The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (107 page)

Silas Deane was the occasion of the friction, but Arthur Lee was the cause. Deane’s ambiguous position as commissioner and entrepreneur, combined with his friendship for the equally ambiguous Beaumarchais, convinced Lee that Deane and his fellow profit-seekers had their own interests, rather than those of the United States, closest to heart. “Let me whisper to you that I have reason to suspect there is jobbing both with you and with us,” Lee confided to Sam Adams, who was always happy to spot conspiracy and did not like Deane’s politics besides. “The public concerns and the public money are perhaps sacrificed to private purposes.” Congress should insist on separating the commissioners from the commerce of the war. To his brother, Richard Henry Lee, Arthur Lee was more specific. “If in the arrangement of things I could be continued here, and Mr. D. removed to some other place, it would be pleasing to me, and disconcert effectually their wicked measures.”

Lee’s distrust of Franklin was more diffuse but of longer standing. From their days in London he still resented Franklin’s primacy with the Massachusetts House of Representatives. At that time he had suspected Franklin of collusion with the British; now he thought Franklin too cozy with the French. The fact that Franklin frequently sided with Deane against Lee on the three-man commission convinced Lee that Franklin must be colluding with Deane and probably Beaumarchais.

Lee’s style was not to accuse openly but to insinuate; not to adduce evidence but to accumulate slights. He was constantly complaining of being bypassed by Franklin and Deane; when Deane, during Lee’s absence, moved into an apartment next to Franklin’s, one that Lee himself had coveted, Lee read perfidy into proximity.

Lee’s sniping drove Franklin to distraction. By the spring of 1778, after another complaint by Lee that he was being left out, Franklin could stand it no longer. “It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters,” he wrote.

I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. If I have often received and borne your magisterial snubbings and rebukes without reply, ascribe it to the right causes, my concern for the honour and success of our mission, which would be hurt by our quarrelling; my love of peace; my respect for your good qualities; and my pity for your sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself with its jealousies, suspicions and fancies that others mean you ill, wrong you or fail in respect for you. If you do not cure your self of this temper, it will end in insanity, of which it is the symptomatic forerunner, as I have seen in several instances. God preserve you from so terrible an evil; and for his sake pray suffer me to live in quiet.

As he had a few years earlier with his angry letter to William Strahan, Franklin held this draft till his temper cooled, and ultimately decided against sending it. Fate—and the Congress—had thrown him together with Lee; until fate and Congress changed their minds, he would make the best of the situation.

As it happened, even as Franklin was filing this unsent letter, a new commissioner was making his way from Nantes to Paris. Franklin wished that Lee were the one being replaced; instead it was Deane, the victim of Lee’s slanders and his own carelessness at accounting, which made Lee’s accusations plausible. (Deane could take some ironic solace in the knowledge that when it came to carelessness he was no match for Lee, who on a mission to Prussia allowed his personal papers to be stolen by an agent of the British.)

The new man was John Adams, who had decided that being a commissioner of the United States in France was not beneath him after all. Adams was a Puritan at heart, and as touchy in his own way as Arthur Lee. His opinion of Franklin reflected both aspects of his personality. “That he was a great genius, a great wit, a great humourist and a great satirist, and great politician is certain,” Adams wrote later. “That he was a great philosopher, a great moralist and a great statesman is more questionable.”

Part of Adams’s objection was that Franklin got all the credit. “On Dr. F. the eyes of all Europe are fixed, as the most important character in American affairs in Europe,” he recorded contemporaneously. “Neither L. [Lee] nor myself are looked upon of much consequence.” At first Adams did not particularly question this state of affairs. “The attention of the Court seems most to F., and no wonder. His long and great reputation, to which L.’s and mine are in their infancy, are enough to account for this.”

Yet the more time he spent in France the more it annoyed him. His mood did not improve from constantly having to explain to curious French men and women that he was not the “famous Adams”—Sam Adams. He preserved sufficient sense of humor to remark afterward, “No body went so far in France or England as to say I was the infamous Adams”; but not enough to keep from grumbling, “It was a settled point
at Paris and in the English news papers that I was not the famous Adams, and therefore the consequence was settled absolutely and unalterably that I was a man of whom no body had ever heard before, a perfect cypher, a man who did not understand a word of French—awkward in his figure—awkward in his dress—no abilities—a perfect bigot—and fanatic.”

In the summer of 1779 the obscure Adams fell into conversation with a French gentleman, a “Mr. M.,” who remarked that in France foreign ambassadors were free to hold religious services in their own way. “But Mr. Franklin never had any,” the Frenchman said, with evident surprise.

“No, said I, laughing,” Adams recorded in his diary, “because Mr. F. had no—I was going to say, what I did not say, and will not say here. I stopped short and laughed.”

“No, said Mr. M., Mr. F. adores only great nature, which has interested a great many people of both sexes in his favour.”

“Yes, said I, laughing, all the atheists, deists and libertines, as well as the philosophers and ladies are in his train—another Voltaire and Hume.”

“Yes, said Mr. M., he is celebrated as the great philosopher and the great legislator of America.”

“He is, said I, a great philosopher, but as a legislator of America he has done very little. It is universally believed in France, England and all Europe that his electric wand has accomplished all this revolution, but nothing is more groundless. He has done very little. It is believed that he made all the American constitutions, and their confederation. But he made neither. He did not even make the constitution of Pennsylvania, bad as it is.”

Adams could never forgive Franklin for receiving too much credit for events. He held a similar grudge against Washington, and in the last year of Franklin’s life complained to Benjamin Rush, “The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be
that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures and
war.”

The acid of Adams’s envy continued to corrode his impression of Franklin; all the same, the sketch he drew of Franklin in his autobiography caught a substantial measure of truth, and what it missed revealed much about a man whom chance—and that Congress again—teamed
with Franklin during some critical episodes of American history. Adams was unsparing.

The life of Dr. Franklin was a scene of continual dissipation. I could never obtain the favour of his company in a morning before breakfast, which would have been the most convenient time to read over the letters and papers, deliberate on their contents, and decide upon the substance of the answers. It was late when he breakfasted, and as soon as breakfast was over, a crowd of carriages came to his levee, or if you like the term better, his lodgings, with all sorts of people; some philosophers, academicians and economists; some of his small tribe of humble friends in the literary way whom he employed to translate some of his ancient compositions, such as his Bonhomme Richard [Poor Richard] and for what I know his Polly Baker &c.; but by far the greater part were women and children, come to have the honour to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his simplicity, his bald head and scattering straight hairs, among their acquaintances.

These visitors occupied all the time, commonly, till it was time to dress to go to dinner. He was invited to dine abroad every day and never declined unless we had invited company to dine with us. I was always invited with him, till I found it necessary to send apologies, that I might have some time to study the French language and do the business of the mission. Mr. Franklin kept a horn book always in his pocket in which he minuted all his invitations to dinner, and Mr. Lee said it was the only thing in which he was punctual.

Here Adams interjected that he often required days to get Franklin to supply something as simple as a signature to a paper he—Adams—had drafted. Franklin’s social schedule was too full for mere commission business.

He went according to his invitation to his dinner and after that went sometimes to the play, sometimes to the philosophers, but most commonly to visit those ladies who were complaisant enough to depart from the custom of France so far as to procure sets of tea gear, as it is called, and make tea for him…. After tea the evening was spent in hearing the ladies sing and play upon their piano fortes and other instruments of music, and in various games as cards, chess, backgammon &c. &c. Mr. Franklin I believe however never played at any thing but chess or checquers.

In these agreeable and important occupations and amusements the afternoon and evening was spent, and he came home at all hours from nine to twelve o’clock at night. This course of life contributed to his pleasure and I believe to his health and longevity. He was now between seventy and eighty [seventy-two when Adams arrived], and I had so much respect and compassion for his age that I should have been happy to have done all the business, or rather all the drudgery, if I could have been favoured with a few moments in a day to receive his advice concerning the manner in which it ought to be done. But this condescension was not attainable.

If Adams
could not enjoy the pleasures of Paris, Franklin certainly could. After a brief sojourn in the Hôtel d’Hambourg, in the rue de l’Université, he moved to the village of Passy, just outside the city, on the way to Versailles. Passy was a comparatively rustic retreat from the crowds, smells, and noises of the capital; a ten-minute carriage ride transported the well-to-do and well connected to the villas and châteaux they had tucked among the wooded hills and vineyards overlooking the Seine. Franklin’s landlord was both well-to-do and well connected—the latter on account of the former. The humble but ambitious Jacques Donatien Leray of Nantes had made a fortune in the India trade, and with his pile had purchased the Loire château of Chaumont, which came with the “de Chaumont” suffix he added to his name. As a nouveau riche, Chaumont worked harder at his responsibilities than the true aristocrats; while they glided smugly toward the doom of the
ancien régime,
Chaumont improved his properties, winning support of the peasants that would save him from the guillotine. Government officials appreciated his gifts—both those nature bestowed on him and those he bestowed on them—and awarded him assorted honors and appointments. Vergennes found his Anglophobia a useful asset in plotting France’s revenge against the English.

It was probably Vergennes who suggested that Chaumont invite Franklin to stay at the Hôtel de Valentinois, the elegant property Chaumont
had recently purchased at Passy. Chaumont gallantly refused to accept rent from the American commissioner, saying they could settle the bill once the United States confirmed its independence. If this arrangement placed Franklin under a certain obligation to one of France’s leading merchants (of whom a Paris paper said, “He would grasp, if he could, the commerce of the thirteen united colonies for himself alone”), Franklin did not mind—even if Arthur Lee and John Adams
did.
(Adams tut-tutted at “the magnificence of the place, and tried to discover how much it was costing the American people. Failing, he wrote, “It was universally expected to be enormously high.”)

Chaumont did not simply shelter Franklin but promoted him avidly. He arranged for the famous sculptor, Giovanni Battista Nini, whom he had lured from Italy to the Loire, to produce a series of medallions memorializing Franklin’s stay in France. One version showed the subject in a fur cap, with the simple inscription, “B. Franklin, Américain.” Another lacked the cap but contained the motto already popularized by Turgot,
“Eripuit Coelum Fulmen Septrumque Tyrannis
(“He snatched the lightning from heaven and the scepter from tyrants”). Chaumont persuaded the royal portaitist, Joseph Siffrède Duplessis, to paint Franklin in both oil and pastel.

Chaumont introduced Franklin to his family, and also to the neighbors at Passy—the crowd Adams found so “dissipated.” Madame Chaumont was a Franklin favorite from the start; so too the daughter of the lord of the manor of Passy, a young lady commonly called the Mademoiselle de Passy. Even John Adams noticed her; she was, he said, “one of the most beautiful young ladies I ever saw in France.” Franklin noticed too, as Adams could not resist recording. “Mr. Franklin, who at the age of seventy had neither lost his love of beauty nor his taste for it, called Mademoiselle de Passy his favourite and his flame and his love and his mistress, which flattered the family and did not displease the young lady.” Madame Chaumont observed the interplay between seventy and seventeen, and when the mademoiselle was married off to the Marquis de Tonnerre, she punned, “Alas! All the rods of Mr. Franklin could not prevent the lightning
[tonnerre]
from falling on Mademoiselle de Passy.”