Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

  By early 1778, Voltaire was 84 and ailing, and there had even been stories that he had died. (His retort, even better than Mark Twain’s similar one, was that the reports were true, only premature.) In February, Franklin paid a ceremonial visit to his home and asked him to give his blessing to 7-year-old Benny Bache. As twenty awed disciples watched and shed “tears of tenderness,” Voltaire put his hands on the boy’s head and pronounced in English, “God and Liberty.” According to Condorcet, one of the witnesses, he added, “This is the only appropriate benediction for the grandson of Monsieur Franklin.”

  Some derided the rather histrionic display. One of Paris’s more caustic papers accused them of “playing out a scene” of “puerile adulation,” and when former Massachusetts governor Hutchinson heard of the “God and Liberty” benediction, he remarked that it was “difficult to say which of those words had been most used to bad purposes.” Mainly, however, the encounter was reverentially publicized throughout Europe.7

  Franklin and Voltaire staged an even more dramatic meeting at the Académie Royale on April 29 of that year. Franklin was dressed with trademark simplicity: plain coat, no wig, and no adornments other than his spectacles. Voltaire, who would die within a month, was gaunt and frail. The crowd demanded that they give each other a French embrace, an act that evoked, in the words of Condorcet, such “noisy acclamation one would have said it was Solon who embraced Sophocles.” The comparison to the great Greek philosophers, one famous for his laws and the other for his literature, was proclaimed throughout Europe, as eyewitness John Adams reported with his typical mix of awe and resentment:

  There was a general cry that M. Voltaire and M. Franklin should be introduced to each other. This was no satisfaction; there must be something more. Neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected; they however took each other by the hand. But this was not enough. The clamor continued until the explanation came out: Il faut s’embrasser à la française. The two aged actors upon this great theater of philosophy and frivolity then embraced each other by hugging one another in their arms and kissing each other’s cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the cry immediately spread through the kingdom, and I suppose all over Europe: Qu’il est charmant de voir embrasser Solon et Sophocles.8

  The Académie served as one of Franklin’s bases among the intellectual elite of Paris. Another was a remarkable Masonic lodge known, in honor of the muses, as the Lodge of the Nine Sisters. Freemasonry in France was evolving from being just a set of businessmen’s social clubs, which is what it mainly was in America, and was becoming part of the movement led by the philosophes and other freethinkers who challenged the orthodoxies of both the church and the monarchy. Claude-Adrien Helvétius, a very freethinking philosophe, had first envisioned a superlodge in Paris that would be filled with the greatest writers and artists. When he died, his widow, Madame Helvétius (about whom we will soon hear a lot more), helped fund its creation in1776.

  Franklin and Voltaire joined the Lodge of the Nine Sisters in April 1778, the same month as their public meeting at the Académie. The lodge provided Franklin with influential supporters and enjoyable evenings. But it was risky. Both the king and the clerics were wary of the renegade lodge—and of Franklin’s membership in it.

  The controversy surrounding the lodge was heightened when, in November 1778, it held a memorial service for Voltaire, who, on his deathbed a few months earlier, had waved off priests seeking to give him last rites. Some friends, such as Condorcet and Diderot, thought it wise to avoid the ceremony. But Franklin not only attended, he took part in it.

  The hall was draped in black, lit only dimly by candles. There were songs, speeches, and poems attacking the clergy and absolutism in all forms. Voltaire’s niece presented a bust by Houdon. (Houdon, a member, also did a bust of Franklin for the lodge, which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) Then a flame of light revealed a grand painting of the apotheosis of Voltaire emerging from his tomb to be presented in heaven by the goddesses of Truth and Benevolence. Franklin took the Masonic wreath from his head and solemnly laid it at the foot of the painting. Everyone then adjourned to the banquet room, where the first toast included a tribute to Franklin—“the captive thunder dying at his feet”—and to America.

  Louis XVI, though a Mason himself, was annoyed by the spectacle and worked through the other Masonic lodges to have the Nine Sisters expelled. After months of controversy, the situation was resolved when the Nine Sisters reorganized itself and Franklin took over as its Venerable, or Grand Master. During the ensuing years, Franklin would induct many Americans into the lodge, including his grandson Temple, the spy Edward Bancroft, and the naval warrior John Paul Jones. He also helped create from within the lodge a group somewhat akin to his American Philosophical Society, known as the Société Apollonienne.9

  Madame Brillon

  As fascinating as the freemasons and philosophes were, it was not for his male friends that Franklin was famous in France. Among his many reputations was that of a legendary and lecherous old lover who had many mistresses among the ladies of Paris. The reality, truth be told, was somewhat less titillating. His famed female friends were mistresses only of his mind and soul. Yet that hardly made their relationships less interesting.

  The first of these was with a talented and high-strung neighbor in Passy, Madame Brillon de Jouy, an accomplished musician who was noted for her performances on the harpsichord and the new pianos that were becoming fashionable in France. When she first met Franklin in the spring of 1777, she worried that she had been too shy to make a good impression. So the next day she asked a mutual friend to send her some of the Scottish melodies she knew Franklin loved. “I would try to play them and compose some in the same style!” she wrote. “I do wish to provide the great man with some moments of relaxation from his occupations, and also to have the pleasure of seeing him.”

  Thus began their intense companionship, which soon became sexually charged and the fodder for much gossip. Adams and others were shocked by what Madame Brillon called her “sweet habit of sitting on your lap” and by stories of their late nights spent together. “I am certain you have been kissing my wife,” her husband once wrote Franklin.

  Yet Monsieur Brillon added in his letter, “My dear Doctor, let me kiss you back in return.” Franklin’s relationship with Madame Brillon, like so many of his others with distinguished ladies, was complex and never fully consummated. It was, as Claude-Anne Lopez has ably described, an amité amoureuse in which Franklin had to settle for playing the role of “Cher Papa,” an oddly flirtatious father.10

  Madame Brillon, who was 33 when she met Franklin, was buffeted by conflicting passions and variable moods. Her husband, twenty-four years her senior (but fourteen years younger than Franklin), was wealthy, doting, and unfaithful. She had two daughters with beautiful singing voices and lived in one of the most elegant estates in Passy, yet she was prone to fits of depression and self-pity. Although she spoke no English, she and Franklin exchanged more than 130 letters during their eight-year relationship, and she was able not only to enchant him but also to manipulate him.

  She did so by composing and playing music for him, creating a salon around him, and writing him flattering letters in French and in the third person. “It is,” she declared, “a real source of joy for her to think that she can sometimes amuse Mr. Franklin, whom she loves and esteems as he deserves.” When the Americans won the Battle of Saratoga, she composed a triumphal overture entitled “Marche des Insurgents” (which is still sometimes performed) and played it for him in a private concert. They also flirted over the chessboard. “She is still a little miffed,” Madame Brillon teasingly wrote of herself, “about the six games of chess he won so inhumanly and she warns him she will spare nothing to get her revenge.”11

  By March 1778, after months of just music and chess, Franklin was ready for something more. So he shocked her with some of his libertine theology and challenged her to save his soul. “You were kind enou
gh,” she wrote, now comfortable in the first person, “to entrust me with your conversion.” Her propositions were promising, even suggestive. “I know my penitent’s weak spot, I shall tolerate it! As long as he loves God, America, and me above all things, I absolve him of all of his sins, present, past and future.”

  Madame Brillon went on to describe the seven cardinal sins, merrily noting that he had conquered well the first six, ranging from pride to sloth. When she got to the seventh, the sin of lust, she became a bit coy: “The seventh—I shall not name it. All great men are tainted with it…You have loved, my dear brother; you have been kind and lovable; you have been loved in return! What is so damnable about that?”

  “She promises to lead me to heaven along a road so delicious,” Franklin exulted in his reply to her. “I am in raptures when I think of being absolved of the future sins.” Turning to the Ten Commandments, he argued that there were actually two others that should be included: to multiply and fill the earth, and to love one another. He had always obeyed those two very well, he argued, and should not that “compensate for my having so often failed to respect one of the ten? I mean the one which forbids us to covet thy neighbor’s wife, a commandment which (I confess) I have consistently violated.”12

  Alas, Madame Brillon took that cue to beat a hasty retreat. “I dare not decide the question without consulting that neighbor whose wife you covet,” she wrote, referring to her husband. There was, she explained, a double standard she must obey. “You are a man, I am a woman, and while we might think along the same lines, we must speak and act differently. Perhaps there is no great harm in a man having desires and yielding to them; a woman may have desires, but she must not yield.”

  Little did she know that her own husband was engaging in this double standard. Once again, it was John Adams who recorded the situation in shocked detail after Franklin took him to dine with “a large company of both sexes” at the Brillons. Madame Brillon struck Adams as “one of the most beautiful women of France,” her husband as “a rough kind of country squire.” Among the crowd was a “very plain and clumsy” woman. “I afterwards learned both from Dr. Franklin and his grandson,” Adams noted, “that this woman was the amie of Mr. Brillon.” He also surmised, this time incorrectly, that Madame Brillon was having an affair with another neighbor. “I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats. But I did not know the world.”

  A year later, Madame Brillon found out about her husband’s affair with this “clumsy” young woman, Mademoiselle Jupin, who was the governess of the Brillon girls. She banished the young woman from the house, and then began to fear that she might take a job as Franklin’s housekeeper. After Franklin assured her, in a closed-door session at his office, that he had no intention of hiring the woman, Madame Brillon wrote him a relieved letter. “My soul is calmer, my dear Papa, since it has unburdened itself into yours, since it does not fear anymore that Mlle J——might settle down with you and be your torment.”13

  Even before this fit of jealousy, Madame Brillon had begun a crusade to stop Franklin from turning his attentions to other women, despite being unwilling to satisfy his ardor. “When you scatter your friendship, as you have done, my friendship does not diminish, but from now on I shall try to be somewhat sterner to your faults,” she threatened.

  In a forceful yet seductive reply, Franklin argued that she had no right to be so possessive. “You renounce and totally exclude all that might be of the flesh in our affection, allowing me only some kisses, civil and honest, such as you might grant your little cousins,” he chided. “What am I receiving that is so special as to prevent me from giving the same to others?”

  He included in the letter a proposed nine-article treaty of “peace, friendship and love” between the two of them. It began with articles that she would accept, followed by ones declaring pretty much the opposite that he would accept. The former included one saying that “Mr. F. shall come to her whenever she sends for him” and another saying that he would “stay with her as long as she pleases.” His stipulations, on the other hand, included one saying that “he will go away from Madame B’s whenever he pleases,” and another that “he will stay away as long as he pleases.” The final article of the treaty was one on his side: “That he will love any other woman as far as he finds her amiable.” He added, however, that he was “without much hope” that she would agree to this final provision, and in any event “I despair of finding any other woman that I could love with equal tenderness.”14

  In describing his sexual desires, Franklin could be quite salacious. “My poor little boy, whom you ought to have cherished, instead of being fat and jolly like those in your elegant drawings, is thin and starved for want of the nourishment that you inhumanely deny him.” Madame Brillon continued the colloquy by calling him an Epicurean, who “wants a fat chubby love,” and herself a Platonist, who “tries to blunt his little arrows.” In another suggestive letter, he told a fable about a man who refused to lend out his horses to a friend. He was not like that. “You know that I am ready to sacrifice my beautiful big horses.”

  After dozens of such sensuous parries and thrusts had passed between them, at least on paper, Madame Brillon ended up rejecting once and for all his desires for a more corporeal love. In return, she also abandoned her attempt to prevent him from seeking it elsewhere. “Platonism may not be the gayest sect, but it is a convenient defense for the fair sex,” she wrote. “Hence, the lady, who finds it congenial, advises the gentleman to fatten up his favorite at other tables than hers, which will always offer too meager a diet for his greedy appetites.”15

  The letter, which concluded with an invitation for tea the next day, did not end their relationship. Instead, it took on another form: Madame Brillon declared that she would henceforth like to play the role of an adoring daughter, and she assigned to him the role of a loving father.

  It is to her father that this tender and loving daughter is speaking; I had a father once, the best of men, he was my first, my closest friend. I lost him too soon! You have often asked me: “Couldn’t I take the place of those you regret?” And you have told me about the humane custom of certain savages who adopt their prisoners of war and put them in the place of their own dead relatives. You have taken in my heart the place of that father.

  Franklin, either out of desire or necessity, formally agreed. “I accept with infinite pleasure, my dear friend, the proposal you make, with such kindness, of adopting me as your father,” he wrote. Then he turned philosophical. It was, as he had said of Benny and Temple, important for him, now that he was separated from his own “affectionate daughter” in Philadelphia, to have always some child with him “to take care of me during my life and tenderly close my eyelids when I must take my last rest.” He would work hard, he promised, to play the role properly. “I love you as a father, with all my heart. It is true that I sometimes suspect that heart of wanting to go further, but I try to conceal it from myself.”16

  The transformation of their relationship evoked from Franklin one of his most wistful and self-revealing little tales, The Ephemera, written to her after a stroll in the garden. (The theme came from an article he had printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette fifty years earlier.) He had happened to overhear, he wrote, a lament by one of the tiny short-lived flies who realized that his seven hours on this planet were nearing an end.

  I have seen generations born, flourish and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy!…

  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 long
er exists?…

  To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but the reflection 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. [In the original French version, the final words more clearly refer to the recipient: “toujours amiable Brillon.”]17

  Throughout his remaining years in France, and even in letters after his return to America, Franklin would stay emotionally attached to Madame Brillon. Their new arrangement still allowed him such liberties as playing chess with a mutual friend, late into the night, in her bathroom, while she soaked in her tub and watched. But it was, as bathtub chess games go, rather innocent; the tub was covered, as was the style, by a wooden plank. “I’m afraid that we may have made you very uncomfortable by keeping you so long in the bath,” he apologized the next day, adding a wry little promise: “Never again will I consent to start a chess game with the neighbor in your bathing room. Can you forgive me this indiscretion?” She certainly could. “No, my good papa, you did not do me any ill yesterday,” she replied. “I get so much pleasure from seeing you that it made up for the little fatigue of having come out of the bath a little too late.”

  Having forsaken the possibility of an earthly romance, they amused themselves by promising themselves one in heaven. “I give you my word,” she teased him at one point, “that I will become your wife in paradise on the condition that you will not make too many conquests among the heavenly maidens while you are waiting for me. I want a faithful husband when I take one for eternity.”