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 enough,” 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 Br
illon 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 longer 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.”
More than almost anyone, she could articulate what made him so charming to women, “that gaiety and that gallantry that cause all women to love you, because you love them all.” With both insight and affection, she declared, “You combine the kindest heart with the soundest moral teaching, a lively imagination, and that droll roguishness which shows that the wisest of men allows his wisdom to be perpetually broken against the rocks of femininity.”18
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.
Madame Helvétius
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. Frien
ds 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:
I have in my way been trying to form some hypothesis to account for your having so many friends and of such various kinds. I see that statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets and men of learning of all sorts attach themselves to you as straws to a fine piece of amber…We find in your sweet society that charming benevolence, that amiable attention to oblige, that disposition to please and be pleased, which we do not always find in the society of one another…In your company, we are not only pleased with you, but better pleased with one another and with ourselves.21
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Page 42