Chapter VII: Franklin's French Friends (2)

When the Abbe de la Roche made a gift to Franklin of a volume of Helvetius' 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 Abbe 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.

When the hardy resolution is once formed of reviewing the correspondence between Franklin and Madame Brillon, the most difficult task is that of compression.

What! [she wrote to "Monsieur Papa" from Nice, after
the capitulation of Cornwallis] You capture entire
armies in America, you burgoinise Cornwallis, you take
cannon, vessels, munitions of war, men, horses, etc.,
etc. you capture everything and from everybody, and the
gazette alone brings it to the knowledge of your
friends, who befuddle themselves with drinking to your
health, to that of Washington, of Independence, of the
King of France, of the Marquis de la Fayette, of the
Mrs: de Rochambault, Chalelux etc., etc. while you
do not exhibit a sign of life to them; yet you should
be a bon vivant at this time, although you rarely err
in that respect, and you are surely twenty years
younger because of this good news, which ought to bring
us a lasting peace after a glorious war.

To this letter, Franklin replied on Christmas Day of the year 1781, the birthday of the Dauphin of Heaven, he called it in the letter. He was very sensible, he said, to the greatness of their victory, but war was full of vicissitudes and uncertainty, and he played its game with the same evenness of temper that she had seen him bring to the good and bad turns of a game of chess. That was why he had said so little of the surrender, and had only remarked that nothing could make him perfectly happy under certain circumstances. The point, of course, was that still another capitulation was essential to his happiness. He then proceeds to tell Madame Brillon that, everywhere from Paris to Versailles, everyone spoke of her with respect, and some with affection and even admiration; which was music to his ears.

I often pass before your house [he adds]. It wears a
desolate look to me. Heretofore, I have broken the
commandment in coveting it along with my neighbour's
wife. Now I do not covet it. Thus I am the less a
sinner. But with regard to the wife, I always find
these commandments very inconvenient, and I am sorry
that we are cautioned to practise them. Should you find
yourself in your travels at the home of St. Peter, ask
him to recall them, as intended only for the Jews, and
as too irksome for good Christians.

These specimens are true to the language of the entire correspondence, but further excerpts from it will not be amiss for the purpose of enabling us to realize how agreeable the flirtation between the two must have been to have produced such a lengthy correspondence despite the fact that Franklin visited Madame Brillon at least every Wednesday and Saturday.

On Nov. 2, 1778, she wrote to Franklin as follows:

The hope that I had of seeing you here, my dear Papa,
has kept me from writing to you for Saturday's tea.
Hope is the remedy for all our ills. If one suffers,
one hopes for the end of the trouble; if one is with
friends, one hopes to remain with them always; if one
is away from them, one hopes to rejoin them,--and this
is the only hope that is left to me. I shall count the
days, the hours, the moments; each moment gone brings
me nearer to you. We like to grow older when it is the
only means of reuniting us to those whom we love. The
person, who takes life thus, seeks unceasingly to
shorten it; he plans, desires; without the future, it
seems to him that he has nothing. When my children are
grown up--in ten years--the trees in my garden will
shade me. The years slip by, then one regrets them. I
might have done such and such a thing, one says then.
Had I not been only twenty-five years old, I should not
have done the foolish thing of which I now repent. The
wise man alone enjoys the present, does not regret the
past, and awaits peacefully the future. The wise man,
who, like you, my Papa, has passed his youth in
acquiring knowledge and enlightening his fellow-men,
and his mature years in obtaining liberty for them,
brings a complaisant eye to bear on the past, enjoys
the present, and awaits the reward of his labors in the
future; but how many are wise? I try to become so, and
am so in some respects: I take no account of wealth,
vanity has little hold upon my heart; I like to do my
duty; I freely forgive society its errors and
injustices. But I love my friends with an idolatry that
often does me much harm: a prodigious imagination, a
soul of fire will always get the better of all my plans
and thoughts. I see, Papa, that I must never lay claim
to any but the one perfection of loving the most that
is possible. May this quality make you love your
daughter always!... Come, you always know how to
combine a great measure of wisdom with a touch of
roguishness; you ask Brillon for news of me at the very
moment when you are receiving a letter from me; you
play the part of the neglected one, just when you are
being spoiled, and then you deny it like a madman when
the secret is discovered. Oh, I have news of you!

... Mama, my children, and Mlle. Jupin present their
respects to you. May I venture to beg you to give my
kind regards to Mr. Franklinet?

Another letter in the same vein from Madame Brillon to Franklin bears date May 11, 1779:

You are quite right, my good Papa, we should find true
happiness only in peace of mind; it is not in our power
to change the nature of those with whom we live, nor to
check the course of the contradictions that surround
us. It is a wise man who speaks, and who tries to
comfort his too sensitive daughter by telling her the
truth. Oh, my father, I beseech your friendship, your
healthy philosophy; my heart hears you and is
submissive to you. Give me strength to take the place
of an indifference that your child can never feel. But
admit, my friend, that for one who knows how to love,
ingratitude is a frightful misfortune; that it is hard
for a woman who would give her life without hesitation
to insure her husband's happiness to see the results of
her exertions and her longings wiped out by intrigue,
and falsity. Time will make everything right; my Papa
has said so, and I believe it. But my Papa has also
said that time is the stuff that life is made of. _My_
life, my friend, is made of a fine and thin stuff, that
grief rends cruelly; if I had anything to reproach
myself with, I should long have ceased to exist. My
soul is pure, simple, frank. I dare to tell my Papa so;
I dare to tell him that it is worthy of him; I dare
still to assure him that my conduct, which he has
deemed wise, will not belie itself, that I shall await
justice with patience, that I shall follow the advice
of my worthy friend with steadiness and confidence.

Adieu, you whom I love so much--my kind Papa. Never
call me anything but "my daughter." Yesterday you
called me "Madame," and my heart shrank, I examined
myself, to see whether I had done you any wrong, or if
I had some failings that you would not tell me of.
Pardon, my friend; I am not visiting you with a
reproach, I am accusing myself of a weakness. I was
born much too sensitive for my happiness and for that
of my friends; cure me, or pity me; if you can, do one
or the other.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, you will come to tea, will you
not? Believe me, my Papa, that the pleasure I feel in
receiving you is shared by my husband, my children, and
my friends; I cannot doubt it, and I assure you of it.

Franklin's reply to this letter is for a brief moment that of a real father rather than Monsieur Papa. This reminds us that, in one of her letters to him, she states that in her own father she had lost her first and best friend, and recalled the fact that Franklin had told her of the custom of certain savages, who adopt the prisoners, that they capture in war, and make them take the place of the relations whom they have lost. In answer to her statement that ingratitude is a frightful misfortune, he says: "That is true--to ingrates--but not to their benefactors. You have conferred benefits on those that you have believed worthy of them; you have, therefore, done your duty, as it is a part of our duty to be kindly, and you ought to be satisfied with that and happy in the reflection." This was followed by the advice to his "very dear and always lovable daughter" to continue to fulfill all her duties as a good mother, a good wife, a good friend, a good neighbor, a good Christian, etc. We shall see a little later on what he deemed a part of the duty of a good charitable Christian to be. The letter terminates with an apology for his bad French. "It may," he said, "disgust you, you who write that charming language with so much purity and elegance. But, if you can in the end decipher my awkward and improper expressions, you will, at least, perhaps, experience the kind of pleasure that we find in solving enigmas or discovering secrets."

His letter transmitting his _Dialogue with the Gout_ to Madame Brillon was not so decorous. It was in it that he had a word to say about the other kind of Christian conduct that he was in the habit of enjoining upon her. A part of this letter was the following:

One of the characters in your story, namely, the Gout
appeared to me to reason well enough, with the
exception of his supposition that mistresses have had
something to do with producing this painful malady. I
myself believe the entire contrary, and this is my
method of reasoning. When I was a young man, and
enjoyed the favors of the sex more freely than at
present, I had no gout. Therefore, if the ladies of
Passy had had more of that kind of Christian charity,
that I have often recommended to you in vain, I would
not have the gout at present. This seems to me to be
good logic.

I am much better. I suffer little pain, but I am very
feeble. I can, as you see, joke a little, but I cannot
be really gay before I hear that your precious health
is re-established.

I send you my Dialogue in the hope that it may amuse
you at times.

Many thanks for the three last volumes of Montaigne
that I return.

The visit of your ever lovable family yesterday evening
has done me much good. My God! how I love them all from
the Grandmother and the father to the smallest child.

The reply of Madame Brillon was in kindred terms:

Saturday, 18th November, 1780.

There would be many little things indeed to criticise
in your logic, which you fortify so well, my dear Papa.
"When I was a young man," you say, "and enjoyed the
favors of the sex more freely than at present, I had no
gout." "Therefore," one might reply to this, "when I
threw myself out of the window, I did not break my
leg." Therefore, you could have the gout without having
deserved it, and you could have well deserved it, as I
believe, and not have had it.

If this last argument is not so brilliant as the
others, it is clear and sure; what is neither clear nor
sure are the arguments of philosophers who insist that
everything that happens in the world is necessary to
the general movement of the universal machine. I
believe that the machine would go neither better nor
worse if you did not have the gout, and if I were
forever rid of my nervous troubles.

I do not see what help, more or less, these little
incidents can give to the wheels that turn this world
at random, and I know that my little machine goes very
much the worse for them. What I know very well besides,
is that pain sometimes becomes mistress of reason, and
that patience alone can overcome these two nuisances. I
have as much of it as I can, and I advise you, my
friend, to have the same amount. When frosts have cast
a gloom over the earth, a bright sun makes us forget
them. We are in the midst of frosts, and must wait
patiently for this bright sun, and, while waiting for
it, amuse ourselves in the moments when weakness and
pain leave us some rest. _This_, my dear Papa, is _my_
logic....

Adieu, my good Papa. My big husband will take my letter
to you; he is very happy to be able to go to see you.
For me, nothing remains but the faculty of loving my
friends. You surely do not doubt that I shall do my
best for you, even to Christian charity, that is to
say, with the exception of your Christian charity.

She writes a brief letter to Franklin on New Year's Day of 1781:

If I had a good head and good legs--if, in short, I had
everything that I lack,--I should have come, like a
good daughter, to wish a happy New Year to the best of
papas. But I have only a very tender heart to love him
well, and a rather bad pen to scribble him that this
year, as well as last year, and all the years of my
life, I shall love him, myself alone, as much as all
the others that love him, put together.

Brillon and the children present their respects to the
kind Papa; and we also send a thousand messages for M.
Franklinet.

Some four years later, after Franklin had vainly endeavored to marry Temple Franklin to a daughter of Madame Brillon, we find him writing a letter of congratulation to her upon the happy _accouchement_ of her daughter. It elicits a reply in which the cheek of the "beautiful and benignant nature," of which she speaks, undergoes a considerable amount of artificial coloring.

2nd December, 1784.

Your letter, my kind Papa, has given me keen pleasure;
but, if you would give me still more, remain in France
until you see my sixth generation. I only ask you for
fifteen or sixteen years: my granddaughter will be
marriageable early; she is fair and strong. I am
tasting a new feeling, my good Papa, to which my heart
surrenders itself with pleasure, it is so sweet to
love. I have never been able to conceive how beings
exist who are such enemies to themselves as to reject
friendship. They are ingrates, we say; well we are
deceived; that is a little hard sometimes, but we are
not always so; and to feel oneself incapable of
returning the treachery affords a satisfaction of
itself that consoles us for it.

My little nurse is charming and fresh as a morning
rose. The first days the child had difficulty,... but
patience and the mother's courage overcame it; all goes
well now, and nothing could be more interesting than
this picture of a young and pretty person nursing a
superb child, the father uninterruptedly occupied with
the spectacle, and joining his attentions to those of
his wife. My eyes are unceasingly moist, and my heart
rejoices, my kind Papa. You realize so well the value
of all that belongs to beautiful and benignant nature
that I owe you these details. My daughter charges me
with her thanks and compliments to you; _ma Cadette_
and my men present their regards, and as for me, my
friend, I beg you to believe that my friendship and my
existence will always be one as respects you.

Once Franklin sought to corner Madame Brillon with a story, which makes us feel for a moment as if the rod of transformation was beginning to work a backward spell, and the Benjamin Franklin of Craven Street and Independence Hall to be released from the spell of the French Circe:

To make you better realize the force of my
demonstration that you do not love me, I commence with
a little story:

A beggar asked a rich Bishop for a louis by way of
alms. You are wild. No one gives a louis to a beggar.
An ecu then. No. That is too much. A liard then,--or
your benediction. My benediction! Yes, I will give it
to you. No, I will not accept it. For if it was worth a
liard, you would not be willing to give it to me. That
was how this Bishop loved his neighbor. That was his
charity! And, were I to scrutinize yours, I would not
find it much greater. I am incredibly hungry for it and
you have given me nothing to eat. I was a stranger, and
I was almost as love-sick as Colin when you were
singing, and you have neither taken me in, nor cured
me, nor eased me.

You who are as rich as an Archbishop in all the
Christian and moral virtues, and could sacrifice a
small share of some of them without visible loss, you
tell me that it is asking too much, and that you are
not willing to do it. That is your charity to a poor
wretch, who once enjoyed affluence, and is
unfortunately reduced to soliciting alms. Nevertheless,
you say you love him. But you would not give him your
friendship if it involved the expenditure of the least
little morsel, of the value of a liard, of your wisdom.

But see how nimbly the coquette eludes her pursuer:

MY DEAR PAPA: Your bishop was a niggard and your beggar
a queer enough fellow. You are a logician all the
cleverer because you argue in a charming way, and
almost awaken an inclination to yield to your unsound
arguments founded on a false principle. Is it of Dr.
Franklin, the celebrated philosopher, the profound
statesman, that a woman speaks with so much
irreverence? Yes, this erudite man, this legislator,
has his infirmities (it is the weakness, moreover, of
great men: he has taken full advantage of it). But let
us go into the matter.

To prove that I do not love you, my good Papa, you
compare yourself to a beggar who asked alms from a
bishop. Now, the role of a bishop is not to refuse to
give to beggars when they are really in want; he honors
himself in doing good. But in truth the kind of charity
which you ask of me so amusingly can be found
everywhere. You will not grow thin because of my
refusals! What would you think of your beggar, if, the
bishop having given him the "louis" which he asked, he
had grumbled because he did not get two? That, however,
is your case, my good friend.

You adopted me as your daughter, I chose you for my
father: what do you expect of me? Friendship! Well, I
love you as a daughter should love her father. The
purest, the most respectful, the tenderest affection
for you fills my soul; you asked me for a "louis"; I
gave it to you, and yet you murmur at not getting
another one, which does not belong to me. It is a
treasure which has been entrusted to me, my good Papa;
I guard it and will always guard it carefully. Even if
you were like "Colin sick," in truth I could not cure
you; and nevertheless, whatever you may think or say,
no one in this world loves you more than I.

In this letter she puts him off with the teasing assurance of friendship. In another, written from Marseilles, it is with other charming women that she mocks him:

I received on my arrival here, my good Papa, your
letter of October 1st. It has given me keen pleasure; I
found in it evidences of your friendship and a tinge of
that gayety and gallantry which make all women love
you, because you love them all. Your proposition to
carry me on your wings, if you were the angel Gabriel,
made me laugh; but I would not accept it, although I am
no longer very young nor a virgin. That angel was a sly
fellow and your nature united to his would become too
dangerous. I should be afraid of miracles happening,
and miracles between women and angels might well not
always bring a redeemer....

I have arranged, my good friend, to write alternately
to my "great neighbor" and to you; the one to whom I
shall not have written will kindly tell the other that
I love him with all my heart, and when your turn comes
you will add an embrace for the good wife of our
neighbor, for her daughter, for little Mother Caillot,
for all the gentle and pretty women of my acquaintance
whom you may meet. You see that not being able to amuse
you, either by my singing or by chess, I seek to
procure you other pleasures. If you had been at Avignon
with us, it is there you would have wished to embrace
people. The women there are charming; I thought of you
every time I saw one of them. Adieu, my good Papa; I do
not relate to you the details of my journey, as I have
written of them to our neighbor, who will communicate
them to you. I limit myself to assuring you of the most
constant and the tenderest friendship on my part.

At times the pursuer is too badly afflicted with gout in his legs to maintain the pursuit, and the pursued has to come to his assistance to keep the flirtation going:

How are you, my good Papa? Never has it cost me so much
to leave you; every evening it seems to me that you
would be very glad to see me, and every evening I think
of you. On Monday, the 21st, I shall go to meet you
again; I hope that you will then be very firm on your
feet, and that the teas of Wednesday and Saturday, and
that of Sunday morning, will regain all their
brilliance. I will bring you _la bonne eveque_. My fat
husband will make you laugh, our children will laugh
together, our great neighbor will quiz, the Abbes La
Roche and Morellet will eat all the butter, Mme. Grand,
her amiable niece, and M. Grand will help the company
out, Pere Pagin will play _God of Love_ on his violin,
I the march on the Piano, and you _Petits Oiseaux_ on
the armonica.

O! my friend, let us see in the future fine and strong
legs for you, and think no more of the bad one that has
persecuted you so much. After what is bad, one enjoys
what is good more; life is sown with both, which she
changes unceasingly. What she cannot keep from being
equal and uniform is my tenderness for you, that time,
place, and events will never alter.

My mother and all my family wish to be remembered to
you.

I have had some news of you through our neighbor, but I
must absolutely have some from you.

Amusingly enough, M. Brillon contributes his part to the restoration of the gouty legs to something like normal activity.

The visits of your good husband during my sickness
[wrote Franklin to Madame Brillon] have been very
agreeable to me. His conversation has eased and
enlivened me. I regret that, instead of seeking it when
I have been at your home, I have lost so much time in
playing chess. He has many stories and always applies
them well. If he has despoiled you of some, you can
repeat them all the same, for they will always please
me, coming from your mouth.

There is another letter from Madame Brillon to Franklin which drew a reply from him, in which he ascended into the Christian heaven with almost as much literary facility as marked his entrance into the Pagan Elysium. Her letter was written during an absence from home:

Here I am reduced to writing to you, my good Papa, and
to telling you that I love you. It was sweeter no doubt
to let you see it in my eyes. How am I going to spend
the Wednesdays and Saturdays? No teas, no chess, no
music, no hope of seeing or embracing my good papa! It
seems to me that the privation which I experience from
your absence would suffice to make me change my views,
were I inclined to materialism.

Happiness is so uncertain, so full of crosses, that the
deep conviction that we shall be happier in another
life can alone tide us over the trials of this one. In
Paradise we shall be reunited, never to leave each
other again! We shall there live on roasted apples
only; the music will be made up of Scotch airs; all
parties will be given over to chess, so that no one may
be disappointed; every one will speak the same
language; the English will be neither unjust nor wicked
there; the women will not be coquettes, the men will be
neither jealous nor too gallant; "King John" will be
left to eat his apples in peace; perhaps he will be
decent enough to offer some to his neighbors--who
knows? since we shall want for nothing in paradise! We
shall never suffer from gout or nervous troubles there.
Mr. Mesmer will content himself with playing on the
armonica, without wearying us with the electric fluid;
ambition, envy, snobbery, jealousy, prejudice, all
these will vanish at the sound of the trumpet. A
lasting, sweet and peaceful friendship will animate
every gathering. Every day we shall love one another,
in order that we may love one another still more the
day after; in a word, we shall be completely happy. In
the meantime, let us get all the good we can out of
this poor world of ours. I am far from you, my good
Papa; I look forward to the time of our meeting, and I
am pleased to think that your regrets and desires equal
mine.

My mother and my children send you a thousand tender
messages of respect; we should all like to have you
here. May I venture to ask you to remember us to your
grandson?

And this was the deft reply of Franklin which has come down to us in French corrected by Madame Brillon's hand:

Since you have assured me that we shall meet each other
again, and shall recognize each other, in Paradise, I
have reflected continually on our arrangements in that
country; for I have great confidence in your
assurances, and I believe implicitly what you believe.

Probably more than forty years will pass away, after my
arrival there, before you will follow me. I fear a
little that, in the course of such a long time, you may
forget me; that is why I have had thoughts of proposing
to you that you give me your word that you will not
renew your contract with M. Brillon. I would give you
mine at the same time to wait for you, but this
monsieur is so good, so generous to us--he loves
you--and we him--so well--that I can not think of this
proposition without some scruples of
conscience--however the idea of an eternity, in which I
should not be more favored than to be allowed to kiss
your hands, or your cheeks occasionally, and to pass
two or three hours in your sweet society at Wednesday
and Saturday evening parties, is frightful. In fine, I
can not make that proposal, but since, like all who
know you, I desire to see you happy in every respect,
we may agree to say nothing more about it at this time,
and to leave you at liberty to decide, when we are all
together again: there to determine the question as you
deem best for your happiness and ours; but, determine
it as you will, I feel that I shall love you eternally.
Should you reject me, perhaps, I shall pay my addresses
to Madame D'Hardancourt (the mother of Madame Brillon),
who might be glad to keep house for me. In that event I
should pass my domestic hours agreeably with her; and I
should be better prepared to see you. I should have
enough time in those forty years there to practise on
the armonica, and, perhaps, I should play well enough
to be worthy to accompany your pianoforte. We should
have little concerts from time to time, good father
Pagin would be of the company, your neighbor and his
dear family [M. Jupin], M. de Chaumont, M. B., M.
Jourdan, M. Grammont, Madame du Tartre, the little
mother, and some other select friends will be our
audience, and the dear, good girls, accompanied by some
other young angels, whose portraits you have already
given me, will sing hallelujahs with us; we shall eat
together apples of Paradise, roasted with butter and
nutmeg; and we shall pity them who are not dead.

In another letter, he complains that she shuts him out from everything except a few civil and polite kisses such as she might give to some of her small cousins.

All this, however, was but preliminary to the treaty, which the signer of the Treaty of Alliance between France and the United States formally submitted to her in this letter.

Among the articles of this treaty were to be these:

Article 6. And the said Mr. F. on his part stipulates
and covenants that he is to call at the home of M'de B.
as often as he pleases.

Article 7. That he is to remain there as long as he
pleases.

Article 8. And that when he is with her, he is to do
what he pleases.

He did not have much hope, he said, of obtaining her consent to the eighth article.

In another letter, the aged lover tells Madame Brillon that she must not accuse others of being responsible for his having left her half an hour sooner than usual. The truth was that he was very much fatigued for special reasons that he mentions, and thought it more decent to leave her than to fall asleep, which he was beginning to do on a bench in her garden after her descent into it. After all a half-hour with an old man, who could not make the best use of it, was a thing of very little importance. Saturday evening, he would remain with her until she wished him to go, and, in spite of her usual polite phrases, he would know the time by her refusal to give him a little kiss.

With another note, he sent to Madame Brillon his Essay on the Morals of Chess. It was only proper that it should be dedicated to her, he said, as its good advice was copied from her generous and magnanimous way of playing the game. In the same letter, he stated that his grandson had inspected the house that she had urged him to apply for, but, true still to his adopted character, he said, "He finds it too magnificent for simple Republicans."

In another letter, he told Madame Brillon that he loved to live, because it seemed to him that there was much more pleasure than pain in existence. We should not blame Providence rashly. She should reflect how many even of our duties it had made pleasures, and that it had been good enough, moreover, to call several pleasures sins to enhance our enjoyment of them.

One more letter from Madame Brillon and we shall let her retire from the chess-board with the credit of having proved herself fully a match for Franklin in the longest and most absorbing game of chess that he played in France:

25th of December at Nice.

The atonement is adequate, my dear Papa. I shall no
longer call you _Monseigneur_ nor even _Monsieur_. My
petition succeeded before reaching you; our tears are
dried. You love us, you tell us so; you are in good
health, and are as roguish as ever, since you are
planning to steal me from Brillon, and to take me on a
trip to America without letting anyone know it.
Everything is as usual. I recognize your fine mask, and
I am wholly satisfied. But, my good Papa, why say that
you write French badly,--that your pleasantries in that
language are only nonsense? To make an academic
discourse, one must be a good grammarian; but to write
to our friends all we need is a heart, and you combine
with the best heart, my lovable Papa, when you wish,
the soundest ethics, a lively imagination, and that
roguishness, so pleasant, which shows that the wisest
man in the world allows his wisdom to be perpetually
broken against the rocks of femininity. Write to me,
therefore, write to me often and much, or from spite I
shall learn English. I should want to know it quickly,
and that would hurt me as I have been forbidden all
study, and you would be the cause of my ills, for
having refused me a few lines of your bad French, which
my family and I--and we are not simpletons--consider
very good; ask my neighbors, M. d'Estaing, Mme.
Helvetius and her abbes, if it would be right for you
to prejudice the improvement which the sun here has
caused in my health, for the sake of a little _amour
propre_ which is beneath My Lord the Ambassador,
Benjamin Franklin.

One more letter from Franklin, and we shall cease to walk upon eggs. The French drapery is gone and nothing is left but Saxon nudity:

I am charm'd with the goodness of my spiritual guide,
and resign myself implicitly to her Conduct, as she
promises to lead me to heaven in so delicious a Road
when I could be content to travel thither even in the
roughest of all ways with the pleasure of her company.

How kindly partial to her Penitent in finding him, on
examining his conscience, guilty of only one capital
sin and to call that by the gentle name of Foible!

I lay fast hold of your promise to absolve me of all
Sins past, present, & future, on the easy & pleasing
Condition of loving God, America and my guide above all
things. I am in rapture when I think of being absolv'd
of the future.

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 _fete champetre_ 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 chateau, 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 chateau, they came upon him, and gathered around the doors of his carriage, and escorted it to the grounds of the chateau, 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:

"Soul of heroes and wise men,
Oh, Liberty! First boon of the Gods!
Alas! It is too remotely that we pay thee our vows;
It is only with sighs that we render homage
To the man who made happy his fellow-citizens."

All then wended their way through the gardens of the Countess to the chateau, 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:

"Of Benjamin let us celebrate the renown,
Let us sing the good that he has done to mortals;
In America he will have altars,
And at Sanois we drink to his fame."

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

"He gives back to human nature its rights,
To free it he would first enlighten it,
And virtue to make itself adored,
Assumed the form of Benjamin."

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