The only intimate friend, we believe, that Franklin had in Ireland was Sir Edward Newenham, a member of the Irish Parliament, whose sympathy with the American cause was so extreme that he appeared in his seat in deep mourning when the news of General Montgomery"s death reached Ireland.
Unfortunately, of the many letters, that Franklin wrote to him, only two or three, of comparatively meagre interest, survive. But of Ireland itself we have some graphic details in his letters to other persons. In one to Thomas Cushing, he says of the Irish, after a tour of the island with his friend, Richard Jackson, "There are many brave Spirits among them. The Gentry are a very sensible, polite, friendly and handsome People. Their Parliament makes a most respectable Figure, with a number of very good Speakers in both Parties, and able Men of Business." He then tells Cushing in modest terms how, when he was on his way to the gallery in the Parliament House at Dublin, the whole a.s.sembly, upon being informed by the Speaker that there was in town an American gentleman of distinguished character and merit, who was a member or delegate of some of the Parliaments in America, by a loud, unanimous expression of its will voted to admit him to the privileges of the floor; whereupon two members came to him without the bar, where he was standing, led him in and placed him very honorably.
Other friends of Franklin there were whom it is difficult to cla.s.sify either as Englishmen or Americans, such as General Horatio Gates and General Charles Lee, who were born in England but became celebrated in America, and Benjamin West, the painter, who was born in America, but pa.s.sed his mature life in England. That Franklin was on very friendly relations with Gates there can be no doubt, for in one of his letters to him he calls him his "Dear old friend," and that was a term never applied by him to any but his intimates. Nor can there be much doubt as to what it was that brought and kept Franklin and Gates together as friends. It was the game to which Franklin was so much addicted that he even expounded its morals in an essay--chess. "When," he wrote to Gates from Pa.s.sy, "shall we meet again in cheerful converse, talk over our adventures, and finish with a quiet game of chess?" And on the same day that he addressed to Washington the n.o.ble letter, declaring that, if the latter were to come to Europe, he would know and enjoy what posterity would say of Washington, he wrote to Gates, "May G.o.d give us soon a good Peace, and bring you and I (_sic_) together again over a Chess board, where we may have Battles without Bloodshed."
How an eccentric and perfidious man like General Charles Lee, whose temper alone was so repugnant to Franklin"s dislike of disputation as to win for him the nickname of "Boiling Water" from the Indians, could ever have pa.s.sed himself off with Franklin as genuine coin is hard to understand, but he appears to have done so. "Yours most affectionately," is the manner in which one of Franklin"s letters to him ends. In another letter to Lee, Franklin gravely sums up in formal numerical sequence his reasons for thinking that bows and arrows were good weapons not wisely laid aside. The idea is one so little in harmony with his practical turn of mind, and is reasoned out so elaborately, that we form a shrewd suspicion as we read that this was after all but his humorous way of replying to his erratic friend"s suggestion that the use of pikes by the American Army might not be a bad thing.
A very different kind of friend was Benjamin West. It was he that Franklin had in mind when he wrote to Polly Stevenson in 1763, "After the first Cares for the Necessaries of Life are over, we shall come to think of the Embellishments. Already some of our young Geniuses begin to lisp Attempts at Painting, Poetry, and Musick. We have a young Painter now studying at Rome." Twenty years later, the lisping attempts of America at painting had become so distinctly articulate, and the young painter, who was studying at Rome, had become so famous, that Franklin could write to Jan Ingenhousz, "In England at present, the best History Painter, West; the best Portrait Painter, Copley, and the best Landscape Painter, Taylor, at Bath, are all Americans." Benjamin West, and his wife, as Elizabeth Shewell, were friends of Franklin and Deborah before West left his native Pennsylvania for Europe; and the friendship between the artist and his wife and Franklin was kept alive by affectionate intercourse in England. For one of West"s sons Franklin became G.o.dfather. "It gave me great Pleasure," he said in a letter to West, referring to a letter from West to him, "as it informed me of the Welfare of a Family I so much esteem and love, and that my G.o.dson is a promising Boy." The letter concludes with loving words for the G.o.dson and Raphael, West"s oldest son, and "Betsey," West"s wife.
We have by no means taken a complete census of Franklin"s American and British friends. For instance, in a letter to Doctor Cooper from London, he refers to a Mr. Mead, first Commissioner of the Customs in England, whom we have not mentioned, as a particular and intimate friend of his; to say nothing of other persons with whom his intercourse was very friendly but either too colorless to arrest our attention in reading his correspondence, or to even bring them up in his correspondence at all. But we have marshalled quite enough of these friends before the eye of the reader, we are sure, to satisfy him that few human beings ever had such a wealth of affection heaped on them as Franklin.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] "Mrs. Shipley and her daughter Kitty, in their pa.s.sion for you rival Georgiana." Letter from Jonathan Shipley to Franklin, Nov. 27, 1785.
[35] To a series of experiments, conducted by Sir John Pringle, we owe our knowledge of the fact that mosquito hawks are so whimsically const.i.tuted that they live longer with their heads off than on. One of these decapitated moths was so tenacious of his existence as to survive for 174 days.
[36] A letter from Franklin to Francis Maseres, dated Pa.s.sy, June 26, 1785, suggests an additional reason why the antipathy of the American Whigs to the American loyalists was so unrelenting. "The war against us was begun by a general act of Parliament, declaring all our estates confiscated; and probably one great motive to the loyalty of the royalists was the hope of sharing in these confiscations. They have played a deep game, staking their estates against ours; and they have been unsuccessful. But it is a surer game, since they had promises to rely on from your government, of indemnification in case of loss; and I see your Parliament is about to fulfil those Promises. To this I have no objection, because, though still our enemies, they are men; they are in necessity; and I think even a hired a.s.sa.s.sin has a right to his pay from his employer."
[37] The business of Whitefoord as a wine-merchant was carried on at No. 8 Craven Street, and he enjoyed a considerable reputation for wit in his time. He served as Secretary to the Commission that settled the terms of peace with the United States. He was, Burke thought, a mere _diseur de bons mots_. Goldsmith deemed him of sufficient importance to make him the subject of an epitaph intended to be worked into the Retaliation, and reading as follows:
"Here Whitefoord reclines, deny it who can; Tho" he merrily lived, he is now a grave man.
What pity, alas! that so lib"ral a mind Should so long be to Newspaper Essays confined!
Who perhaps to the summit of science might soar, Yet content if the table he set in a roar; Whose talents to fit any station were fit, Yet happy if Woodfall confessed him a wit."
His intimacy with Franklin, Whitefoord said on one occasion, had been the "pride and happiness" of his life.
CHAPTER VII
Franklin"s French Friends
To the host of friends mentioned above, numerous as it was, another great addition was to be made when Franklin became one of our envoys to France.
In the various Colonies of America, so unlike each other in many respects, in England, in Scotland, his liberal instincts and quick sympathies ran out into new social forms almost with the fluid ease of the melted tallow which he had poured, in his boyhood, into his father"s candle moulds; but of all the impressions that he ever derived from any society, that which was made upon him by French society certifies most strikingly to the wonderful plasticity of his nature, under the pressure of new conditions. So permeated did he--one of the truest progenitors of distinctively American ideas and attributes, and one of the truest exponents of the robust Anglo-Saxon character--become with the genius of the French People that a Frenchman, Henri Martin, the historian, has declared that he was "of a mind altogether French in its grace and elasticity."
There was a time, of course, when Franklin, apart from the inveteracy of the old English prejudice, which believed that upon every pair of English legs marched three Frenchmen, had no good blood for the French because of the agony in which they had for so many years, with the aid of their savage friends, kept the colonial frontier. "I fancy that intriguing nation would like very well to meddle on occasion, and blow up the coals between Britain and her colonies; but I hope we shall give them no opportunity." This was his quiet comment even as late as 1767 in a letter to William Franklin upon the sedulous attentions recently paid to him by Monsieur Durand, the French plenipotentiary in London, whose masters were fully awake to the fact that the quarrel between Great Britain and her Colonies might be a pretty one from the point of view of French interests, and that in duels it is not the pistols but the seconds that kill. But this was politics. Long before Franklin crossed the Atlantic on his French mission, he had felt, during his visits to France in 1767 and 1769, the bewitching influence of social conditions perpetually enlivened and refreshed by the vivacity and inventive resource which were such conspicuous features of his own character. After his return from France in 1767, he wrote to D"Alibard: "The Time I spent in Paris, and in the improving Conversation and agreeable Society of so many learned and ingenious Men, seems now to me like a pleasing Dream, from which I was sorry to be awaked by finding myself again at London." These agreeable impressions were confirmed by his return to France in 1769. After stating in a letter to Dupont de Nemours in the succeeding year that he expected to return to America in the ensuing summer, he exclaimed, "Would to G.o.d I could take with me Messrs. Dupont, du Bourg, and some other French Friends with their good Ladies! I might then, by mixing them with my Friends in Philadelphia, form a little happy Society that would prevent my ever wishing again to visit Europe."
It was, therefore, to no entirely novel social conditions that Franklin was introduced when he found himself again in France in 1776. At any rate, no chameleon was ever quicker to absorb the color of his latest background.
As time elapsed, nothing but his inability to write and speak French with the facility of a native-born Frenchman separated him in a social sense from the ma.s.s of French men and women, by whom he was admired, courted and flattered almost from the day that he set foot in France until the day that he was conveyed in one of the Queen"s litters to the coast on his return to America. How far this a.s.similation was the deliberate achievement of a wise man, who never failed to act upon the principle that the best way of managing men is to secure their good will first, how far but the unconscious self-adjustment of a pliable disposition it is impossible to say. But there can be no doubt about the amazing sympathy with which Franklin entered into the social life of the French people. Beneath the gay, pleasure-loving exterior that he presented to French society, there was always the thought of that land over-sea, so singularly blessed by Providence with material comfort and equality of fortune, with the general diffusion of education and enlightenment, and with political inst.i.tutions bound to the past only by the wisdom of experience. Always beneath that exterior, too, was a glowing resentment of the wrongs that England had inflicted upon America, an enthusiastic sense of the "glorious cause" in which America was engaged, and a resolution as fixed as the eye of Nemesis that no hand but the hand of America itself should fill out the outlines of the imperial destiny, in which he had once been so eagerly, even pathetically, desirous that England should share. But these were thoughts and purposes reserved for the hours of business, or of confidential intercourse with his American compatriots, or for such moments as the one when he heard of the fall of Philadelphia and the surrender of Burgoyne. In his purely social relations with the French People, he preserved only enough of his republican ideas, dress and manners to give a certain degree of piquancy to his _ensemble_.
He adopted French usages and customs; he composed exquisite little stories and dialogues in the French manner, and, old as he was, he made love like a French _galant_. "As it is always fair Weather in our Parlours, it is at Paris always Peace," he wrote to the Chevalier de la Luzerne, and this remark comes home to us with full force when we remember with what unrestrained gaiety of heart, notwithstanding the shudder sent through him at times by the American War, he enjoyed the social life of Paris. Long before he left France, he had learnt to love the country and its people with a sincere, fervent attachment. After saying in a letter to Josiah Quincy, that the French had certainly advanced in politeness and civility many degrees beyond the English, he paid them this compliment:
I find them here a most amiable Nation to live with.
The Spaniards are by common Opinion suppos"d to be cruel, the English proud, the Scotch insolent, the Dutch Avaricious, &c., but I think the French have no national Vice ascrib"d to them. They have some Frivolities, but they are harmless. To dress their Heads so that a Hat cannot be put on them, and then wear their Hats under their Arms, and to fill their Noses with Tobacco, may be called Follies, perhaps, but they are not Vices. They are only the effects of the tyranny of Custom. In short, there is nothing wanting in the Character of a Frenchman, that belongs to that of an agreeable and worthy Man. There are only some Trifles surplus, or which might be spared.
These, however, were but frigid words in comparison with those subsequently employed by him in relation to a country, where, to use his own language, everybody strove to make him happy. "The French are an amiable People to live with," he told his old friend, Captain Nathaniel Falconer, "They love me, & I love them." In a later letter to William Franklin, he said, "I am here among a People that love and respect me, a most amiable Nation to live with; and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; for my Friends in America are dying off, one after another, and I have been so long abroad, that I should now be almost a Stranger in my own Country."
Nor did the love for France that he took back with him to the United States grow at all fainter with absence and the flow of time. To the Duc de la Rochefoucauld he wrote from Philadelphia, "I love France, I have 1000 Reasons for doing so: And whatever promotes or impedes her Happiness affects me as if she were my Mother." To Madame Lavoisier he used terms that communicate to us an even more vivid conception of the ambrosial years that he had pa.s.sed in France.
These [he said, referring to his good fortune in his old age in its different aspects] are the blessings of G.o.d, and depend on his continued goodness; yet all do not make me forget Paris, and the nine years" happiness I enjoyed there, in the sweet society of a people whose conversation is instructive, whose manners are highly pleasing, and who, above all the nations of the world, have, in the greatest perfection, the art of making themselves beloved by strangers. And now, even in my sleep, I find, that the scenes of all my pleasant dreams are laid in that city, or in its neighbourhood.[38]
Mingled with these pleasant dreams, it is safe to say were some of the lively and charming women to whose embraces he submitted, if his sister Jane was not misinformed, in a spirit quite remote from that of the rigors of penance.
You mention the Kindness of the French Ladies to me [he wrote to Elizabeth Partridge, whose husband was the superintendent of the almshouse in Boston], I must explain that matter. This is the civilest nation upon Earth. Your first Acquaintances endeavour to find out what you like, and they tell others. If "tis understood that you like Mutton, dine where you will you find Mutton. Somebody, it seems, gave it out that I lov"d Ladies; and then everybody presented me their Ladies (or the Ladies presented themselves) to be _embrac"d_, that is to have their Necks kiss"d. For as to kissing of Lips or Cheeks it is not the Mode here, the first, is reckon"d rude, & the other may rub off the Paint.
The French Ladies have however 1000 other ways of rendering themselves agreeable; by their various Attentions and Civilities, & their sensible Conversation. "Tis a delightful People to live with.
I hope, however [he wrote to another correspondent after denying a story about himself], to preserve, while I stay, the regard you mention of the French ladies; for their society and conversation, when I have time to enjoy them, are extremely agreeable.
And that the French ladies found his society and conversation extremely agreeable no one can well doubt who has had occasion to become familiar with the scented missives, full of artful coquetry, that were addressed by many fair hands to "tres cher papa," or "Dear American papa" or "amiable papa," when he was in the land where somebody had been so considerate as to give it out that he liked ladies. At times, these notes run along in mingled French and English as if the writers were determined to bring to bear upon him the blandishments not only of the former language but of his own familiar tongue besides. "Je vous envoye a sweet kiss, dear Papa, envoyez moi en revanche, un Mot de Reponse," was one languishing request.
Even Franklin"s bad French mattered but little when a woman, Madame Brillon, whom the daughter of Abigail Adams p.r.o.nounced "one of the handsomest women in France," could write to him, "It is always very good French to say, "Je vous aime." My heart always goes out to meet this word when you say it to me." From such words as these to his saying that the best master of languages is a mistress the transition was not very difficult.[39]
It was at Pa.s.sy, then a suburb of Paris, that Franklin resided during the eight and a half years that he was one of our representatives in France.
His surroundings were thus described by him in reply to a question from Mrs. Stevenson:
You wish to know how I live. It is in a fine House, situated in a neat Village, on high Ground, half a Mile from Paris, with a large Garden to walk in. I have abundance of Acquaintance, dine abroad Six days in seven. Sundays I reserve to dine at home, with such Americans as pa.s.s this Way; and I then have my grandson Ben, with some other American Children from his school.
The house mentioned by Franklin was known as the Ba.s.se Cour de Monsieur Le Ray de Chaumont, and had originally, with the inscription over its door, "Se sta bene, non si muove" not been unknown to fame as the Hotel de Valentinois. Indeed, John Locke, who visited Paris in 1679, declared that it was among the twenty-four _belles maisons_ in Paris that best rewarded the curiosity of the stranger at that time. The circ.u.mstances, under which it pa.s.sed into the possession of Franklin, were another proof of the flaming zeal with which many of the foremost inhabitants of France espoused the cause of the Colonies. Chaumont was Grand Maitre des Eaux et Forets de France and Intendant Honoraire des Invalides, a friend of the Duc de Choiseul, and a man of large wealth, with a chateau on the Loire as well as the mansion at Pa.s.sy, of which the building occupied by Franklin was a part. In his generous enthusiasm for American liberty, he declined a post in the French Ministry, offered to him by Choiseul, because he thought that by declining it he might be a more useful intermediary between America and the French Government. When John Adams came to Pa.s.sy, and found a home under the same roof with Franklin, he felt obliged to write to Chaumont asking him to consider what rent they should pay to him for the use of his house and furniture. Every part of Chaumont"s conduct towards him and Americans in general, and in all their affairs, he said, had been polite and obliging, as far as he had an opportunity of observing, and he had no doubt it would continue, but it was not reasonable that they should occupy such an elegant mansion without any compensation to the owner, and it was not right that they should live at too great or at too uncertain an expense to their const.i.tuents. The reply of Chaumont was worthy of a paladin of Ancient France. "When I consecrated my home to Dr. Franklin and his a.s.sociates who might live with him," he said, "I made it fully understood that I should expect no compensation, because I perceived that you had need of all your means to send to the succor of your country, or to relieve the distresses of your countrymen escaping from the chains of their enemies."
This is a world, however, in which it is too much to expect an absolutely free gift of house rent, and the answer of Chaumont to John Adams does not altogether agree with the version of the matter given by Franklin in a letter to Robert R. Livingston, in which he said that Chaumont had originally proposed to leave the article of rent unsettled until the end of the war, and then to accept for it a piece of American land from the Congress such as they might judge equivalent. Considering the serious uncertainty as to whether there would then be any Congress, this was quite generous enough. It is painful to relate, however, that Chaumont engaged so recklessly in the hazardous business of shipping supplies to America for the patriot army as to become involved in pecuniary embarra.s.sments, which produced some degree of temporary constraint in his intercourse with Franklin. "I find that in these Affairs with him, a Bargain tho" ever so clearly express"d signifies nothing," wrote Franklin in a moment of disgust with his volatility to Jonathan Williams. A few months before, Franklin had made this entry in a journal kept by him during a brief portion of his residence at Pa.s.sy. "Visit at M. de Chaumont"s in the evening; found him cold and dry." But before Franklin left France, the old cordiality of intercourse appears to have been fully re-established, for we find the two dining with each other again, and besides, when Franklin was on his way to the seacoast, on his return to America, Chaumont and his daughter accompanied him part of the way. The entire restoration of good feeling between the two men is also shown in the letters and conduct of Franklin after his return to America. Chaumont was one of the group of French friends favored by him with gifts of the Franklin Myrtle Wax Soap, "thought," he said, "to be the best in the World, for Shaving & for washing Chinces, and other things of delicate Colours." In one of his letters from Philadelphia, Franklin tells Chaumont that Donatien Le Ray Chaumont, the Younger, who had come over to America to press certain claims of the elder Chaumont against the United States, was out at that time with his "son Bache" and some others on a hunt. It is in this letter, by the way, that he said of Finck, his _maitre d" hotel_ at Pa.s.sy, who was pretending that he was not wholly paid, "He was continually saying of himself, Je suis honnete homme, Je suis honnete homme. But I always suspected he was mistaken; and so it proves." In another letter, he wrote to Chaumont, "I have frequently the Pleasure of seeing your valuable Son, whom I love as my own," and in this letter he sent his love to all Chaumont"s children in France, one of whom he was in the habit of addressing as "ma femme," another as "ma chere amie," and still another as "mon enfant." "Present my affectionate Respects to Madame de Chaumont, and Love to Mad"e Foucault, to ma Femme, ma chere Amie, et mon Enfant," was one of his messages to Chaumont. This Madame Foucault was the favorite mentioned by William Temple Franklin, when he wrote to his grandfather some nine months after the latter found the manner of Chaumont "cold and dry," "All the family (the Chaumonts) send their love to you, and the beautiful M"e Foucault accompanys hers with an English kiss." A challenge of that kind was always promptly caught up by Franklin. "Thanks to Mad"e Foucault," he replied, "for her kindness in sending me the Kiss. It was grown cold by the way. I hope for a warm one when we meet."
An amusing observation of Madame Chaumont, which has its value, as an ill.u.s.tration of eighteenth-century manners in France, is quoted in a letter from Franklin to John Paul Jones:
L"Abbe Rochon had just been telling me & Madame Chaumont [wrote Franklin] that the old Gardiner & his Wife had complained to the Curate, of your having attack"d her in the Garden about 7 o"clock the evening before your Departure, and attempted to ravish her relating all the Circ.u.mstances, some of which are not fit for me to write. The serious Part of it was yt three of her Sons were determin"d to kill you, if you had not gone off; the Rest occasioned some Laughing; for the old Woman being one of the grossest, coa.r.s.est, dirtiest & ugliest that we may find in a thousand, Madame Chaumont said it gave a high Idea of the Strength of Appet.i.te & Courage of the Americans. A Day or two after, I learnt yt it was the femme de Chambre of Mademoiselle Chaumont who had disguis"d herself in a Suit, I think, of your Cloaths, to divert herself under that Masquerade, as is customary the last evening of Carnival: and that meeting the old Woman in the Garden, she took it into her Head to try her Chast.i.ty, which it seems was found Proof.
The wit of Madame de Chaumont, however, shows to better advantage in connection with another incident. One of Franklin"s friends was Mademoiselle Pa.s.sy, a beautiful girl, whom he was in the habit of calling, so John Adams tells us, "his favorite, and his flame, and his love," which flattered the family, and did not displease the young lady. When her engagement to the Marquis de Tonnerre was announced, Madame de Chaumont exclaimed to Franklin, "Helas! tous les conducteurs de Monsieur Franklin n"ont pas empeche le tonnerre de tomber sur Mademoiselle de Pa.s.sy."
Franklin himself was entirely too good a conductor of wit not to pa.s.s a thing like this on.
It gives me great Pleasure Madam my respected Neighbour, [he said in a letter to Madame de Boulainvilliers, the mother of the Semele upon whom the Marquis was about to descend] to learn that our lovely Child is soon to be married with your Approbation & that we are not however to be immediately depriv"d of her Company. I a.s.sure you I shall make no Use of my Paratonnerre [lightning-rod] to prevent this Match.
Franklin"s republican simplicity began and ended with his unpowdered hair, worn straight, and covered with a cap of marten fur, and his russet dress.
At Pa.s.sy, he lived in a manner that Vergennes, accustomed to the splendor and profusion of European Courts, might well call modest, but which was quite as lavish as was consistent with the reputation of a plain democrat or of a veritable philosopher. Under the terms of his contract with his _maitre d"hotel_, the latter was to provide _dejeuner_ and dinner daily for five persons. The _dejeuner_ was to consist of bread and b.u.t.ter, honey, and coffee or chocolate with sugar, and the dinner of a joint of beef, or veal or mutton, followed by fowl or game with "deux plats d"entremets, deux plats de legumes, et un plat de Pattisserie, avec hors d"oeuvre, de Beurres, cornichons, radis, etc." For dessert, there were to be "deux de Fruit en hiver et 4 en Ete." There were also to be at dinner: "Deux compottes, un a.s.siette de fromage, un de Biscuits, et un de bonbons," and "Des Glaces, 2 fois par Semaine en Ete et un fois en Hyver." The cost of this service per month was 720 livres. There was also an allowance of 240 livres per month for nine domestic servants, and of 400 livres per month for extra dinners for guests; making the total monthly cost of Franklin"s table 1360 livres. And there was no lack of good wine, red or white, _ordinaire_ or _extraordinaire_. In 1778, there were 1180 bottles of wine and rum in the cellar at Pa.s.sy, and, some four and one half years later, there were 1203. Franklin also maintained a carriage and coachman at a cost of 5018 livres per year. By a resolution of Congress, the salaries of the different Commissioners of the United States in Europe were fixed at 11,428 livres tournois per annum, in addition to their reasonable expenses, and the total expenses of Franklin in France are computed by Smyth to have been about $15,000 per annum, a moderate sum, indeed, in comparison with the amount necessary to sustain the dignity of our Minister to France at the present time. Nevertheless, the _menage_ at Pa.s.sy was luxurious enough for him to be warned that it had been described at home by some of his guests in such terms as to provoke popular censure on the part of his countrymen.
They must be contented for the future [Franklin said in a letter to John Adams] as I am, with plain beef and pudding. The readers of Connecticut newspapers ought not to be troubled for any more accounts of our extravagance. For my own part, if I could sit down to dinner on a piece of excellent salt pork and pumpkin, I would not give a farthing for all the luxuries of Paris.
After this time, Franklin did not keep such an open house as before, considerably to the relief of his gout. Previously, if we may believe John Adams, he had made a practice of inviting everybody to dine with him on Sunday at Pa.s.sy. Sometimes, his company was made up exclusively, or all but exclusively, of Americans, and sometimes partly of Americans, and partly of French, and, now and then, there was an Englishman or so. Miss Adams mentions a "sumptuous dinner," at which the members of the Adams family, the Marquis de la Fayette and his wife, Lord Mount Morris, an Irish Volunteer, Dr. Jeffries, and Paul Jones were guests. Another dinner is mentioned by her at which all the guests were Americans, except M. Brillon, who had dropped in, he said, "a demander un dine a Pere Franklin." A whimsical story is told by Jefferson of still another dinner at which one half of the guests were Americans and one half French.
Among the last [he says] was the Abbe (Raynal). During the dinner he got on his favorite theory of the degeneracy of animals, and even of men, in America, and urged it with his usual eloquence. The Doctor at length noticing the accidental stature and position of his guests, at table, "Come," says he, "M. L"Abbe, let us try this question by the fact before us. We are here one half Americans, and one half French, and it happens that the Americans have placed themselves on one side of the table, and our French friends are on the other.
Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature has degenerated." It happened that his American guests were Carmichael, Harmer, Humphreys, and others of the finest stature and form; while those of the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbe himself, particularly, was a mere shrimp. He parried the appeal, however, by a complimentary admission of exceptions, among which the Doctor himself was a conspicuous one.
Not the least interesting of the guests that Franklin drew around his table at Pa.s.sy were lads, who had a claim upon his notice, either because they were the sons, or grandsons, of friends of his, or because they were friends of his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. In a letter to Doctor Cooper, Franklin tells him that his grandson, Samuel Cooper Johonnot appeared a very promising lad, in whom he thought that the doctor would have much satisfaction, and was well on the preceding Sunday, when he had had the pleasure of his company to dinner with Mr. Adams" sons, and some other young Americans. There is still in existence a letter from John Quincy Adams, then a boy of eleven, to Franklin, which indicates that the latter had quite won his heart, though, do what he might, he could never win the heart of the elder Adams.
It was a brilliant society, to which Franklin was introduced, after the first reserve of the French Court, before its recognition of American independence, was laid aside. He had the magpie habit of h.o.a.rding every sc.r.a.p of paper or cardboard, that bore the imprint of his existence, and Smyth, the latest editor of Franklin"s works, has, with his usual diligence, compiled the names that appear most frequently on the visiting cards, found among Franklin"s papers. They are such significant names as those of La d.u.c.h.esse d"Enville, her son Le Duc de la Rochefoucauld, M.
Turgot, Duc de Chaulnes, Comte de Crillon, Vicomte de Sarsfield, M.
Brisson, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Comte de Milly, Prince des Deuxponts, Comte d"Estaing, Marquis de Mirabeau and M. Beaugeard, Treasurer of the State of Brittany.
The Diary of John Adams reveals Franklin and himself dining on one occasion with La d.u.c.h.esse d"Enville, and "twenty of the great people of France," on another with M. Chalut, one of the farmers-general, and the old Marshal Richelieu, and "a vast number of other great company," on another with the Prince de Tingry, Duc de Beaumont, of the ill.u.s.trious House of Montmorency, and on another with La d.u.c.h.esse d"Enville, along with her daughter and granddaughter, and dukes, abbots and the like so numerous that the list ends with a splutter of et ceteras. "Dukes, and bishops and counts, etc."
are the overburdened words with which Adams closes his list of the guests at a dinner given by Vergennes, the minister of Louis XVI.