The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (78 page)

During
this third stay in England, Franklin continued his practice of summer vacations away from London. However great the city might be in many respects, it took a toll on one’s health. Whether the thick smoke and damp chill of winter were worse than the infectious diseases of summer was partly a matter of taste. The taste of government officials tended toward summer departures, which afforded another reason for Franklin’s holidays: when the city cleared out, there was nothing for a colonial agent to do. Additionally, of course, a man of Franklin’s wide interests thrived on new sights and experiences.

In the summer of 1766 he traveled to Germany with John Pringle. “Though I was not quite to say sick, I was often ailing last winter and through this spring,” Franklin explained to Debbie. Pringle wanted to drink the waters at Bad Pyrmont, a spa in the neighborhood of George III’s ancestral home. “I hope more from the air and exercise,” Franklin said. They left London in mid-June; because Pringle was physician to Queen Charlotte and she was expecting a child in the early autumn, they had to be back before the end of August.

After a week’s journey by road, channel packet, and again road, they arrived at Bad Pyrmont. For two weeks they took the waters there. Pringle had intended to stay longer, but either because the treatment effected its benefits sooner than expected or because it appeared unlikely to do so at all, Pringle decided to join Franklin on a tour of the north German countryside. “I found a very fine country,” Franklin explained, “and seemingly not so much hurt by the late war as one might have expected, since it appears every where fully cultivated, notwithstanding the great loss it sustained in people.” For the first time Franklin saw the source of all those Germans who had emigrated to Pennsylvania over the years. At the same time he discovered that America was not the only place they were going. “It should seem their numbers are inexhaustible, since the Empress of Russia is now inviting into her country such Germans as are willing to leave their own, and obtained no less than forty thousand of them last year.”

In mid-July they visited the city of Hanover, where they examined the Royal Library and watched the noted German scientist Johann Friedrich Hartman conduct a series of electrical experiments. From Hanover they went south to Göttingen; both were inducted into the
Royal Academy. A professor at the University of Göttingen, Gottfried Achenwall, took the opportunity to query Franklin at length on past and current conditions in the British North American colonies. Franklin expatiated on American geography, on the founding of the colonies, on the growth of their populations, on Indian affairs, on the diverse modes of free and bound labor, on American relations with Britain. Not surprisingly the professor received an account of recent events that favored the colonies. In an afterword to his transcript of their conversation, Achenwall summarized the lesson: “Every colony respects its founders, if it is well treated. But if it feels injured and despised, it is alienated. Colonies are not sent out to be slaves, but as lawful equals to those who remain at home.”

Franklin and Pringle traveled south to Frankfurt and Mainz, then north down the Rhine to Cologne and the Netherlands, whence they crossed the Channel back to England. They arrived in good time for Pringle to oversee the birth of a healthy Princess Charlotte. As for Franklin, in reporting to the Pennsylvania Assembly that he was back on the job, he pronounced himself “well and hearty, my journey having perfectly answered its intention.”

The following
year Franklin repeated his Continental cure. Again he traveled with Pringle, who again had a couple of months free before he had to be back with the queen, who again was pregnant.

The trip started in late August. “I have stayed too long in London this summer, and now sensibly feel the want of my usual journey to preserve my health,” Franklin wrote Debbie. The principal symptoms of his delay were two: a backful of rashes and boils that “made him very uneasy,” according to Mrs. Stevenson, and a sour temper, doubtless an expression of that uneasiness. From London to Dover he found nothing good to say about the journey. “I was engaged in perpetual disputes with the innkeepers, hostlers and postillions,” he told Polly Stevenson. He could not understand why every post chaise he and Pringle rode in had a hood or canopy so pitched as to make it nearly impossible for the passengers to see out—which, in Franklin’s opinion, was the whole reason for traveling. When he tried to persuade his drivers to change the rigging, they explained that this would be impossible. The chaises were rigged for the safety and benefit of the horses; to change would kill the animals. Franklin thought this absurd and said so, to no avail. “They added other
reasons that were no reasons at all, and made me, as upon a hundred other occasions, almost wish that mankind had never been endowed with a reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make use of it and so often mislead themselves by it; and that they had been furnished with a good sensible instinct instead of it.”

The crossing to the Continent offered further evidence of human folly. “We embarked for Calais with a number of passengers who had never been before at sea. They would previously make a hearty breakfast, because if the wind should fail, we might not get over till supper-time. Doubtless they thought that when they had paid for their breakfast they had a right to it, and that when they had swallowed it they were sure of it. But they had scarce been out half an hour before the sea laid claim to it, and they were obliged to deliver it up. So it seems there are uncertainties even beyond those between the cup and the lip.”

Things improved in France, slightly. Describing the boatmen and porters on the two sides of the Channel, Franklin declared, “I know not which are most rapacious, the English or French; but the latter have, with their knavery, the most politeness.”

The roads from Calais to Paris were as good as those in England, paved in many places with smooth stones and lined with rows of trees. “But then the poor peasants complained to us grievously, that they were obliged to work upon the roads full two months in the year without being paid for their labour. Whether this is truth, or whether, like Englishmen, they grumble cause or no cause, I have not yet been able fully to inform myself.”

Franklin was struck by the different complexions he encountered: dark at Calais and Boulogne but much lighter at Abbeville. He suspected that the change might be due to the immigration of Dutch spinners and weavers some generations earlier; these people were naturally lighter, and their work kept them indoors, away from the sun. Whatever the cause of their fairness, they were hard workers. “Never was I in a place of greater industry, wheels and looms going in every house.”

At Paris the complexion changed again, but for a reason more readily discerned. Franklin thought Polly Stevenson would be interested in the beauty secrets of French ladies, so he shared them in some detail. The use of rouge was most striking.

I have not had the honour of being at any lady’s toilette to see how it is laid on, but I fancy I can tell you how it is or may be done: Cut a hole of 3 inches diameter in a piece of paper, place it on the side of your face in such a manner as that the top of the hole may be just under your eye; then with a brush dipped in the colour paint face and paper together, so when the paper is taken off there will remain a round patch of red exactly the form of the hole.

This is the mode, from the actresses on stage upwards through all ranks of ladies to the princesses of the blood.

The practice stopped just short of the queen, as Franklin could attest from personal observation. He and Pringle were invited to a
grand convert,
where King Louis XV and Queen Marie supped in public. Franklin was favorably impressed. “Serenity, complacence and beauty” characterized the queen; as for the king: “He spoke to both of us very graciously and cheerfully, is a handsome man, has a very lively look, and appears younger than he is.” (Louis, called the Well-Beloved, was fifty-seven.) Yet Franklin did not wish Polly to get the wrong impression. “I would not have you think me so much pleased with this King and Queen as to have a whit less regard than I used to have for ours. No Frenchman shall go beyond me in thinking my own King and Queen the very best in the world and the most amiable.”

Versailles alone was worth the trouble and expense of the trip. “The range of building is immense; the garden front most magnificent, all of hewn stone; the number of statues, figures, urns, &c. in marble and bronze of exquisite workmanship is beyond conception.” The cost of construction was estimated to Franklin at £80 million. Yet someone was stinting on maintenance. “The waterworks are out of repair, and so is a great part of the front next the town, looking with its shabby half brick walls and broken windows not much better than the houses in Durham Yard.” The effect was odd, but French. “There is, in short, both at Versailles and Paris, a prodigious mixture of magnificence and negligence, with every kind of elegance except that of cleanliness and what we call
tidyness.
”

Yet Franklin conceded the palm to Paris on two points of civic hygiene. The first had to do with the water supply, which was rendered “as pure as that of the best spring by filtering it through cisterns filled with sand.” The second involved the streets, which “by constant sweeping are fit to walk in though there is no paved foot path.” For that reason many well-dressed people did indeed walk in the streets, eschewing the coaches and chairs essential for unspattered travel in London.

Franklin found the French people to be the politest he had met. “It seems to be a point settled here universally that strangers are to be treated with respect; one has just the same deference shewn one here by being a stranger as in England by being a lady.” At a customs house near Paris the officers were about to seize two dozen bottles of Bordeaux wine given to Franklin and Pringle at Boulogne. “But as soon as they found we were strangers, it was immediately remitted on that account.” At the cathedral of Notre-Dame, where an immense crowd had gathered to see an exhibit dedicated to the recently deceased dauphiness, Franklin and Pringle initially despaired of getting in. “But the officer being told that we were strangers from England, he immediately admitted us, accompanied and showed us everything.” Franklin asked himself and Polly, “Why don’t we practice this urbanity to Frenchmen? Why should they be allowed to outdo us?”

The experience occasioned reflections on travel and life. “Travelling is one way of lengthening life, at least in appearance. It is but a fortnight since we left London, but the variety of scenes we have gone through makes it seem equal to six months living in one place.” The present journey had wrought effects upon the traveler obvious at first glance.

Perhaps I have suffered a greater change to my own person than I could have done in six years at home. I had not been here six days before my tailor and peruquier had transformed me into a Frenchman. Only think what a figure I make in a little bag wig [which gathered the hair in a bag at the nape of the neck] and naked ears! They told me I was become 20 years younger, and looked very
galante.
So being in Paris where the mode is to be sacredly followed, I was once very near making love to my friend’s wife.

Vacation once more produced its intended effect. The travelers wended back to London early in October, with Franklin revived in body and spirit. Three weeks later he wrote to Debbie, “I have been extremely hearty and well ever since my return from France, the complaints I had before I went on that tour being entirely dissipated, and fresh strength and activity, the effects of exercise and change of air, have taken their place.”

18
Reason and Riot
1768–69

He needed the revival, for awaiting his return to England was the worst flare-up of anti-American feeling since the aftermath of the Stamp Act riots. To Franklin’s embarrassment, the Townshend duties—which were just the kind of external taxes he said the Americans preferred—were immediately rejected in America as illegitimate. Boston called a town meeting that endorsed a renewal of the nonimportation compact of the Stamp Act crisis. Providence and Newport did the same. New York merchants embargoed trade with Britain; New York artisans embargoed business with merchants who failed to live up to the merchandise embargo.