Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (51 page)

THE GOUT: The world may think as it pleases; it is always very complaisant to itself, and sometimes to its friends; but I very well know that the quantity of meat and drink proper for a man who takes a reasonable degree of exercise, would be too much for another who never takes any…

If your situation in life is a sedentary one, your amusements, your recreation, at least, should be active. You ought to walk or ride; or, if the weather prevents that, play at billiards. But let us examine your course of life. While the mornings are long, and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four dishes of tea with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested.

Immediately afterwards you sit down to write at your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise. But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you say, to your sedentary condition. But what is your practice after dinner? Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have dined would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours!

…You know M. Brillon’s gardens, and what fine walks they contain; you know the handsome flight of an hundred steps which lead from the terrace above to the lawn below. You have been in the practice of visiting this amiable family twice a week, after dinner, and it is a maxim of your own, that “a man may take as much exercise in walking a mile up and down stairs, as in ten on level ground.” What an opportunity was here for you to have had exercise in both these ways! Did you embrace it, and how often?

MR. F.: I cannot immediately answer that question.

THE GOUT: I will do it for you; not once.
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He sent the bagatelle to Madame Brillon along with a letter that, in a cheeky way, rebutted her poem’s contention “that mistresses have had a share in producing this painful malady.” As he pointed out, “When I was a young man and enjoyed more of the favors of the fair sex than I do at present, I had no gout. Hence, if the ladies of Passy had shown more of that Christian charity that I have so often recommended to you in vain, I should not be suffering from the gout right now.” Sex had become, by then, a topic of banter rather than of tension for them. “I will do my best for you, in a spirit of Christian charity,” she wrote back, “but to the exclusion of
your
brand of Christian charity.”

Franklin used his bagatelles as a way to improve his language skills; he would translate them back and forth, show them to friends like the Abbé de la Roche, and then incorporate corrections. He wrote his famous story about paying too much for a whistle as a child, for example, in two columns, the left in French and the right in English, with space in the margins for revisions. Because Madame Brillon spoke no English, Franklin sent her the French versions of his writings, often showing her the corrections others had made.

She was looser about grammar than about morals. “The corrector of your French spoiled your work,” she said of the edits la Roche made to the gout dialogue. “Leave your works as they are, use words that say things, and laugh at grammarians, who by their purity weaken all your sentences.” For example, Franklin often coined new French words, such as “indulger” (meaning “to indulge”), which his friends would then revise. Madame Brillon, however, found these neologisms charming. “A few purists might quibble with us, because those birds weigh words on a scale of cold erudition,” she wrote, but “since you seem to express yourself more forcefully than a grammarian, my judgment goes in your favor.”
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Franklin found it particularly difficult to master the language’s masculine and feminine distinctions, and he even jokingly put the word “masculines” in the feminine form, and “feminines” in the masculine when complaining about the need to look such things up in the dictionary. “For sixty years now [since age 16], masculine and feminine things—and I am not talking about modes and tenses—have been giving me a lot of trouble,” he noted wryly. “It will make me all the happier to go to paradise where, they say, all such distinctions will be abolished.”

So how good was Franklin’s French? By 1780, he was speaking and writing with great flourish and gusto, though not always with proper pronunciation and grammar. That approach appealed to most of his friends there, particularly the women, but not surprisingly, it offended John Adams. “Dr. Franklin is reported to speak French very well, but I find upon attending to him critically that he does not speak it grammatically,” Adams chided. “He acknowledged to me that he was wholly inattentive to grammar. His pronunciation, too, upon which the French gentlemen and ladies complimented him very highly, and which he seemed to think pretty well, I soon found out was very inaccurate.”
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The bagatelle that most enchanted his French friends, entitled “Conte,” was a parable about religious tolerance. A French officer who is about to die recounts a dream in which he arrives at the gates of heaven and watches St. Peter ask people about their religion. The first replies that he is a Catholic, and St. Peter says, “Take your place there among the Catholics.” A similar procedure follows for an Anglican and a Quaker. When the officer confesses that he has no religion, St. Peter is indulgent: “You can come in anyway; just find a place for yourself wherever you can.” (Franklin seems to have revised the manuscript a few times to make his point about tolerance clear, and in one version expressed it more forcefully as: “Enter anyway and take any place you wish.”)
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The tale echoed many of Franklin’s previous light writings advocating religious tolerance. Although Franklin’s belief in a benevolent God was becoming stronger as he grew older, the French intellectuals admired the fact that he did not embrace any religious sect. “Our freethinkers have adroitly sounded him on his religion,” one acquaintance wrote, “and they maintain that they have discovered he is one of their own, that is that he had none at all.”
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One of Franklin’s famous passions was chess, as evidenced by the late-night match he played in Madame Brillon’s bathroom. He saw the game as a metaphor for both diplomacy and life, a point that he made explicit in a bagatelle he wrote in 1779 on “The Morals of Chess,” which was based on an essay he had drafted in 1732 for his Philadelphia Junto. “The game of chess is not merely an idle amusement,” he began. “Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it. For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain and competitors or adversaries to contend with.”

Chess, he said, taught foresight, circumspection, caution, and the importance of not being discouraged. There was also an important etiquette to be practiced: never hurry your opponent, do not try to deceive by pretending to have made a bad move, and never gloat in victory: “Moderate your desire of victory over your adversary, and be pleased with the one over yourself.” There were even times when it was prudent to let an opponent retract a bad move: “You may indeed happen to lose the game to your opponent, but you will win what is better, his esteem.”
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During one of Franklin’s late-night chess matches in Passy, a messenger arrived with an important set of dispatches from America. Franklin waved him off until the game was finished. Another time, he was playing with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. “Ah,” said the duchess, “we do not take Kings so.” Replied Franklin in a famous quip: “We do in America.”
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One night in Passy he was absorbed in a game when the candles flickered out. Refusing to quit, he sent his opponent to find more. The man quickly returned with a surprised look and the news that it was already light outside. Franklin threw open the shutters. “You are right, it is daytime,” he said. “Let’s go to bed.”

The incident was the inspiration for a bagatelle he wrote about his surprise at discovering that the sun rose and poured forth light at 6 in the morning. By this stage in his life, it should be noted, he no longer shared Poor Richard’s belief in being early to bed and early to rise. He declared that this discovery would surprise his readers, “who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon.” This led him to conclude that if people would simply get up much earlier, they could save a lot of money on candles. He even included some pseudo-scientific calculations of what could be saved by this “Economical Project” if during the summer months Parisians would shift their sleeping time seven hours earlier: close to 97 million livres, “an immense sum that the city of Paris might save every year by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.”

Franklin concluded by bestowing the idea on the public without any request for royalty or reward. “I expect only to have the honor of it,” he declared. He ended up with far more honor than he could have imagined: most histories of the invention of Daylight Savings Time credit the idea to this essay by Franklin, even though he wrote it mockingly and did not come up with the idea of actually shifting clocks by an hour during the summer.
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The essay, which parodied both human habits and scientific treatises, reflected (as did his writings as a youth) the influence of Jonathan Swift. “It was the type of irony Swift would have written in place of ‘A Modest Proposal’ if he had spent five years in the company of Mmes. Helvétius and Brillon,” notes Alfred Owen Aldridge.
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A similar scientific spoof, even more fun and famous (or perhaps notorious), was the mock proposal he made to the Royal Academy of Brussels that they study the causes and cures of farting. Noting that the academy’s leaders, in soliciting questions to study, claimed to “esteem utility,” he suggested a “serious enquiry” that would be worthy of “this enlightened age”:

With a pretense of scientific seriousness, Franklin proceeded to explain how different foods and minerals change the odor of farts. Might not a mineral such as lime work to make the smell pleasant? “This is worth the experiment!” There would be “immortal honor” attached to whoever made the discovery, he argued, for it would be far more “useful [than] those discoveries in science that have heretofore made philosophers famous.” All the works of Aristotle and Newton, he noted, do little to help those plagued by gas. “What comfort can the vortices of Descartes give to a man who has whirlwinds in his bowels!” The invention of a fart perfume would allow hosts to pass wind freely with the comfort that it would give pleasure to their guests. Compared to this luxury, he said with a bad pun, previous discoveries “are, all together, scarcely worth a Fart-hing.”

Although he printed this farce privately at his press in Passy, Franklin apparently had qualms and never released it publicly. He did, however, send it to friends, and he noted in particular that it might be of interest to one of them, the famous chemist and gas specialist Joseph Priestley, “who is apt to give himself airs.”
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Yet another delightful essay of mock science was written as a letter to the Abbé Morellet. It celebrated the wonders of wine and the glories of the human elbow:

As for the human elbow, Franklin explained, it was important that it be located at the right place, otherwise it would be hard to drink wine. If Providence had placed the elbow too low on the arm, it would be hard for the forearm to reach the mouth. Likewise, if the elbow had been placed too high, the forearm would overshoot the mouth. “But by the actual situation, we are enabled to drink at our ease, the glass going exactly to the mouth. Let us, then, with glass in hand, adore this benevolent wisdom; let us adore and drink!”
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Where did this new circle of ersatz family members leave Franklin’s actual family? At a distance. His daughter, Sally, who adored him, wrote of her diligence in restoring their house in Philadelphia after the British had withdrawn in May 1778. But whereas the letters from his French lady friends began “Cher Papa,” most of those from his real daughter began more stiffly, with “Dear and honored sir.” His replies, addressed to “Dear Sally” and occasionally “My Dear Child,” often expressed delight about the exploits of his grandchildren. But sometimes even his compliments were freighted with exhortations. “If you knew how happy your letters make me,” he lectured at one point, “I think you would write oftener.”