Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  At Auteuil, the tête-à-tête between Franklin and Madame Helvetius, the Abbes and Cabanas became even more rollicking. Notes and songs flowed back and forth, to be added to the collection of witty essays, such as the Ephemerae. Franklin called these his “bagatelles” and printed them on the small press which he had set up in the Hotel de Valentinois. Sometimes Franklin and the Abbes would borrow Madame Brillon’s piano and have an evening of “good music and tea with ice.” Abbe Morellet wrote a song which argued that the American Revolution had really started because Franklin had grown tired of English beer and decided to switch to French wine.

  In all history there never was

  A better braver cause

  Independence was the goal

  So French wine could soothe the soul I am told

  Of Benjamin.

  The Ambassador replied with a mad essay in praise of wine which he signed Abbe Franklin. It abounded with puns on the word vin, French for wine. Before Noah, Franklin pointed out, men had only water to drink and that is why they went astray and became “abominably wicked.” So God gave Noah the secret of wine, and he in turn discovered some of the secrets of living. Hence the origin of the word divine” to discover by means of wine.” Solemnly he lectured the Abbe Morellet on putting water into wine, which was then the fashion in France. Franklin did not approve of it. “Offer water only to children,” he advised, and pointed out that Saint Paul advised Timothy to put some wine into his water for his health’s sake, but “not one of the Apostles nor any of the Holy Fathers have ever recommended putting water into wine.” To further prove the divine origin of wine, Franklin noted the position of the elbow, which God had placed precisely in the middle of the arm, enabling a man to lift a glass of wine to his mouth without the slightest difficulty. There was only one conclusion. “Let us adore then, glass in hand, this benevolent wisdom; let us adore and drink.”

  Another day Franklin sent over an old song he had written forty years before on the same subject. The verses contained not a little of his mellow philosophy.

  SINGER

  Fair Venus calls; her voice obey

  In beauty’s arms spend night and day

  The joys of love all joys excel,

  And loving’s certainly doing well.

  CHORUS

  0! No!

  Not so!

  For honest souls know,

  Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.

  SINGER

  Then let us get money, like bees lay up honey; We’ll build us new hives, and store each cell. The sight of our treasure shall yield us great pleasure.

  We’ll count it, and chink it, and jiggle it well.

  CHORUS

  0! No!

  Not so!

  For honest souls know,

  Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.

  SINGER

  If this does not fit ye, let’s govern the city.

  In power is pleasure no tongue can tell.

  By crowds tho you’re teased, your pride shall be pleased,

  And this can make Lucifer happy in hell!

  CHORUS

  0! No!

  Not so!

  For honest souls know,

  Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.

  SINGER

  Then toss of your glasses, and scorn the dull asses

  Who, missing the kernel, still gnaw the shell;

  What’s love, rule or riches:

  Wise Solomon teaches,

  They’re vanity, vanity, vanity still.

  CHORUS

  That’s true;

  He knew;

  He tried them all through;

  Friends and a bottle still bore the bell.

  There was in all this gaiety a bittersweet undertone of sadness. Franklin had decided to go home. The great victory won, and the peace restored, his thoughts turned inevitably to America. Madame Helvetius begged him to spend the rest of his life in France, where so many people loved him. “I want to be buried in my own country,” he replied, sounding more and more like a patriarch of old. He sent a veritable stream of letters to Congress, begging them to dismiss him. In almost every one of these letters he added a plea for William Temple Franklin. He expatiated on the long years of service Temple had given him and the country in the French mission, acting as his secretary, and then as secretary of the peace commission. Franklin urged that he be rewarded by being appointed secretary of the legation or a charge d’affaires in some other American legation in Europe.

  For eighteen months, he got no answer to either request. Congress was in a state of political desuetude, moving haphazardly from city to city, with scarcely enough money to pay its dinner bills. In it there was still a sprinkling of Franklin enemies, who delighted in striking at him through his grandson. Unfortunately, Temple gave them a tempting target. He seemed to have inherited very little of his grandfather’s talent or stability. His favorite sport was strolling the boulevards of Paris with French friends his own age, dressed in the high style of the day. He liked to shock people by extravagant public performances, such as coming late to dinner and going around the table, kissing every woman in the room.

  True to one Franklin tradition, Temple had had an illegitimate child by Blanchette Caillot, the wife of a Passy neighbor. The baby died of smallpox a few months after it was placed in the care of a country family. Instead of sympathizing with the broken-hearted Mother, who worshipped her “Franklinet.” Temple coldly reproached her for her carelessness and broke off the affair. While he could be charming, there would seem to have been an underlying emotional emptiness in Temple that made it difficult for him to achieve any really satisfactory human relationship. Various visitors to Passy noted that he seemed, at times, to treat his grandfather with considerable discourtesy. Between them there always stood an absent figure, the father whom Franklin had defeated so totally.

  In mid-August of 1784, Franklin received a letter from William, a cautious, tentative, but hopeful inquiry to his “Dear and honoured father,” asking if they could “revive that affectionate intercourse and connexion which till the commencement of the late troubles had been the pride and happiness of my life. Although he was beaten, William refused to admit that he was wrong. “If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it,” he said. “It is an error of judgment that the maturest reflection I am capable of cannot rectify; and I verily believe were the same circumstances to occur again tomorrow, my conduct would be exactly similar to what it was heretofore, notwithstanding the cruel suffering, scandalous neglect and ill-treatment which we poor unfortunate loyalists have in general experienced. . . .”

  Having “broken the ice,” William wondered if he could come to Paris to see his father and discuss “private family affairs of a very important nature.” Franklin answered the letter almost immediately, declaring that he would be glad to “revive the affectionate intercourse.” He said it would be “very agreeable” to him. But the next sentence betrayed how difficult this resumption would be. “Indeed nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen sensations, as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause, wherein my good fame, fortune, and life were all at stake.” Then, struggling to control himself, Franklin added, “I ought not to blame you for differing in sentiment with me in public affairs. We are men all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power; they are form’d and govern’d much by circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situation was such that few would have censured your remaining neuter....” Then the bitterness burst through again in the next line, which Franklin underlined: “Tho there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguish’d by them.”

  Franklin added, in the most perfunctory language, “I shall be glad to see you when convenient.” But now was not convenient. He would “not have you come here at present.” Temple was coming to London at his father’s invitation, and Fr
anklin told William to confide “to your son the family affairs you wished to confer upon with me.” Tensely, he warned William, “I trust that you will prudently avoid introducing him to company, that it may be improper for him to be seen with.”

  Temple went to London, and Franklin promptly became a grouchy, miserable grandfather, demanding letters from him by every post, and insisting that Temple clear every move he made with him. At twenty-four Temple must have found it rather humiliating to ask his grandfather’s permission to go to the seashore with his father. When he asked for an extension of his visit, Franklin conceded it with an absolute minimum of grace. Then a month passed without a letter from Temple, and Franklin erupted with petulant wrath. He told Temple that “he waited with impatience the arrival of every post. But not a word. All your acquaintance are continually inquiring what news from you. I have none. Judge what I must feel, what they must think, and tell me what I am to think of such neglect.” Temple coolly replied by asking for an extension of his stay.

  Temple finally returned in December, but the experience did nothing to bridge the chasm between Franklin and his son; if anything it widened it. On neither side was there any attempt to resume a correspondence. William was absorbed in helping loyalists present their claims to the British government for their losses. On his own behalf he presented a bill for 48,000 pounds. Franklin, who was seeing a stream of influential Englishmen, including such potent politicians as young William Pitt, never murmured so much as a word on William’s behalf. Lord Shelburne intervened with Louis XVI to obtain a royal pension for his old friend Abbe Morellet without impugning his political integrity. Franklin could certainly have done something for William, in a discreet and unofficial way, if he chose. Instead, William became the victim of a whispering campaign among American loyalists, who accused him of deliberately choosing the King’s side as a prearranged plot with his father, so that no matter who won, a Franklin would be on the safe side of the quarrel. This may well have had something to do with the almost brutal way that the Parliamentary commission disposed of William’s claims. They granted him only 500 pounds, and disallowed the rest of his 48,000-pound plea. Other loyalists of his stature received settlements as high as 24,000 pounds. The government did allow him a pension of 500 pounds a year, 50 pounds more than the salary he had received as New Jersey’s governor. But this, compared to the lifestyle to which William aspired, was genteel poverty.

  Franklin paid a price, within himself, and within his family, for leading America to nationhood. It exceeded in many ways the sacrifice of Biblical Abraham. Franklin had been forced to strike down not just his first born, but his only son, and no intervening deity withheld his hand. Instead, as in most family tragedies, he was forced to relive the emotion again and again for the rest of his life. One day about this time, Franklin was walking in the Bois de Boulogne with a French friend. The conversation turned to children, and Franklin suddenly began describing, in the most emotional terms, his lost little Francis Pager Franklin, dead now more than fifty years. Tears filled his eyes, and he choked, “I always thought he would have been the best of all my children.”

  But Franklin’s mind was too supple, his wisdom too deep, to allow these family emotions to torment him day and night. Most of the time, he took a cheerfully ironic, philosophic attitude toward himself. Writing to a friend in England about his health and present circumstances, he noted how often in his life he had sung a song called “The Old Man’s Wish,” in which the singer hopes for a warm house in a country town, an easy horse, some good old authors, ingenious and cheerful companions, a pudding on Sundays with stout ale and a bottle of burgundy. Each stanza ended with a refrain.”

  May I govern my passions with an absolute sway, Grow wiser and better as my strength wears away,

  Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay.

  “But what signifies our wishing?” Franklin asked. “Things happen, after all, as they will happen. I have sung that wishing song a thousand times, when I was young, and now find, at fourscore, that the three contraries have befallen me, being subject to the gout and the stone, and not being yet master of all my passions.” He reminded himself, Franklin said, of a “proud girl” in Pennsylvania, who regularly proclaimed that she would never marry a parson nor a Presbyterian nor an Irishman and ended by being married to an Irish Presbyterian parson.

  Finally Congress sent permission to go home. Through Jonathan Williams, Franklin hired an English ship, and after weeks of packing, he started for the coast. He traveled in a royal litter, drawn by the King’s mules, because his bladder stone gave him unendurable pain in a jolting carriage. In Passy, Madame Milton wept after begging him, “If it ever pleases you to remember the woman who loved you the most, think of me.” Even her husband added a postscript: “My very dear Papa, I have nothing to add, and even if I wanted to, my tears would not let me see.” For Madame Helvetius, the pain was even more intense. Only at the very end did she realize that she alone had had the power to keep Franklin in France. In the middle of his journey to the coast, she suddenly reached out, with almost guilty emotion, begging him to return. “I fear you are in pain, that the road will tire you and make you more uncomfortable. If such is the case, come back, my dear friend, come back to us.” As he boarded the ship in Le Havre, Franklin’s last thoughts were of her. “I am not sure that I shall be happy in America, but I must go back. I feel sometimes that things are badly arranged in this world when I consider that people so well matched to be happy together are forc’d to separate.

  “I will not tell you of my love. For one would say that there is nothing remarkable or praiseworthy about it, since everybody loves you. I only hope that you will always love me some....”

  At Southampton, a small coterie of Franklinites gathered to say goodbye. Bishop Shipley and his daughter Katherine were there, as well as Benjamin Vaughan, one of the architects of the peace, now busily engaged in publishing Franklin’s collected writings in London. Jonathan Williams arrived to join them for the voyage back to America. Other old friends hurried down from London. For four days they dined and drank together at the Star Tavern. But there was one other visitor to the Star who did not join in these happy hours: William Franklin.

  Face to face, Franklin found it even more impossible to forgive his son. He could not forget that William was wanted for murder, the murder of a fellow American. Their conversation together was a cold and matter-of-fact discussion of business matters. Aware now that Congress was probably not going to do anything for Temple, Franklin was becoming more and more anxious about his future. He decided to buy for Temple the substantial farm which William still owned in New Jersey. Unlike the property of other loyalists, it had never been confiscated, almost certainly because it belonged to Benjamin Franklin’s son.

  Franklin drove the hardest possible bargain. Although he was later to note that land values had tripled in Philadelphia since 1776, he forced William to sell the farm for 227 pounds, 11.5 shillings less than he had paid for it in the 1760s. Nor was this the worst blow. Franklin presented William with a bill for 1,500 pounds, the money he had advanced to him during his governorship years. He knew that William, with his claims before the Parliamentary commission still unsettled (it took another year for him to get the bad news), could not possibly pay in cash. Bitterly, William later remarked that he had reason “to believe that had I not taken an active part on the side of government, the debt would never have been demanded by my father.” So William was forced to deed over to Temple all the lands he owned in New York State, acquired when he was helping to launch the ill-fated Grand Ohio Company. Thus, on the sourest possible note, Franklin wiped out William’s last connection with America.

  On July 27, Franklin entertained the Shipleys and a few other English friends in the cabin of the ship. It was a merry party, which lasted until four A.M. Franklin went to bed, and when he awoke in the morning, the guests had gone and the ship was already under sail. England had vanished beyond the eastern horizon. The ending of his
long struggle with the Old World was as offhand and casual as its beginning. Always, and wherever possible, Franklin loved to reduce large ideas and great movements to personal terms.

  To his old friend David Hartley, who had not been able to come to Southampton he wrote a farewell letter which beautifully summed up this approach. “I cannot quit the coasts of Europe without taking leave of my ever dear friend Mr. Hartley. We were long fellow labourers in the best of all works, the work of peace. I leave you still in the field, but having finished my day’s work, I am going home to go to bed! Wish me a good night’s rest, as I do you a pleasant evening. Adieu!”

  On the trip home, Franklin wrote his long delayed report on his study of the Gulf Stream. Now that the information would be valuable only to peaceful merchantmen, and not to British men-of-war, he told how ships could shorten their passage from America to England by as much as two weeks by using the three-mile-an-hour current of this great ten-mile-wide ocean river. Similarly, by avoiding it on the passage from Europe to America, they could save as much as sixty to seventy miles a day. Franklin recommended equipping ships with thermometers in order to enable captains to quickly identify the whereabouts of the Stream. He also noted other characteristics “the Gulf weed with which it is interspersed . . . and that it does not sparkle in the night.” Modern scientists have not forgotten Franklin’s discovery. The special submarine which began exploring the Gulf Stream from top to bottom in 1969 is named the Benjamin Franklin.

  But on the six-week voyage Franklin did no work on the project that all his friends had urged on him, his autobiography. One of his Philadelphian Quaker friends, Abel James, had rescued the original manuscript, which he had left with Joseph Galloway in his trunk full of personal papers. Galloway’s house had been plundered, ironically, by British soldiers during the fighting around Philadelphia and most of the papers had been lost. James’s rescue of the Autobiography seemed almost miraculous, and when it appeared on Franklin’s desk in Passy, with an urgent plea from his old friend to complete it, Franklin had been inspired to write a small section, largely concerned with his attempt to achieve moral perfection. But aboard ship, he made no effort to carry the narrative forward. Some think that he felt that he could not undertake the more complex story of his political career in Philadelphia and England, without his papers. There may have been another reason for his delay. He could not decide what kind of autobiography he should write. If the attacks of his enemies had made his reputation as odious among his fellow Americans as some people said, it would have to be an apologia. During his period of indecision, when he debated with his French friends whether or not to go home, this rumored unpopularity was one of the arguments they had used against the idea, that a return would only expose him to the irritation of petty envy and malice, which, at a distance of 3000 miles, he could afford to ignore. He had admitted to Madame Helvetius that he was not sure whether he would be happy in America. In his angry letter to John Jay he had remarked that after fifty years in the public service, he had only one ambition, that of carrying a good reputation to the grave with him. Now he was going home, to find out how that reputation stood among his countrymen.