Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (50 page)

In the ensuing years, Franklin would help guide Madame Brillon through her bouts of depression, and he would try, as we shall see, to encourage a marriage between Temple and either of her daughters. But increasingly, by 1779, he was turning more of his attention toward another woman, one with an even more fascinating household, who lived in the neighboring village of Auteuil.

Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d’Autricourt was born to one of the great aristocratic families of Lorraine, but she was the tenth of twenty children and thus lacked a dowry. So when she was 15 and of marriageable age, she was sent off to a convent. As it turned out, she certainly did not have the temperament for a cloistered life nor, for that matter, the funds. At age 30, her pension ran out and so did she, to Paris, where she was taken in by a kindly aunt who had left her husband, become a novelist, and created a salon filled with bright and slightly bohemian intellectuals.

There Anne-Catherine’s vivacity and beauty attracted many suitors, most notably the economist Turgot, eight years her junior, who would later become France’s comptroller and a friend of Franklin. Turgot was engaging but not wealthy enough, so she instead married someone more established, Claude-Adrien Helvétius.

Helvétius was one of France’s fifty or so Farmers General, a royal-chartered group with the very lucrative assignment of collecting taxes and holding leases. Once he had made his fortune, Helvétius set out to satisfy his social and intellectual aspirations. So the rich financier married the poor aristocrat and became, as mentioned above, a noted philosopher who helped plan the Nine Sisters Masonic Lodge. His great work,
De l’Esprit
(1758), was a controversial espousal of godless hedonism, which argued that the love of pleasure motivated human activity. Around him he gathered the stars of the Enlightenment, including Diderot, Condorcet, Hume on his occasional visits from Edinburgh, and Turgot, still in favor though spurned as a suitor.

When Helvétius died in 1771, five years before Franklin’s arrival, his widow Anne-Catherine, now Madame Helvétius, married off their two daughters to men of their own choosing, gave each of them one of the family chateaux, and bought a rambling farm in Auteuil near Passy. She was lively, outgoing and, as befitted her aristocratic birth but impoverished upbringing, somewhat of a free-spirited bohemian who enjoyed projecting an earthy aura. There is an oft-repeated remark that has been attributed to many but was likely first famously uttered by the writer Fontenelle, who was in his late nineties when he frequented her salon. Beholding Madame Helvétius in one of her more casual states of undress, he proclaimed, “Oh, to be seventy again!”

At Auteuil she cultivated a free-spirited garden that was devoid of all French formality, a collection of ducks and dogs that formed a noisy and motley menagerie, and a salon that displayed many of the same attributes. Friends brought her rare plants, unusual pets, and provocative ideas, and she nurtured them all at what became jokingly known as “l’Académie d’Auteuil.”
¹⁹

Living with Madame Helvétius were two priests and one acolyte:

• The Abbé André Morellet, a noted political economist and contributor to the
  Encyclopédie,
  in his late forties who had first befriended Franklin in 1772 at the English house party where he played the trick of stilling the waves with his magic cane, and who shared his love for fine wine, song, economic theories, and practical inventions.
  
• The Abbé Martin Lefebvre de la Roche, in his late thirties, a former Benedictine whom (in Morellet’s words) “Helvétius had after a fashion secularized.”
  
• Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, a bachelor poet in his early twenties, who translated Homer, studied medicine, wrote a book on hospitals, and revered Franklin, whose tales and anecdotes he faithfully recorded.
  

“We discoursed of morality, of politics, and of philosophy,” la Roche recalled. “Notre Dame d’Auteuil excited your coquetry, and the Abbé Morellet wrangled over the cream and ushered his arguments to prove what we did not believe.”
²⁰

It was Turgot, still smitten by Madame Helvétius, who first brought Franklin to visit her in 1778, when she was nearly 60 but still both lively and beautiful. Her domestic menagerie, filled with banter and intellectual irreverence, was perfectly tailored to Franklin’s tastes, and shortly thereafter he wrote her a letter in which he described her electromagnetism:

Not surprisingly, John Adams was shocked by both Madame Helvétius and her household when Franklin brought him for a visit. The two abbots, he sniped, “I suppose have as much power to pardon a sin as they have to commit one.” Of the moral “absurdities” at the house he commented, “No kind of republican government can ever exist with such national manners.” His wife, Abigail, was even more horrified when she visited later, and she described Madame Helvétius with a delightfully vicious pen:

Franklin did more than flirt with Madame Helvétius; by September 1779, he was ardently proposing marriage in a way that was more than half-serious but retained enough ironic detachment to preserve their dignities. “If that Lady likes to pass her days with him, he in turn would like to pass his nights with her,” he wrote through Cabanis, using the third person. “As he has already given her many of his days, though he has so few left to give, she appears ungrateful never to have given him a single one of her nights, which steadily pass as a pure loss, without giving happiness to anyone except Poupon [her dog].”
²³

She led him on lightly. “I hoped that after putting such pretty things on paper,” she scrawled, “you would come and tell me some.” He continued his quest in a clever, yet still humorously detached, fashion by composing for her two little tales. The first was written in the voice of the flies living in his apartment. They complain about the dangers they faced from the spiders at Passy and thank her for making him clean out their webs. “There only remains one thing for us to wish,” they conclude. “It is to see both of you forming at last but one ménage.”
²⁴

Turgot, now more jealous than amused by Franklin, counseled her to decline his marriage proposals, which she did. Franklin nevertheless renewed his suit with one of his most famous tales, “The Elysian Fields,” in which he recounted a dream about going to heaven and discussing the matter with her late husband and his late wife, who had themselves married. Praising Madame Helvétius’s looks over those of his departed wife, he suggested they take revenge:

Beneath the frivolity lurked a sincere desire—his friends thought so, as did his friendly rival Turgot—yet it was expressed with a flair that made it seem safe and clever. Always uncomfortable with deep emotional bonds, Franklin performed the perfect distancing trick. Instead of conducting his suit in secret, which would have given it a dangerous seriousness, he took it public by publishing the story on his private press a few months later. By doing so, he put his heart out for all to see, and there it could dance safely in the realm between sincerity and self-deprecating playfulness. “Franklin somehow never committed himself wholly in love,” notes Claude-Anne Lopez. “A part of him was always holding back and watching the proceedings with irony.”

It was all too much, both the seriousness and the public playfulness, for Madame Helvétius. She fled in June 1780 to spend the summer in Tours with the hope, according to a letter Turgot wrote a mutual friend, “that she may forget, if possible, all the turmoil that has tormented her.” He added that the vacation was best “not only for her own tranquility, but also to reestablish it in that other head [i.e., Franklin’s] that has agitated so ill-advisedly.”
²⁶

As for Franklin, the deft dance of half-serious flirtations, unrequited though they were, had a rejuvenating effect on his body and spirit. “I do not find that I grow any older,” he wrote a friend that spring. “Being arrived at 70, and considering that by traveling further in the same road I should probably be led to the grave, I stopped short, turned about, and walked back again; which having done these four years, you may now call me 66.”
²⁷

One product of Franklin’s flirtations at Passy and Auteuil was the collection of fables and tales—such as “The Ephemera,” “The Flies,” and “The Elysian Fields,” mentioned above—that he wrote to amuse his friends. He called them bagatelles, the French term for a sprightly little musical piece, and he published many of them on the private press he installed at Passy. They were similar to little stories he had written in the past, such as “The Trial of Polly Baker,” but the dozen or so written in Passy have a slight French accent to them.

They have been the subject of much critical fawning. “Franklin’s bagatelles combine delight with moral truth,” declares Alfred Owen Aldridge. “They are among the world’s masterpieces of light literature.” Not exactly. Their value lies more in the glimpse they give into Franklin’s personality than in their literary merit, which is somewhat slight. They are jeux d’esprit, as fun as a five-finger exercise. Most display Franklin’s typical wry self-awareness, though some are a bit heavy-handed in their attempt to teach a moral lesson.
²⁸

The most amusing is “Dialogue between the Gout and Mr. Franklin,” a precursor to the old Alka Seltzer commercial in which a man is berated by his stomach. When he was bedridden by the malady in October 1780, Madame Brillon wrote him a poem, “Le Sage et la Goutte,” that implied that his malady was caused by his love for “one pretty mistress, sometimes two, three, four.” Among the lines:

Franklin replied one midnight with a long and rollicking dialogue in which the gout chided him for his indulgences and also, because Franklin liked to be instructive, prescribed a course of exercise and fresh air:

MR. F.: Eh! oh! eh! What have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?

THE GOUT: Many things; you have ate and drank too freely, and too much indulged those legs of yours in their indolence.

MR. F.: Who is it that accuses me?

THE GOUT: It is I, even I, the Gout.

MR. F.: What! my enemy in person?

THE GOUT: No, not your enemy.

MR. F.: I repeat it, my enemy; for you would not only torment my body to death, but ruin my good name; you reproach me as a glutton and a tippler; now all the world, that knows me, will allow that I am neither the one nor the other.