The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (109 page)

My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me, and they tell me I have
lived long enough, to nature and to glory.
But what will fame be to an Ephemere who no longer exists? And what will become of all history, in the 18th hour, when the world itself, even the whole
Moulin-Joli,
shall come to its end, and be buried in universal ruin?

To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but the reflections of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good Lady Ephemeres, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable
Brillante.

At his age
Franklin may not really have expected to catch the swift Brillante, but he seems to have had higher hopes regarding another woman—who shocked John Adams even more than Madame Brillon did. Madame Helvétius was a wealthy widow who made a great show of lamenting her departed husband. “That she might not be, however, entirely without the society of gentlemen,” Adams recorded, “there were three or four handsome abbes who daily visited the house, and one at least resided there.” Such personal confessors were customary among families of distinction, Adams discovered, although he could not help observing that they seemed to have as much power to commit sins as to pardon them. “Oh Mores! I said to myself. What absurdities, inconsistencies, distractions and horrors would these manners introduce into our republican governments in America. No kind of republican government can ever exist with such national manners as these. Cavete Americani.”

Franklin fit right in, which simply reinforced Adams’s disgust at the libertine life his fellow commissioner was leading. Yet such was Adams’s eventual mastery of the diplomatic arts that after leaving Paris he wrote Franklin asking him to convey his compliments to Madame Helvétius—and Madame Brillon—“ladies for whose characters I have a very great respect.”

Adams’s wife, Abigail, labored under no such constraints. Mrs. Adams supplied a fuller, but no more flattering, picture of Madame Helvétius.

She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air; upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, “Ah, mon Dieu, where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?” You must suppose her speaking all this in French. “How I look!” said she, taking hold of a chemise made of tiffany, which she had on over a blue lute-string, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman; her hair was frizzled; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty gauze half-handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze, than ever my maids wore, was bowed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders. She ran out of the room; when she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other; upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, “Helas! Franklin”; then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief of the conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hand into the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both the gentlemen’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor’s neck.

I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from affectation or stiffness of behavior, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor’s word; but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although sixty years of age, and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.

After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog, who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite, and whom she kissed. This is one of the Doctor’s most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him.

Madame Helvétius, born Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d’Autricourt, belonged to an aristocratic but straitened family of Lorraine; as the tenth of twenty children she lacked the dowry required for a match to a man of equivalent social rank. So she was placed in a convent where, all supposed, she would spend her life in prayer and contemplation. But even that prim prospect failed when the pension that supported her ran out. Luckily an aunt took pity and brought her to Paris, where her genteel poverty found a mate in a man of means but insufficient (in his eyes) station—one of the group of Farmers General that would subsidize the American Revolution. Monsieur Helvétius established his wife at Auteuil, not far from Passy, attracted an assortment of intellectuals and artists, and died. Madame Helvétius, in her late fifties on Franklin’s appearance, currently maintained the salon.

Franklin was first drawn by the company. The economist and finance minister Turgot was a regular; in fact, Turgot had once wooed the lady but failed to pass the means test. Yet still he hovered about, hoping for a second chance now that she had all the money she needed. Diderot and d’Alembert took time from their
Encyclopédie;
Condorcet dropped by for the Tuesday dinners that commenced at two and lasted long into the night. David Hume occasionally found his way from Edinburgh. The writer Fontenelle, well into his nineties, captured the spirit of the gatherings with the witticism, uttered upon catching the casual hostess in one of her not uncommon states of undress: “Oh, to be seventy again!”

Franklin found intellectual pleasure in “l’académie d’Auteuil”; he sought pleasure of another sort in “Notre Dame d’Auteuil,” as he called Madame Helvétius. “If Notre Dame is pleased to spend her days with Franklin, he would be just as pleased to spend his nights with her,” he wrote. “And since he has already given her so many of his days, although he has so few left to give, she seems very ungrateful in never giving him one of her nights, which keep passing as a pure loss, without making anyone happy except Poupon [her cat].”

With Madame Brillon, whose husband was still very much alive—and a Franklin friend as well—Franklin could hope only for a liaison. With Madame Helvétius he hoped for something more permanent. Or perhaps his proposals were merely foreplay. In one letter he described his disappointment at her canceling an engagement, and the impatience with
which he awaited his next meeting with her. “He will be there early, to watch her enter, with that grace and dignity which have charmed him,” he wrote. “He even plans to capture her there and keep her to himself for life.”

In a variation of the “Ephemere” letter he sent Madame Brillon (one wonders if the two women were comparing notes), he assumed the role of spokesman for the flies who lived in his apartment at Passy. The flies sent their respects to Madame Helvétius, who had taken pity on the untidy Doctor Franklin and ordered his apartment swept. This scattered the spiders that had preyed on the flies. “Since that time we have lived happily, and have enjoyed the beneficence of the said bonhomme F. without fear. There remains only one thing for us to wish in order to assure the stability of our fortune; permit us to say it, ‘Bizz, izzz ouizz a ouizzzz izzzzzzz, etc.’ It is to see both of you forming at last but one ménage.”

Madame Helvétius deflected Franklin’s entreaties with the memory of her husband. Franklin concocted another approach.

Saddened by your barbarous resolution, stated so positively last night, to remain single the rest of your life, in honour of your dear husband, I went home, fell on my bed, believing myself dead, and found myself in the Elysian Fields.

I was asked if I had a wish to see some important persons.

“Take me to the philosophers.”

“There are two who reside quite near here, in this garden. They are very good neighbours and very good friends of each other.”

“Who are they?”

“Socrates and H. [Madame Helvétius’s late husband].”

“I have prodigious esteem for both of them, but let me see H. first, for I understand some French and not a word of Greek.”

He received me with great courtesy, having known me by reputation, he said, for some time. He asked me a thousand questions on war, and on the present state of religion, of liberty, and of the government in France.

“But you are not enquiring at all about your dear friend Madame H.; yet she is excessively in love with you, and I was with her but an hour ago.”

“Ah,” said he, “you are bringing back to my mind my former felicity. But one must forget, in order to be happy in this place. For several of the first years, I thought of nobody but her. Well, now I am consoled. I have taken another wife. One as similar to her as I could find. She is not, to be sure, quite as beautiful, but she has just as much common sense, a little more wisdom, and she loves me infinitely. Her continuous endeavour is to please me; and she has gone out right now to search for the best nectar and ambrosia to regale me with tonight. Stay with me and you shall see her.”

“I notice,” said I, “that your former friend is more faithful than you, for several matches have been offered her, and she has turned them all down. I confess that I, for one, loved her madly; but she was harsh towards me and rejected me absolutely for the love of you.”

“I pity you,” said he, “for your misfortunes, for she is truly a good and lovely woman, and most amiable. But Abbé de la R. and Abbé M., aren’t they any more in her home, now and then?”

“Yes, of course; for she has not lost a single of your friends.”

“Now, if you had won over Abbé M. (with coffee and cream) [this was a standing joke], and got him to plead your cause, you might have met with success, for he is as subtle a debater as Duns Scotus or St. Thomas; he puts his arguments in such good order that they become almost irresistible. Or, better still, if you had convinced Abbé de la R. (by the gift of some fine edition of an old classic) [this second priest was a bibliophile] to argue against you, for I have always observed that when he advises something she has a strong tendency to do the exact opposite.”

As he was saying this, the new Madame H. came in with the nectar. I recognized her instantly as Madame F., my former American friend [that is, Deborah Franklin]. I claimed her.

But she said coldly, “I have been a good wife to you for forty-nine years and four months, almost half a century. Be content with that. I have formed a new connection here, that will last for eternity.”

Grieved by this rebuke from my Euridyce, I resolved there and then to abandon those ungrateful shadows, and to come back to this good world, to see the sun again, and you. Here I am! Let us avenge ourselves!

Franklin
had no more success with Madame Helvétius than with Madame Brillon. Whether his pursuit of other women in Paris had a different outcome is impossible to know. Certainly he achieved a reputation there as a great lover of women, and considering the determination with which he wooed Madames Brillon and Helvétius, any failure would hardly have been for lack of trying. And considering the mores of French society at the time, he could hardly have wanted for willing partners.