The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  IV

  As the war dragged on, Franklin found spiritual refreshment in the company of a remarkable woman who lived in the nearby village of Auteil. Her baptismal name was Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d’Autricourt. Distantly related to Queen Marie-Antoinette, she was simultaneously bohemian and regal, frivolous and frank, reckless and reserved. Almost sixty when Franklin met her, she was the widow of Claude-Adrien Helvetius, a wealthy financier and freethinker whose books had been banned by royal decree. Madame Brillon called her “my charming and redoubtable rival.” Franklin dubbed her “Notre Dame d’Auteil”—Our Lady of Auteil. Madame Brillon was a moody and gifted bourgeois, full of the insecurities of her class. Madame Helvetius was an aristocrat with a hauteur that came as naturally to her as breathing. Once Franklin realized that Madame Brillon wanted him only as a platonic “Papa,” he began spending more time with Madame Helvetius.

  In her charming country house with its three blooming acres, Madame Helvetius maintained two unfrocked abbots and Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, a sometime medical student and poet of twenty-two. They all worshipped Madame H. and were equally delighted with Franklin’s company. Dinners were a feast of fine food and even finer wit and bursts of poetry.

  Through Cabanis, Franklin dashed off notes such as this one:

  If Notre Dame is pleased to spend her days with Franklin, he would be just as pleased to spend his nights with her; 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 pure loss, never making anyone happy but Poupon [Madame’s dog].8

  At first, Madame Helvetius did not take Franklin’s invitations and intimations seriously. She teased him about a pain he had developed in his shoulder: “Would it be, by any chance, a rheumatism caught under the windows of one of my rivals? Surely you are young enough to go and spend all clear nights playing the guitar, while blowing on your fingers!”9

  Suddenly, Franklin moved beyond jokes and solemnly, seriously proposed marriage to Madame Helvetius. Notre Dame d’Auteuil was nonplused. She sought the advice of her old friend, the famous economist Anne-Robert Turgot, whose proposals she had rejected innumerable times. Turgot curtly informed her that she—and Franklin—were much too old to be swooning like Romeo and Juliet. Madame mournfully informed Franklin that she could not accept his proposal. She had resolved never to marry again, to honor the memory of her husband.

  A few mornings later, one of Franklin’s wittiest masterpieces was on Madame Helvetius’s breakfast table. He told how he had stumbled into bed after Madame’s rejection, a forlorn discouraged man. Suddenly he found himself “in the Elysian Fields.” Assuming he was dead, he asked to meet some famous philosophers. He was soon chatting with Socrates and Helvetius. Knowing no Greek, he could not make sense of Socrates, but he chatted with Helvetius in his makeshift French and discussed “religion, liberty, the government of France.” Finally he wondered why the philosopher had not inquired about his wife.

  Helvetius informed Franklin he had taken another wife. She was not quite as beautiful as Madame but she had “just as much common sense, a little more wisdom, and she loves me infinitely.” At this point, in strolled the second wife. It was Deborah Franklin! Her astonished earthly husband claimed her as his spouse. But Deborah was not even slightly interested, saying, “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.” The thunderstruck Franklin “resolved there and then to abandon these ungrateful shadows, and to come back to this good world, to see the sun again, and you. Here I am! Let us revenge ourselves.”10

  Madame remained adamant. To make his rejection seem part of a game, Franklin published the little essay on a private printing press he had set up at Passy. It was circulated through the salons of Paris, and irony blended with romance to enable Franklin to return to Auteuil, where he was soon back to cheerful fooling. One day he asked Madame to help him solve a mathematical puzzle: “Usually when we share things, each person gets only one part; but when I share my pleasure with you, my part is doubled. The part is more than the whole.”11

  Madame of course had no need to reply to this nonsense. She understood that Franklin was telling her she no longer had to worry about importunate demands for marital bliss. Soon Franklin was cheerfully telling Cabanis, who was absent for a few weeks, that now and then “I offend our good lady who cannot long retain her displeasure but, sitting in state on her sofa, graciously extends her long handsome arm and says: ‘la, baisez ma main; je vous pardonne’ (there, kiss my hand, I forgive you) with all the dignity of a sultaness. She is as busy as ever, endeavoring to make every creature about her happy, from the abbes down thro all ranks of the family to the birds and Poupon.”12

  V

  Two other women still on Franklin’s horizon were Margaret Stevenson and her daughter, Polly. In 1770 Polly had married a doctor named Hewson and had three children in four years. When her husband contracted septicemia while dissecting a corpse and died in agony, Polly had returned to her mother’s house. She was soon writing to Franklin, discussing the war, politics, science, and her aging mother.

  After Ben negotiated the alliance with France, and he was a recognized and feted diplomat, Mrs. Stevenson began expressing the hope that she could join him in Passy. But by this time the Stevensons had run into shoal waters financially. When an inheritance from an aunt was tied up in litigation, they had to give up their house on Craven Street and retire to a country village. Mrs. Stevenson was miserable. She was a city woman and she yearned for the lively social world that Franklin had woven around her for almost two decades. Only Polly and her three children occasionally lifted her spirits.

  Polly put the children in boarding school and moved back to London, but Mrs. Stevenson’s health began to decline. She suffered from dropsy, which affected one of her legs. Yet she was still determined to come to France and live with Franklin. He was more than willing, even though she did not speak a word of French. In that careful style they used with each other in letters (which were too often opened by inquisitive governments), Franklin assured her that he, too, yearned for her “faithful tender care and attention to my interests, health and comfortable living.” When Polly hesitated, unsure about bringing her children to France, Mrs. Stevenson proclaimed her readiness to come with a friend. “Don’t be surprised if I pack myself up and…pipe upon you,” she playfully warned.

  On January 13, 1783, only a few weeks after Franklin and his fellow negotiators had signed a preliminary treaty of peace with England, Polly wrote Franklin a tearful letter: “I know you will pay the tribute of a sigh for the loss of one who loved you with the most tender affection.” Her mother had died on New Year’s Day. A saddened Franklin replied that the loss reminded him of how many of his English friends had died recently, but this news “strikes the hardest.” He somberly speculated that it was the way life loosened old people’s attachments to the world and made them more willing to follow their friends.13

  A few months later, when his spirits rose with the prospect of peace, Ben wrote to Polly in another vein, recalling his friendship with her and Margaret Stevenson as “all clear sunshine without the least cloud in the atmosphere.” Here, in a single sentence, was the difference between Franklin’s English wife and his American wife.

  VI

  After the British defeat at Yorktown it took another year and a half to negotiate the peace treaty that ended the struggle. As this often torturous diplomacy unfolded during the year 1782, William Franklin’s name abruptly intruded on the scene. In New York, William was being accused of the brutal murder of an American militia officer in New Jersey. The actual crime had been committed by one of the officers in a band of guerillas he had organized, the Associated Loyalists, but the officer claimed he had only been following William Franklin’s orders.

  The victim had been hanged in revenge for
the supposed murder of one of William’s loyalist raiders. An infuriated General Washington had chosen by lot a young British officer captured at Yorktown and was ready to hang him if William was not surrendered for trial and certain conviction. The British officer’s mother had appealed to King Louis XVI to intercede with Congress to spare her son, and the king had acquiesced. William had decided he might be safer on the other side of the Atlantic and retreated to London.

  This messy affair was a huge embarrassment for Ambassador Franklin. He soon learned that William had been made the London spokesman for the hundreds of loyalists who were seeking compensation from the crown for their losses. In the peace negotiations, the British fought desperately to persuade the Americans to agree to join them in paying these people for their confiscated lands and houses. Franklin stonily opposed giving a penny to these ruined men and women, even when his fellow negotiators wavered and admitted that some sort of palliative gesture might be agreeable. Finally the British begged them to accept a clause in the treaty, stating that Congress would simply appeal to the states to compensate loyalists. Franklin saw to it that the clause excluded loyalists who had “borne arms against the United States.” William Franklin was, of course, his target.

  In the summer of 1784, almost a year after peace between England and America became official, William wrote his father a letter, wondering if they could “revive that affectionate intercourse and connexion which till the commencement of the late troubles was the pride and happiness of my life.” The defeated royal governor would not admit he was wrong; “If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it,” he wrote. “I verily believe were the same circumstances to occur again tomorrow, my conduct would be exactly similar.” Not even the “cruel suffering, scandalous neglect and ill-treatment we poor unfortunate loyalists have in general experienced” would change his mind. He did not mention Elizabeth Downes Franklin’s lonely death in New York, but it had to be an unspoken part of his “cruel suffering.”14

  Franklin’s reply was a study in torment. He began by all but confessing that he, too, remembered those years of “affectionate intercourse and connexion” with deep pleasure. Reviving them would be “very agreeable to him.” But in the next sentence the wound spoke: “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 where in my good name, fortune and life were at stake.”

  Desperately, the father struggled to summon some shreds of forgiveness: “I ought not to blame you for differing with me in sentiment 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…Your situation was such that few would have censured you for remaining neuter…” This was as close as Franklin could come to mentioning Elizabeth Downes Franklin’s influence.

  But the bitterness, the rage, could not be denied. Franklin underlined the next sentence: “Tho there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them.” He was telling William that his loyalty to his father should have transcended his loyalty to his wife.15

  William had asked to come to France to discuss family business. Franklin curtly informed him that a visit would be inconvenient for the time being. Instead, he would let William Temple Franklin go to London and find out what was on William’s mind. He warned William not to introduce Temple to his loyalist friends, who might damage his standing with patriotic Americans. But the visit still ignited the fears that had impelled Benjamin to take Temple to Paris with him in 1776. He knew how persuasive William could be.

  Ben harassed Temple with a stream of letters, insisting that he tell him virtually every move he made. At one point Temple, now twenty-four, had to ask his grandfather’s permission to go to the seashore with his father. By the time Temple returned to France, even a pretense of affection between Benjamin and William had evaporated. Ben never wrote his son another letter, and William plunged into the political struggle to win compensation from the crown for the loyalists.

  During the peace negotiations, Temple, revealing a lack of judgment appalling even in a young man, covertly advised one of the British negotiators that they ought to do something handsome for William, saying it might make Ambassador Franklin more amenable to their point of view. Of all people, Temple certainly knew this was a total fiction. It was a sign of how gravely Temple, too, had been wounded by the brutal clash between his father and grandfather and the sad death of the woman who had offered him a mother’s love. His future years would reveal the depth of his trauma.16

  VII

  With peace restored, Ambassador Franklin had one more decision to make. Should he stay in France and continue to enjoy Madame Brillon’s adoration in Passy, Madame Helvetius’s effervescent charm in Auteuil, and the devotion of a half dozen other ladies in Paris? He was the most famous American in Europe. Distinguished men and women from a half dozen countries visited him to pay their respects. For a while Franklin wavered. He was not at all sure how he would be welcomed in America.

  His hesitation was grim evidence of the damage inflicted by the smear campaign Arthur Lee, John Adams, and his other enemies had waged against him. William Franklin’s defection was another reason to avoid mocking or accusatory eyes. How could a man who failed to persuade his only son to be a patriot hope for praise from his countrymen?

  As we shall see, Franklin was not the only founder who felt that his fame had been diminished by the vagaries and rivalries of the Revolution. Today most historians are ready to say his diplomatic achievements in France place him just behind George Washington in the pantheon of those who contributed most to winning independence. But this was by no means apparent in 1784. Few Americans understood or appreciated what he had accomplished in his years as ambassador to France.

  VIII

  “The moment that an American minister gives loose to his passion for women, that moment he is undone; he is instantly at the mercy of the spies of the court, and the tool of the most profligate of the human race.” John Adams struck this lowest of low blows against Franklin on September 3, 1783, the very day that a definitive peace treaty with England was signed in Paris.17

  More than two hundred years later, has any worthwhile evidence emerged that substantiates this vicious portrait of Franklin’s love life? Scholars who have devoted decades to studying Franklin in France have not found a single diary entry, memoir, or letter from anyone who claimed to have had an affair or even a one-night liaison with him. In a country where love has always been a topic openly and almost continuously discussed, this surely is evidence that nothing even approaching Adams’s innuendo occurred.

  This conclusion has not prevented playwrights, novelists, and screenwriters from portraying Franklin as, in the words of one reviewer of a recent TV portrayal, “somewhere between a phony and a dirty old man.”18 Our current view of sex as an irresistible drive to which everyone succumbs has endorsed this mythical Franklin to the point where, in the words of the best historian of this aspect of his career, it has “become part of our national heritage.” This fable deprives Franklin of his “rich and complex humanity.”

  The French understood and still understand the variety of love that Franklin was practicing in his old age. They call it amitié amoureuse. It is sometimes described as a game; a better term would be art. It is a branch of love that has added spice to the lives of men and women of all ages—and it is by no means confined to France.19

  Perhaps the best insight into Franklin’s French love life comes from an anecdote told by Thomas Jefferson. Not long after he arrived in France to replace Franklin as ambassador, the Virginian watched while a group of French women showered their favorite American with kisses. With a smile, Jefferson asked Franklin if he could arrange to transfer “these privileges” to him when he took over his post. “You are too young a man,” Franklin said.20

  VIII

  Another
factor in Franklin’s struggle to decide whether to stay in France or return home was his health. He suffered repeated attacks of gout and had developed painful bladder stones. He wondered whether he could survive a two- or three-month ocean voyage. But he found himself yearning for his Philadelphia family, his daughter, Sally, and her husband and children. “Who will close my eyes if I die in a foreign land?” he asked Madame Brillon, who replied, “I will.”

  Finally, Franklin made up his mind. He told Madame Helvetius he wanted to be buried in his own country. One is tempted to wonder whether he also wanted to make amends to Sally Franklin for the harsh words he had written to her. More probable was a desire to see the four grandchildren Sally had borne since he left America. She had sent him a stream of lively letters full of their sayings and antics.21

  Temple was also on Franklin’s mind. In the letters he sent to Congress asking for a replacement, he had added numerous pleas for a government appointment for his grandson. The ambassador argued that Temple’s fluency in French and his seven years’ experience as embassy secretary would make the young man an excellent chargé d’affaires of an American legation in Europe. Congress ignored him.

  Temple had become a handsome young man, with a passion for expensive clothes and an eye for pretty women. When he went to England to visit his father, he took with him a list of the best tailors, bootmakers, and hatters compiled by a French friend. Appended was another list that Temple also undoubtedly put to good use: “And when lewd, go to the following safe girls, who I think are very handsome.”