The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (108 page)

Franklin’s flirtations survived this fall, not least because they had numerous other objects. Madame Chaumont had a sister, Madame Foucault, who found Franklin charming. Temple Franklin, visiting the Chaumonts in the Loire, wrote his grandfather, “All the family send their love to you, and the beautiful Madame Foucault accompanies hers with an English kiss.” This presumably signified an actual touching of lips, rather
than the neck-pecking the French ladies preferred, so as not to ruin their rouge. Franklin replied, “My best respects to Madame de Chaumont and my love to the rest of the family. Thanks to Madame Foucault for her kindness in sending me the kiss. It was grown cold by the way. I hope for a warm one when we meet.” Whether or not Franklin received his warm English kiss on that next occasion, his thoughts of Madame Foucault were kept warm by a friend, Monsieur Brillon, who subsequently wrote from “Paris, across the street from Madame Foucault”: “By Jove, what a splendid sight to be across the street from! We saw her yesterday. She is marvelously plump once again”—evidently she had previously lost weight—“and has just acquired new curves. Very round curves, very white.”

Monsieur Brillon
could laugh with Franklin about eyeing Madame Foucault partly because he was unaware that Franklin was eyeing Madame Brillon. And one reason for his unawareness was that he himself was busy chasing, and catching, the governess of his children. John Adams described the ménage.

Madame Brillon was one of the most beautiful women in France, a great mistress of music, as were her two little daughters. The dinner was luxury, as usual in that country. A large cake was brought in, with three flags flying. On one of them, “Pride subdued”; on another, “Haec dies, in qua fit Congressus, exultemus et potemus in ea.”

Mr. Brillon was a rough kind of country squire. His lady all softness, sweetness and politeness. I saw a woman in company, as a companion of Madame Brillon, who dined with her and was considered as one of the family. She was very plain and clumsy. When I afterwards learned both from Dr. Franklin and his grandson, and from many other persons, that this woman was the
amie
of Mr. Brillon, and that Madame Brillon consoled herself by the
amitié
of Mr. Le Vailliant [Le Veillard], I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats. But I did not know the world. I soon saw and heard so much of these things in other families and among almost all the great people of the kingdom that I found it was a thing of course.

Franklin, observing the same mores, determined to make himself at home. His pursuit of Madame Brillon commenced with a conversation on theology and the afterlife. She, a devout Catholic, was mildly shocked at his deism. He suggested, perhaps suggestively, that she take charge of his soul. She responded in like vein. “You were kind enough yesterday, my dear brother, to entrust me with your conversion,” she wrote. “I will not be stern, I know my penitent’s weak spot, I shall tolerate it! As long as he loves God, America, and me above all things, I absolve him of all his sins, present, past, and future; and I promise him Paradise where I shall lead him along a path strewn with roses.”

She listed the cardinal sins, and absolved him of the first six. The seventh—lust—was not so easy to dispose of. “All great men are tainted with it; it is called their weakness,” she said. “You have loved, my dear brother; you have been kind and lovable; you have been loved in return! What is so damnable about that? Go on doing great things and loving pretty women—provided that, pretty and lovable though they may be, you never lose sight of my principle: always love God, America, and me above all.”

Franklin thanked his confessor for her leniency, remarking particularly that it covered sins yet to be committed. To her litany of the cardinal sins he riposted the Ten Commandments, although he said he had been taught that there were really twelve. “The first was:
Increase and multiply,
and replenish the earth. The twelfth is: A new commandment I give unto you,
that ye love one another.
It seems to me that they are a little misplaced, and that the last should have been the first.” Yet he had never made any difficulty on that point. “I was always willing to obey them both whenever I had an opportunity.” He wondered whether some bargain might be struck. “Pray tell me, my dear Casuist, whether my keeping religiously these two commandments, though 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 neighbor’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.” He added another argument. “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.”

Madame Brillon saw she was losing ground in theology. She appealed to natural law. “Let us start from where we are. You are a man, I am a
woman, and while we might think along the same lines, we must speak and act differently. Perhaps there is no great harm in a man having desires and yielding to them; a woman may have desires, but she must not yield.” Switching back to the commandments, she reminded Franklin she was married. “My friendship, and a touch of vanity, perhaps, prompt me strongly to pardon you; but I dare not decide the question without consulting that neighbour whose wife you covet; because he is a far better casuist than I am. And then, too, as Poor Richard would say, ‘In weighty matters, two heads are better than one.’”

Though denying herself to Franklin—or at least such of herself as the lover in him desired—Madame Brillon complained when he turned his attentions elsewhere.

The dangerous system you are forever trying to demonstrate, my dear papa—that the friendship a man has for women can be divided
ad infinitum
—this is something I shall never put up with. My heart, while capable of great love, has chosen few objects on which to bestow it. It has chosen them well; you are at the head of the list. When you scatter your friendship, as you have done, my friendship does not diminish, but from now on I shall try to be somewhat sterner toward your faults.

He refused to repent. “You renounce and exclude arbitrarily every thing corporal from our amour, except such a merely civil embrace now and then as you would permit to a country cousin. What is there then remaining that I may not afford to others without a diminution of what belongs to you?” He compared his affection toward women to her playing on the pianoforte: several people might enjoy it without any being cheated from the others’ partaking.

Switching metaphors, he employed a figure of speech that could have been interpreted doubly, and—given his care with words—was almost certainly intended to be. “My poor little boy, whom you ought methinks to have cherished, instead of being fat and jolly like those in your elegant drawings, is meagre and starved almost to death for want of the substantial nourishment which you his mother inhumanly deny him!”

Adopting yet another analogy, he likened their sparring to war, and proposed a preliminary peace treaty.

Art. 1. There shall be eternal peace, friendship and love between Madame B. and Mr. F.

Art. 2. In order to maintain the same inviolably, Made. B. on her part stipulates and agrees that Mr. F. shall come to her whenever she sends for him.

Art. 3. That he shall stay with her as long as she pleases.

A few more concessions on his part, then:

Art. 8. That when he is with her he will do what he pleases.

Art. 9. And that he will love any other woman as far as he finds her amiable.

Let me know what you think of these preliminaries. To me they seem to express the true meaning and intention of each party more plainly than most treaties. I shall insist pretty strongly on the eighth article, though without much hope of your consent to it. And on the ninth also, though I despair of ever finding another woman that I could love with equal tenderness.

On another day he offered still another analogy. She had said she loved him more than he loved her. He responded:

Judge, by a comparison I am going to make, which of us two loves the most. If I say to a friend: “I need your horses to take a journey, lend them to me,” and he replies: “I should be very glad to oblige you, but I fear that they will be ruined by this journey and cannot bring myself to lend them to anyone,” must I not conclude that the man loves his horses more than he loves me? And if, in the same case, I should willingly risk my horses by lending them to him, is it not clear that I love him more than my horses, and also more than he loves me? You know that I am ready to sacrifice my beautiful, big horses.

Madame Brillon managed to resist this offer of Franklin’s “beautiful, big horses,” but she did grant him permission to drive them elsewhere. He was an Epicurean, she said, while she, a married woman, must remain a Platonist. “Platonism may not be the gayest sect, but it is a convenient defence for the fair sex. Hence, the lady, who finds it congenial, advises the gentleman to fatten up his favorite at other tables than hers, which will always offer too meagre a diet for his greedy appetites.”

Finally Franklin got the message. Perhaps he tired of the game;
perhaps he suspected that even in Paris it might appear foolish for a man of seventy-two to be chasing after a woman less than half his age. Certainly the question of age colored a letter he sent her in the autumn of 1778, in which he essentially agreed to her platonic terms. Some weeks before, Franklin had spent a day with her (and others) at Moulin-Joli, the estate of a mutual friend, situated on the Seine a short distance from Paris. The visit occurred at a time when mayflies were hatching. The French called the species
Éphémère
for the very short life span of the individuals; to Franklin the insects supplied a metaphor for human lives as well.

“You remember, my dear friend,” he wrote Madame Brillon, “that when we lately spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the
Moulin-Joli,
I stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an Ephemere, all whose successive generations we were told were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues; my too great application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress I have made in your charming language.” He went on to explain how the younger insects were speaking three or four at a time, which made it difficult for him to understand. Fortunately the youngsters were not the only ones around. “I turned from them to an old greyheaded one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I have put it down in writing.”

It was, says he, the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the
Moulin-Joli,
could not itself subsist more than 18 hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the apparent motion of the great Luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our Earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction.

I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than 420 minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them, for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above 7 or 8 minutes longer.

What now avails all my toil and labour in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriots, inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! For in politics,
what can laws do without morals?
Our present race of Ephemeres will in a course of minutes become corrupt like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy, how small our progress! Alas,
art is long, and life short!