at Versailles, and it would grow to include not only the requisite new family but also a visiting cast of fellow commissioners, deputies, spies, intellectuals, courtiers, and flirtatious female admirers.

The village of Passy, where Franklin reigned over this coterie, was a collection of villas and chateaux about three miles from the center of Paris on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. One of the finest of these estates was owned by Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, a nou-veau riche merchant who had made a fortune trading in the East Indies and was now motivated—by sincere sympathies as well as the prospect of profit—to associate himself with the American cause. He offered, initially at no rent, rooms and board to Franklin and his crowd, and his Passy compound became America’s first foreign embassy.

It was an idyllic arrangement for Franklin. He had a “fine house” and a “large garden to walk in” as well as an “abundance of acquaintances,” he wrote to Mrs. Stevenson. The only thing missing was “that order and economy in my family that reigned in it when under your direction,” he added, giving only the slightest hint that he might like her to come over and be his household partner again. But it was not a suggestion that he pushed, for he found himself quite comfortable with a new set of domestic and female companions. “I never remember to have seen my grandfather in better health,” Temple wrote Sally. “The air of Passy and the warm bath three times a week have made quite a young man out of him. His pleasing gaiety makes everybody in love with him, especially the ladies, who permit him always to kiss them.”

Chaumont’s main house (on which Franklin erected a lightning rod) was set amid chains of pavilions, formal gardens, stately terraces, and an octagonal pond that overlooked the Seine. Dinners, served at 2
P.M.
, were seven-course extravaganzas, and Franklin built a wine collection that soon included more than one thousand bottles of Bordeaux, champagne, and sherry. The witty Madame Chaumont served as hostess, and her eldest daughter became Franklin’s “ma femme.” He also took a fancy to the teenage daughter of the seigneur of the village, whom he referred to wishfully as his “mistress.” (When she ended up marrying the Marquis de Tonnerre, Madame Chaumont punned, “All the rods of Mr. Franklin could not prevent the lightning [in French,
tonnerre
] from falling on Mademoiselle.”)

Through his trading companies, Chaumont procured supplies for the American cause, including saltpeter and uniforms. Because he emulated Poor Richard’s injunction to do well by doing good, many questioned his motives. “He would grasp, if he could, the commerce of the thirteen colonies for himself alone,” wrote one newspaper.
⁷

Chaumont also served as Franklin’s publicist. He commissioned the great Italian sculptor Giovanni Battista Nini to produce a series of Franklin medallions and the king’s portraitist Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis to do a majestic oil painting of him. Franklin’s favorite, the Duplessis now hangs in a room atop the grand stairway of New York’s Metropolitan Museum (others by Duplessis are in Washington’s National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere).

Benny was placed in a nearby boarding school, where he quickly mastered French; he came to dine, occasionally with some American classmates, with his grandfather every Sunday. Jonathan Williams, a grandnephew, arrived from England and for a while was entrusted to oversee commercial transactions. Temple served as Franklin’s very loyal aide, though not a great one; he became a bit of a playboy who had yet to master most of his grandfather’s thirteen virtues.

Franklin, who was kept busy wrestling with the complexities of arms shipments and commercial transactions, would need whatever loyalty and family support he could muster, as he would find himself working alongside one co-commissioner who was corrupt, another who hated everyone, a secretary who was a spy, a cook who was an embezzler, and a landlord who hoped to be a profiteer.

Of the motley lot, the corrupt commissioner, who was in fact quite congenial and not all that dishonest, was Franklin’s favorite. Silas Deane of Connecticut had arrived in France in July 1776, five months before Franklin, and helped arrange France’s first secret shipment of aid. In that endeavor, he worked with a most unlikely middleman: Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a diplomatic dabbler, would-be profiteer, and the world-famous dramatist who had just written
The Barber of Seville
and was soon to write
The Marriage of Figaro.
Like Beaumarchais, Deane seemed to have sticky fingers and inscrutable accounting methods. He would be recalled in a year to face, and fail, a congressional audit. But Franklin remained friendly throughout.

The great antagonist amid this menagerie, to Deane and then to Franklin, was the third American commissioner, Arthur Lee of Virginia. He was suspicious of all around him to the point of paranoia, a trait only partly vindicated by the fact that he was right in many cases. He had been jealous of Franklin since serving with him as a colonial agent in London (and being part of a rival land scheme syndicate). Along with his brothers, William Lee and Richard Henry Lee, he was behind many of the rumors casting doubts on Franklin’s loyalty and character.