Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies - Softcover

Middlekauff, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520213785 ISBN 13: 9780520213784

Publisher: University of California Press, 1998

Synopsis

In this engaging study of the much-loved statesman and polymath, Robert Middlekauff uncovers a little-known aspect of Benjamin Franklin's personality-his passionate anger. He reveals a fully human Franklin who led a remarkable life but nonetheless had his share of hostile relationships-political adversaries like the Penns, John Adams, and Arthur Lee-and great disappointments-the most significant being his son, William, who sided with the British. Utilizing an abundance of archival sources, Middlekauff weaves episodes in Franklin's emotional life into key moments in colonial and Revolutionary history. The result is a highly readable narrative that illuminates how historical passions can torment even the most rational and benevolent of men.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Middlekauff is Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals (1971), which won the Bancroft Prize, and The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution (1982), which won the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies

By Robert Middlekauff

University of California Press

Copyright © 1998 Robert Middlekauff
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520213784


CHAPTER 1
The Friends of Benjamin Franklin

A few days after Franklin's death, Thomas Jefferson wrote Ferdinand Grand that "the good old Doctor Franklin, so long the ornament of our country and I may say of the world, has at length closed his eminent career." In suggesting that Franklin belonged not just to America but to the world, Jefferson sounded a theme that echoed throughout Europe and America. The next year he sent a few lines to William Smith, once Franklin's enemy but now his eulogist, in which he referred to Franklin "as our great and dear friend, whom time will be making greater while it is spunging us from it's records." Time has not erased Thomas Jefferson from its records, though it has not been so kind to William Smith. But Jefferson was fight about Franklin, who seems even larger now than he did in his own century,1

Fame of the sort Franklin enjoyed, even in his own day, is uncommon. It commonly prevents friendship because it keeps men at a distance. George Washington was as well known as Franklin from the Revolution on, but those who knew him-and those who did not-spoke of him in a language different from what they used in describing Franklin. Washington was a remote figure, a legend, a monument while he lived. To most men he appeared great and mighty-and a little cold. Franklin was great, all agreed, but though he had enormous intellectual and moral power, no one

thought of him as mighty, and only rarely did anyone think him cold.

Joseph Priestley, the great English chemist, noted that strangers sometimes found Franklin reserved, but such reactions were not common enough to evoke frequent comment. Not that Franklin was a hail-fellow-well-met. He could keep himself at a distance, and in fact he never showed all of himself to anyone. But very few men do, and complete openness is not necessary for friendship-indeed it might discourage it (a genial hypocrisy has its uses)-and Franklin met everyone he was not bound to distrust with directness and honesty. He was a good judge of others and normally brought a friendly and warm spirit to his exchanges with them. His curiosity about virtually everything under the sun tended to draw others out, and he was notably successful in his attempts to learn about the human as well as the natural world.2

Franklin seems to have been born curious; his capacity for friendship, though appearing early in his life, was actually an acquired characteristic. He tells us in his Autobiography that as a youth he was "fond" of argument, was in fact of a "disputatious turn," a bad habit, he soon realized, "productive of disgusts and perhaps enmities where you may have occasion for friendship." He had "caught it by reading my father's books of dispute on religion. Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts who have been bred at Edinburgh." Giving up his taste for argument, he next "put on the humble enquirer." This role he learned first from an English grammar and then from Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates. The Socratic method reinforced his natural hunger for trapping his adversaries in positions they really did not wish to defend-"entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither

myself nor my cause always deserved." He liked to win he gave no quarter even in chess-but he soon saw that scoring in this fashion was pointless. It convinced no one, and it cost him friends. He then adopted "the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence," a practice he followed all his life that, one suspects, allowed a freer expression of his own desire to learn. It also helped draw men and women as well as children to him. And in time it became his natural style; what began in artfulness led him to what he really was.3

Among other things he was a good friend to all sorts, ranks, and ages of people. He made friends all his life and with rare exceptions kept them. When he was young, they tended to come from his own class, though he soon attracted the interest of a number of men of the better sort-William Keith, for example, the governor of Pennsylvania. Shortly after he arrived in Philadelphia, Franklin formed the Junto, an organization of young craftsmen who had aspirations to rise, to talk with others of their own kind about business and public service, and to do good. The members included Hugh Meridith, like Franklin an apprentice in Samuel Keimer's print shop. The two soon left Keimer and with the aid of Meridith's father set up on their own. Meridith's fondness for strong drink and his aversion to work soon shattered this partnership. Franklin, however, did not abandon him but lent him money and for several years after their parting attempted to help him in business. The Junto and Franklin also attracted Joseph Breintall, a small merchant and copyist. Breintall worked on another of Franklin's favorite projects by serving as secretary of the Library Company of Philadelphia from 1731 until his death in 1746. There was also William Parson, a shoemaker by trade and an original member of the Junto, who as librarian guarded the books in the company. The others were not really different: Stephen Potts, from Keimer's shop; George Webb, once a scholar at Oxford;

William Maugridge, a joiner by trade; and William Coleman, a merchant's clerk.4

After Franklin became well known in Europe and America, he did not scorn such men. He considered himself a printer all his life, though he did not follow his calling. Artisans everywhere recognized that in some sense he was one of their own. A group of ship carpenters, the White Oaks, came to his rescue in Philadelphia in 1766 when for a time the public believed that he favored the Stamp Act, a notorious and hated measure of parliamentary taxation.5

In the years of fame and reputation, Franklin naturally found most of his friends in other circles. Many were in public life, and some had reputations that rivaled his own, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, for example. But his closest friends, in England and France as well as America, shared more than political interests with him.

Margaret Stevenson, Franklin's landlady in Craven Street, London, for two extended periods was one. She did not have Franklin's interest in politics, but she offered a warm family life to him. Her daughter, Mary, usually called Polly, also became Franklin's friend. Mrs. Stevenson did much to make his life comfortable. She cooked and baked for him and saw to it that his clothes were cared for, his linen clean; she worried over his health and shopped for him and for his wife, though Deborah Franklin was three thousand miles away. Soon after Franklin first came to Craven Street, in 1757, he grew fond of Margaret Stevenson. He also loved Polly Stevenson, who was eighteen years of age when he first met her.6

Polly delighted him. With all the enthusiasm and happiness of the young, she displayed a lively spirit. She also impressed him with her fine intelligence, and he was soon acting as her tutor, giving advice on what to study and read and challenging her to

use her gifts to the fullest. He wrote poems to her and letters when they were apart; he teased her and talked with her about things serious and frivolous. She returned his affection, responded to his questions with those of her own, teased him back, and knitted him garters. Thirty-two years later she would sit by his bedside in Philadelphia as he lay dying.7

For the most part, it was an interest in science, technology, and agriculture that brought Franklin and his English friends together. They often discovered that they shared other concerns; most, for example, were liberals in politics; many were dissenting in religion. They also had aversions in common. None of them had much use for superstition and prejudice; they preferred to trust reason and evidence. They respected authority, but they did not admire the socially powerful. The corruption in English politics offended them, and only a few served in Parliament or held offices in the government.

They differed in personality, but not so greatly as to divide them. Some were bold; some, rather quiet, even meek. Almost none tried to make a big splash in company; several bordered on the reclusive. They did enjoy spending time together, however, often in a London coffeehouse. They visited one another in their homes and businesses, and Franklin traveled with several of his friends. Perhaps most of their meetings were at supper time or at gatherings of the Royal Society.

A glimpse of Franklin's correspondence might lead one to conclude that he knew everyone in London and was friends with everyone worth knowing. But he did not consort often with literary people or with artists. He and Dr. Samuel Johnson met at least once, but Johnson, a Tory, had no desire to know Franklin better. Franklin, after all, brought a whiff of revolutionary, or at least radical, fervor with him to England. The artist Franklin knew best was Benjamin Wilson. The son of a well-fixed clothier, Wilson

took surprising turns while he was still young. His father went broke, and Wilson took a place as a clerk in a business. He was frugal and he had a talent for painting. Hogarth, a much greater artist, gave him encouragement, and for a while Wilson enjoyed the patronage of several wealthy men. He became interested in electricity and published an account of his experiments in 1750. Not surprisingly, when Franklin arrived on the London scene in 1757, the two met and became friends. Wilson painted Franklin's portrait not long after their first meeting. It was one of the few friendships Franklin made that eventually failed.8

The successes were striking and much more common. Peter Collinson, born in London of Quaker parents, was one of them. Collinson, a mercer, ran a business with his brother and traded with American merchants. Business did not bring the two men together; science did. Collinson had an interest in natural history and collected American plants. Franklin seems not to have sent plants to him; he sent something even more interesting-descriptions of his electrical experiments, which Collinson read to the Royal Society. The next year he began their publication in London, and Franklin's name as a scientist was made.9

Franklin's friendship with William Strahan, a Scottish-born printer in London, may have been even closer. The two men took to one another as soon as they met; the year was 1757, and Franklin was on a mission for the Assembly of Pennsylvania. He spent his first night ashore with Peter Collinson and the next with Strahan. Shortly afterward Strahan was writing Deborah Franklin that "I never saw a man who was in every respect, so perfectly agreeable to me."10 Franklin and Strahan talked and laughed together and for a time plotted the marriage of Franklin's daughter Sally, then six or seven years of age, to Strahan's son William, who was three years older.11

Strahan found Franklin agreeable. Most people did, including

Lord Shelburne, who headed the ministry that made peace with America in 1783. Few of Franklin's friends in England, however, were in the highest governing circles, or even in society. But several had great distinction, David Hume and Richard Price, for example. Most were people who are known today only because of their friendship with Franklin. One was Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph in Wales, who avoided his diocese like the plague, preferring the comfort of his family home at Twyford, near Winchester. The bishop's family took to Franklin immediately, and their warmth and admiration encouraged him to begin in 1771 to write his memoirs. The bishop and his wife had six children; the two younger girls, Georgiana and Catherine (Kitty), evidently charmed Franklin and he them. On a trip to London with Franklin by post chaise, Kitty Shipley confessed that she preferred old men to young ones and looked forward to marrying one. Franklin suggested that perhaps she should marry a young man and make him into someone she really wanted. Kitty, who was eleven years of age, replied that she did not want to follow this course and would marry an old general so that she could become a young widow. Fifteen years later Franklin wrote The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams for Kitty.12

Franklin's friendships with children were not uncommon. But his warm connection to a bishop in the established church-or to any churchman-was. His preference for nonconformists or dissenting clergy was clear in his choice of the Club of Honest Whigs. Religious opinion did not bring him to the meetings of this group, a supper club that met every other week in London at St. Paul's Coffeehouse, but anything that smacked of formalism, High Church, or anything similar would have kept him away.13

If the Club of Honest Whigs was not a religious club, neither was it a political group, at least in its beginnings. As the revolu-

tionary crisis developed and reached a peak before independence, the group grew more political, supporting the American cause. But even as America was breaking away, and sympathies for it increased and anger at the ministry kept pace, the members continued to sup together, primarily because of their commitments to natural and moral science. Political agreement provided a comfortable atmosphere for meeting but not a rationale. For the members of the club had important matters to talk over, matters that stimulated their minds.

Although their conversations about science and politics were spirited and informative, they also simply enjoyed one another's company and the food and drink they consumed. Franklin was in his element in these meetings; he had long since learned the virtues of silence, but in these gatherings he spoke in a variety of ways. James Boswell, a member but not in constant attendance, remembered Franklin's asking a question that indicated how he sometimes took it upon himself to stimulate argument in the group: "Franklin asked whether infidels or Protestants had done the most to pull down Popery."14

The club numbered about twenty-five in all-the largest contingent composed of dissenting clergymen and schoolmasters. The most distinguished would have stood out in any gathering, for the Honest Whigs included John Canton, Richard Price, and Joseph Priestley. Franklin admired all three, valued their friendship, and gave each of them more than he received. He would have had reasons for friendship with these three-and many of the others-had the club never existed. He and John Canton came together through their fascination with electricity; both were, in the terminology of the day, electricians. Canton, the master of the Spital Square Academy in London, the son of a weaver, was self-made, a journalist in his earlier years, and during Franklin's English stay a supporter of Franklin's single-fluid the-

try of electricity. Franklin found Canton's own experiments stimulating and looked to him for ideas as much as for agreement. Two years before Franklin left Philadelphia for London on his first mission for the Pennsylvania Assembly, he remarked in a letter to Peter Collinson that he planned to write "the ingenious Mr. Canton." is He was delighted, he said, by Canton's discovery confirming his own that clouds carry both positive and negative electrical charges. Once Franklin reached England, the two men saw much of one another in the meetings of the Royal Society as well as the Honest Whigs, and they visited each other in the Spital Square Academy and at Franklin's house on Craven Street. Franklin served on the committee of the Royal Society that studied Canton's experiments on the compressibility of water and took the lead in persuading the society to award Canton the Copley Medal, given in recognition of an outstanding discovery or invention in science. In 1771, the year before Canton's death, he and Franklin went together to the Midlands, stopping to visit Joseph Priestley at Leeds.16

Canton has fallen into obscurity; Priestley's fame as a chemist-he was the discoverer of oxygen-and an enlightened thinker has grown. He was born in Fieldhead, West Riding, Yorkshire, in 1733. He attended a dissenting academy at Daventry; afterward he filled various pulpits and served as a schoolmaster. At the time he met Franklin in 1765, he was tutor in languages and belles lettres at Warrington Academy. His friendship with Franklin and Canton revolved around their interest in electricity. Priestley suggested that he might write a history of electricity and began when Franklin, Canton, and Richard Price gave him encouragement. Franklin did more by providing Priestley with books and suggestions, and Canton proved as helpful. Franklin was delighted by the result, three volumes called the History and Present State of Electric-ivy with Original Experiments (London, 1767). Priestley carried out

the original experiments of the title while he was writing his history. Writing about theory and finding unsatisfactory everything already done, he attempted to discover the truth for himself. Both the History and the experiments won Franklin's approval, and he, with others equally pleased, proposed Priestley for membership in the Royal Society even before the books were published. The next year, in a curiously ineffective attempt, Franklin proposed Priestley for the Copley Medal-ineffective because Franklin's written assessment of Priestley's scientific work scanted most of the experiments. Six years later Franklin and his friends did it right, and Priestley received the prize.17

Before returning to America on the eve of the war, Franklin spent his last day in London, March 19, 1775, with Priestley. The two men talked that day about the crisis and read recently arrived newspapers from America to find articles that might serve the American cause through their reprinting in London papers. Priestley remembered that Franklin wept when he read the messages sent by Massachusetts towns to Boston, which had been closed to all commerce by one of the Coercive Acts passed by Parliament as punishment for throwing the greatest tea party of the century.18

Priestley shared Franklin's grief at the prospect of war. Like many British intellectuals, including members of the Club of Honest Whigs, he had watched the crisis develop, and he had argued against parliamentary measures. The year before, at Franklin's suggestion, he had written An Address to Protestant Dissenters of All Denominations, in which he held that the American colonies had never been subject to the laws of England except voluntarily. By leaving England, the colonists had removed themselves from English control and had placed themselves under the English king only out of "their regard to the country from which they came."19 This was radical doctrine in England, though not in America,

where Thomas Jefferson had made a similar argument in his Summary View of the Rights of British America. 20 Priestley, however, was not all radicalism and seemed to concede that Boston should compensate the East India Company, which it had "injured" when it threw the tea overboard.21

At the end of the Address, Priestley quoted his friend Richard Price to the effect that war with America would lead to the "public bankruptcy" of England. Price was also Franklin's friend, and he regarded the conflict between England and the colonies just about as his two friends did. He had been born in Wales, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and was educated there and in London. When Franklin first met him he was preaching at Newington Green, a few miles north of London. Price was small in size but large in spirit. His friends seem not to have been simply fond of him; many loved him. He was a gentle man devoted to his preaching and to his books. Reports on his pulpit style indicate that he did not preach with great force--his voice was weak and he did not have much eloquence. Franklin liked preachers who spoke about how life should be led and what constituted morality. Price satisfied him on these grounds and in many other ways as well. His mathematical and scientific interests intrigued Franklin-Price wrote on what today would be called probability theory, and he also studied demographic projection. But for the most part it was Price's amiable character, his sweet personality, and his politics that drew Franklin to him.22

The two men never laid eyes on one another after Franklin's departure for America in 1775, but their correspondence did not flag. Price's calm spirit deserted him when he wrote about the American crisis, and the criticism he received in the newspapers for his attacks on governmental policy made Franklin fear that he might be prosecuted. Price attempted to help American prisoners held in England during the war, and he occasionally sent Franklin

intelligence about the movements of ships. This action may have brought him close to treason.23

The war separated Franklin from his British friends, but it joined him to new ones in France. As in England, science provided the common ground, and as in England, several of these friendships were preceded by exchanges of letters. Condorcet, one of the great encyclopedists and a distinguished mathematician, wrote him first in 1773 with questions about subjects ranging from the performance of barometers in the New World to the condition of free blacks. Franklin asked the American Philosophical Society to reply to the scientific questions but commented on blacks himself, saying among other things that free blacks in America were generally "improvident and poor." He added his own opinion to the effect that "they make good Musicians." The two men met in Paris after Franklin's arrival as commissioner, and they maintained their friendship until Franklin's death. Condorcet eulogized Franklin before the Royal Academy of Sciences in November 1790.24

The great French chemist Lavoisier was also drawn to Franklin. The twenty-five-year difference in their ages did not keep the two apart; in fact, in France as elsewhere Franklin found friends of all ages. He saw Lavoisier in a number of settings-in the Frenchman's laboratory, where he conducted experiments on combustible materials; at meetings of the French Academy; on the commission that investigated Mesmer and animal magnetism (one of the fascinating fakeries of the century); on less interesting committees; and at the Lavoisier home. Madame Lavoisier shared her husband's affection for Franklin and painted his portrait while he was in France.25

The friendship might have foundered had either man been given to jealousy or other forms of pettiness. Lavoisier's interest in the chemical composition of air brought him into conflict with Joseph Priestley, who was an exponent of the phlogiston theory. Franklin kept Priestley informed of Lavoisier's experiments, but he did not reveal his own opinion on the scientific dispute that divided the two.26

Lavoisier and his scientific colleagues in and out of the Royal Academy of Sciences, which made Franklin a member, admired him and the Revolution he represented. Their sympathies were engaged, for they sensed that something flesh-even original-had appeared in the political world with the Declaration of Independence. They had spent much of their lives speculating on the meaning of liberty and hoping for the end of the tyrannies that disfigured European life. Now, with the American Revolution, an enormous change seemed in the making.

French merchants undoubtedly shared this hope, but, understandably, their own interests shaped their attitudes with even greater vigor. Franklin looked to them for arms and munitions, and for ships to carry these items and the clothing and equipment needed by the army. They looked to him with the gleam of profits in their eyes.27

Franklin's landlord, Chaumont, was one of them, a man genuinely fond of his tenant and genuinely fond of profit. Chaumont exuded charm and energy. He was generous, and he was eager to get into the American trade. The French government recognized his talents and seems to have kept its lines open to him, confident that he would keep it informed of Franklin's activities. Chaumont was more than an agent-it is not clear that he was paid-and he took to his opportunities to make money in the new trade with enthusiasm. This quality sometimes led him to overextend himself, as he did in a protracted effort Franklin made in 1779 to

send supplies worth three million livres to Washington's army. Franklin first relied upon Chaumont to secure fifteen thousand uniforms; Lafayette, who became one of the actors in an affair that soon involved other French merchants, shipowners, and the French government, promised to find fifteen thousand stands of arms. Responsibilities in an effort of this sort, in which none of the participants had much experience, soon became entangled with promises and the uncertainties of war. Before the effort ended two years later, Franklin felt his patience flay and his temper rise, but he kept his head-and he kept Chaumont's friendship. The delay in shipping the supplies occasioned the strain between the two men. Franklin was not at fault; Chaumont was.28

An interest in America and a desire to help it to independence undoubtedly steadied Chaumont's course at those moments when his uncertain judgment and his greed threatened to throw him into an eccentric orbit. Franklin's solid presence in French society must have reminded Chaumont that he was dealing in no ordinary business when he contracted to deliver ships and goods to the Americans. He indicated his regard for Franklin soon after they met by having a medallion made with Franklin's head imposed. Then there were the meetings and parties at Passy or nearby where the talk and the wit were comfortable and exhilarating.

Chaumont was in fact part of a circle of friends revolving around Passy. Almost inevitably French ladies took an important part in making this circle work. They probably soon realized that Franklin liked them as people-and appreciated them because they were women.

Franklin had close female friends all his life. Some of these friendships began as flirtations, but something more than sexual tension soon appeared. Franklin's deep attachment to his neighbor Madame Brillon illustrates the major points of this pattern. Louis-Guillaume de Veillard, who lived near Madame Brillon, intro-

duced Franklin to her. It was an encounter that intrigued them both and soon entered another phase. Franklin was at first the great man she wished to meet and to know. One meeting led to others, which soon became exercises in gallantry on Franklin's part. How an aging man, now seventy-one, played the part of gallant without appearing and feeling foolish is not clear, but Franklin evidently managed. Madame Brillon played, not the temptress, but the faithful wife and mother, flattered and pleased by his attentions, perhaps feeling sexual desire akin to his but determined to remain faithful to her husband.29

It was her talent and charm that held Franklin's attention after Madame Brillon made him realize that she would not fulfill his sexual demands. The talent lay in music and the fine arts: she was an accomplished harpsichordist and she apparently learned to play the piano well in that instrument's infancy. She also composed music interesting enough to be praised by Charles Burney, the well-known English music critic. Her drawing and painting, moreover, brought her praise from those who saw her work. She was, in short, a woman of sensibility and taste.30

Madame Brillon was also young-still in her thirties in 1777, when she and Franklin met-beautiful, and the mother of two attractive daughters. Her husband was twenty-four years older than she and did not mind the attention Franklin paid his wife. He may in fact have encouraged it. Brillon was a worldly man, unfaithful to his wife, though she had not learned of his behavior when she met Franklin. By the time she discovered her husband's infidelity, Franklin had become her cher Papa, someone to confide in, someone who listened to her recital of grief and offered comfort and wisdom.

The Brillons sometimes traveled for her health, and in these absences from Passy she poured out her heart to Franklin just as she did when they were together. He soon made it his practice to

spend an evening or two a week with them and sometimes strolled in the gardens with his young friend. These visits provided moments he cherished. He wrote many of his most charming bagatelles under her tutelage-or with her interests in mind. She gave him encouragement, resisted whatever impulse she had to correct his French, and thoroughly enjoyed all that he did.

The awkward moments that every friendship of any length endures were rare after Franklin recognized that he would not become Madame Brillon's lover. Franklin entertained hopes for a time that his grandson, William Temple Franklin, who served as secretary for the American commission, might marry Cunegarde, the Brillon's seventeen-year-old daughter. Temple, as he was called, was twenty-one at the time, a handsome, rather lazy, and useless young man. The Brillons feared such a marriage would deprive them of their daughter, for they expected that Temple would eventually return to America. They accordingly refused, to Franklin's dismay, but this blow did not break their deep and abiding attachment to him.31

There were several other Frenchwomen who loved Franklin, none more interesting to him than Madame Helvetius. He met her early in 1778, at a time when he was on intimate terms with Madame Brillon. Madame Helvetius hardly knew Madame Brillon, and their paths rarely crossed; Madame Brillon's life centered on Passy, Madame Helvetius's on Auteuil. Madame Helvetius possessed a strong sense of herself, one of the ways she resembled Franklin. She took the world as it came and responded confidently, and sometimes, to Franklin's delight, with an earthiness verging on the coarse but without descending to the vulgar. Madame Brillon was much too interested in herself, much too concerned about her own reactions, given to moodiness and emotional swings from depression to delight, to be able to match Madame Helvetius's sure-footed march through life.32

Born Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d'Autricourt to a noble family, related to Austrian royalty, Madame Helvetius nevertheless was poor and at age fifteen was packed off to a convent. She was without a dowry and apparently without hope for an aristocratic life. She remained in the convent for fifteen years until she was forced to leave because her pension, granted her by a cardinal, expired when he died. There seemed no choice but to return home to a life of genteel poverty shared by fifteen brothers and sisters and a mother who was pregnant again. Her aunt Madame de Graffigny rescued her by taking her to Paris. This aunt, a successful novelist, presided over a salon where her niece, familiarly called Minette, was noticed for her beauty and her bright, lively mind. Suitors soon appeared, including Anne-Robert Turgot, who in a few years would become one of the powers in the French government as comptroller-general and minister of the navy. Turgot wanted to marry her, but she rejected him in favor of Claude-Adrien Helvetius, a wealthy man who at thirty-six was four years older than she.33

The marriage, ended by Helvetius's death, lasted twenty years, during which time Madame Helvetius's salon became famous in Paris. Who was the most distinguished among its members is not clear, but it drew Diderot, d'Alembert, Condorcet, and Turgot, among others, and occasionally a visitor from abroad such as David Hume.34

Fifty-two years of age in 1771 when her husband died, Madame Helvetius sold the Paris house after marrying off her daughter. Her new residence was a small estate in Auteuil, near Passy and the Bois de Boulogne. Here she turned to gardening-not the formal gardens with straight lines and disciplined beds so admired by people of her class, but a scattering of colorful plants, from rhododendrons and hortensias to gooseberry bushes. Madame Helvetius loved birds and animals, and the grounds were home to

a profusion of ducks and deer, dogs and cats, and exotic species in aviaries.

At times Madame Helvetius must have entertained as many human visitors as animals and birds. Several from her Paris salon appeared, chief among them Turgot. But fresh faces appeared as well and now and then a great one, Voltaire, for example. Before long several of her favorites lived in the house or enjoyed temporary quarters there. The AbbC) AndrC) Morellet, who lived in Paris, found the house in Auteuil so enticing that he often spent several days a week there. A short-term arrangement seemed to be all that the AbbC) Martin Lefebvre de la Roche expected when he arrived to comfort Madame Helvetius in her widowhood and to prepare her husband's manuscripts for publication. He found a pavilion on the grounds for his books and went to work; thirty years later he was still there.35

The other long-term resident was a young man, Pierre Georges Cabanis, who soon became almost a son to Madame Helvetius. He was twenty-two when Turgot brought him to Auteuil. A brilliant young man, Cabanis, despite the differences in age, hit it off well with the two abbC)s and Benjamin Franklin. Cabanis's major interest was medicine-not its practice, but its theory. He was indeed, in the way of the eighteenth century, a philosopher of medicine. He was also deeply devoted to Notre Dame d'Auteuil, as Franklin dubbed Madame Helvetius, and a fully participating member of l'AcadC)mie d'Auteuil, as the group of intellectuals around her came to call itself.36

Turgot first brought Franklin to Auteuil. Soon he was a full member of the AcadC)mie-nourished by its intellectual vitality and delighted by the wit and fun he found in it. But as important as the group was to him, Madame Helvetius proved more important. She was in her late fifties by this time, no longer the great beauty, but handsome and attractive in ways difficult to grasp two hundred years later. She fascinated Franklin.

Part of the fascination arose from the easy equality she assumed. To Madame Helvetius Franklin was not mon cher Papa but mon cher ami. She was in certain regards a friend in the manner of his closest male friends. She treated him as they did, combining respect with a comfortable informality. Madame Helvetius was sometimes forgetful, perhaps distracted by the incessant comings and goings at Auteuil and by the changing mixture of old and new faces. She forgot about Franklin on occasion, once inviting him for breakfast and then forgetting that he was coming. When he arrived, there was little to eat. The AbbC) Morellet, who apparently had eaten heartily, did his best, but Franklin went away hungry and consoled himself by writing a bagatelle-"Bilked for Breakfast"-on the incident.37

Madame Helvetius was not an intellectual and did not try to match the genius of her guests. But she was not a fool-she judged those who came to her with discernment-and fools did not receive invitations to Auteuil. Her wit and her delight in good conversation pleased Franklin enormously, and though he never neglected Madame Brillon, he seems to have preferred going to Madame Helvetius's.

In the end it was the lady herself who won his heart-not the menagerie of philosophes and the resident abbC)s. Late in the year 1779, Franklin asked her to marry him. His petition was serious and seriously made, though in the months of pursuit that followed lightness and wit did not desert their conversation. She was touched, even tempted to agree, but finally turned him down. Turgot, who had wanted to marry her earlier and who advised her to reject Franklin, was pleased. Franklin, who had never quite lost his head, perhaps had never come close, responded with an irony that revealed his courtship had not robbed him of his capacity for watching himself in action. Still, he was disappointed; he had wanted her badly and would have remained in France for the rest of his days had she married him. At first, indeed, he did not accept

rejection, writing a bagatelle, "The Elysian Fields," in which he rehearsed her refusal to marry him and asked her again.38

Madame Helvetius disappointed Franklin with another rejection, but she did not fail him. Like Madame Brillon before her and, still earlier, Margaret Stevenson in Craven Street, London, she had made him a part of her family. Franklin seems to have needed the warmth and the comfort that such settings provided; and in fact he received the affection and the admiration of women all his life. There was sexual attraction in several of these friendships, and perhaps at times there was sexual fulfillment. Franklin and Margaret Stevenson lived in the same house for sixteen years, which included a long period during which both were healthy and vigorous. After a while their friends customarily invited them together on social occasions. The time and the setting were right for sexual relations, though no one knows if they occurred.

The emotional support that friendships provide was present in these connections and in many of the ties between Franklin and friends of all ages. With many of the men there was even more. Ideas joined affection in a number of these friendships, and Franklin surely gave much more than he received. In fact he proved to his friends, if any proof were needed, that he was a generous man. He gave of his purse, his mind, his affections-he gave of himself.

The reasons young and old were attracted to Franklin varied in the course of his life. When he was young, his friends were also young, artisans for the most part. They-and he-looked for ways to rise, to make money, and, in accordance with popular ideas about virtue, to serve the public. Franklin attracted these young men because he was curious about the world, curious about them;

he was also amusing, a good listener, and a good organizer. They sensed immediately that his intelligence was high and they soon discovered that he was genuinely interested in them. He brought people together, which was always his instinct.

Franklin was older when he became famous and wealthy and powerful. People then came to him because he was all of these things. But his friends were not simply people who wanted something from him. His friends continued to be drawn from all ages and kinds, children as well as adults, the weak as well as the strong. The qualities of his youth may have been somewhat tempered, but his curiosity had not diminished, nor had his sense of fun and the glee he felt in games and jokes. Perhaps more than anything else a current of passion ran deeply in the older man as it had in the younger. Its warmth appeared in various guises-in the public servant, in the eager listener to children's chatter, and surely most strongly in the scientist probing the secrets of nature. Whatever it was-and in Franklin this quality seems to have been a compound of emotion (bordering on piety) and intellect-it helped him make friends.

Franklin was a big man in every sense, and he possessed a splendid capacity for friendship. But despite his generosity and his largeness of spirit, he was not all sunshine and light. There was another, passionate, side that once aroused could attract enemies, even make them. And, of course, there are always men who need little or no reason to become the enemies of others.

Continues...

Excerpted from Benjamin Franklin and His Enemiesby Robert Middlekauff Copyright © 1998 by Robert Middlekauff. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520213785
• ISBN 13: 9780520213784
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 284