  On August 27, 1783, just a few days before the signing of the peace treaty with England, a balloon ascension was held at the Champ-de-Mars. It was the first in Paris; the first in history had taken place near Lyons in the previous June. For four days preceding the event, the great balloon of varnished silk had been filling up with hydrogen gas under the direction of the physicist Jacques-Alexandre-CÉsar Charles. Paris was agog with excitement. Some 50,000 gathered to watch. Franklin, who was present, reported that the balloon rose rapidly “till it entered the clouds, when it seemed to me scarce bigger than an orange and soon after became invisible.” “What good is it?” a skeptic asked. “What good is a newborn baby?” Franklin retorted, a remark that went around the world. He saw the first free balloon ascend with human passengers on November 20, at the ChÂteau de la Muette in Passy. The passengers, scientist PilÂtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arland, were lifted some 500 feet, floated over the Seine, and landed in Paris. A few weeks later he witnessed a balloon soar upwards from the Paris Tuileries, taking its human cargo to the incredible height of 2,000 feet. He could not resist speculating as to what man’s triumph over space might mean to the future. Would the balloon perhaps become a common means of transportation? How delightful that would be for one like himself for whom riding in a carriage had become such agony. But he could hardly hope for such comfort in his lifetime. More to the point was the possibility that the actuality of balloon flight might convince “sovereigns of the folly of wars”:
Not even the wealthiest and most powerful ruler could guard his dominions against such an air raid. The terrible threat would mean an end to warfare. So Franklin reasoned, happily unable to peer into the future. Following the Treaty of Paris, Congress had retained his services as ambassador to France for two years longer. He served unofficially as United States ambassador for all of Europe, and new honors rained down on him. He was elected a member of Madrid’s Royal Academy of History, of Manchester’s Literary and Philosophical Society, of the Academies of Sciences and Arts in the French towns of OrlÉans and Lyons. Through Admiral Lord Richard Howe, a staunch friend still, the British Admiralty sent him Captain Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, a tribute to his instructions to American cruisers to refrain from interfering with the explorer and his crew. His real and solid pleasures came not from such tokens of recognition but from the circle of good friends he had acquired in his years at Passy. He was on good terms with the parish priest, the village tradesmen, and all the children of the town. The Chaumont family, on whose estate he lived, were deeply devoted to him, including the young daughter Sophie whom he called “my little wife.” He established strong bonds of friendship with his neighbor, the lovely and talented young Madame Brillon, wife of an elderly treasury official. For several years he called on her nearly every Wednesday and Saturday, to play chess or to idle on her terrace in the sun. Sometimes he played for her on his armonica. Once he spent a summer day with Madame Brillon and some other companions on Moulin-Joli, an island on the Seine. Over the river hovered a swarm of tiny May flies, known as ephemera since their life span is but a few hours. As a souvenir of this holiday, he wrote the “Ephemera,” one of his most charming fables, a delicate satire about the trivia which make up the thoughts and actions of many human souls during their own comparatively brief period on earth. “Papa,” Madame Brillon called Franklin. After she and her husband left Passy, she sent him a plaintive note. “How am I going to spend the Wednesdays and Saturdays?” Might they perhaps be united in paradise? “We shall live on roast apples only; the music will be made up of Scottish airs ... everyone will speak the same language; the English will be neither unjust nor wicked ... ambition, envy, pretensions, jealousy, prejudices, all these will vanish at the sound of the trumpet.” Young and old, French women lavished attention on the American philosopher. In return, he gave them affection both fatherly and gallant, told them amusing stories, and showed that combination of respect for their mental capacities and appreciation of their womanly charms which had won over Catherine Ray Greene so many years before. Among his many close women friends the most celebrated was the elderly Madame HelvÉtius, widow of a wealthy landowner and philosopher, who lived with her two daughters at Auteuil, a village next to Passy, in the midst of a little park planted with hortensias and rhododendron, and over-run with cats, dogs, chickens, canaries, pigeons, and wild birds. “Our Lady of Auteuil,” Franklin called her, while her daughters were “les Étoiles,” the stars. Her salon was frequented by philosophers, statesmen, poets, scientists, and mathematicians. Franklin first met her through the French minister Turgot. When she knew him better she told him she wished she had welcomed him as she had Voltaire, whom she had greeted at her gate like a king. One of the many scholars Franklin met at her salon was a talented young doctor named Philippe Pinel. Franklin advised him to come to America where doctors were badly needed. Pinel was tempted but refused—and became famous for his courage and wisdom in removing chains from the insane at the Paris hospitals of BicÊtre and SaltpÊtriÈre. While John Adams and his wife Abigail were at Passy, Franklin invited Madame HelvÉtius to dinner. The worthy Abigail was horrified when Madame HelvÉtius kissed Franklin’s cheeks and forehead in greeting. Even more shocking in her eyes, the guest held Franklin’s hand at dinner and now and then let her arm rest on the back of John Adams’ chair. “I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct,” Abigail wrote afterwards, “if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from affectation or stiffness of behaviour, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor’s word; but I should have set her down for a very bad one.” Whatever Abigail Adams thought, there is no doubt of Franklin’s devotion. Sometime—no one knows just when—he proposed marriage to Madame HelvÉtius. She refused him. Perhaps she was too accustomed to her own way of life to want to make a change. Perhaps she felt that his proposal was only a form of gallantry. Neither the proposal nor her refusal interfered with their friendship, which lasted as long as he stayed in France and by correspondence afterward. Since 1777 he had his own private press at Passy and a foundry to cast his own type. His excuse was that the press was useful with so many official forms to be prepared, but it was also true that printing was still in his blood and always would be. One of the pamphlets that came off the Passy printing press was “Information to Those who would Remove to America.” He thought too many of the wrong people wanted to emigrate to America for the wrong reasons, and he wanted to correct their misapprehensions. He discouraged artists and scholars who expected they would receive free transportation, land, slaves, tools and livestock from a rich but ignorant America. In America, a man who did not bring his fortune “must work and be industrious to live.” The chief resource of America was cheap land, he pointed out. Farm laborers were needed. Skilled artisans could make a good living and “provide for children and old age.” But “those Europeans who have these or greater advantages at home would do well to stay where they are.” To answer those who besieged him with questions about the Indians, he wrote “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” perhaps the first fair appraisal of America’s original inhabitants to be printed:
So he continued, by illustration and by example, to show that while Indian ways and customs were quite different from those of the white men, there was much to be said for them, and they were by no means always inferior. In fact, there was much which men who called themselves civilized could learn by studying the nature of those called savages. Some pieces in lighter vein were also run off his press, which Franklin wrote partly as an exercise in French, partly to entertain himself and his friends. In one of these bagatelles, as such pieces are known, he told Parisians of a discovery he had made whereby they could make great savings in the cost of candles and oil lamps. He had gone to bed one night, as usual at three or four hours after midnight, and had been awakened by a sudden noise at six, to find that his room was flooded with light! His servant had forgotten to close the shutters before he retired. Looking into his almanac, he learned what few others could know—that the sun rises early and “that he gives light as soon as he rises.” Another of his bagatelles was “Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout,” in which Gout explains his frequent and unwelcome visits as due simply to Franklin’s indolence; he plays chess too much and exercises too little. The “Ephemera” was printed as a bagatelle, and so was “The Whistle,” an expanded version of the little story he had once told his son William. His intellectual curiosity had not slackened during his years in France. War or no war, he continued to observe natural phenomenon, write and reflect on scientific matters, and keep up with the newest discoveries and inventions. He attended meetings of the Royal Society of Medicine, to which he had been elected in 1777, and of the French Academy of Science. In 1782, he watched Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier perform an experiment with the gas he had named oxygen—Joseph Priestley’s “dephlogistated air.” He wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch scientist, about differences between the Leyden jar and Volta’s new electrophorus, and to Edward Nairne, an English friend, about the comparative humidity of the air in London, Philadelphia and Passy. To a French friend, Count de Gebelin, he discoursed on the characteristics of the various Indian languages. When de Gebelin commented that some Indian words sounded Phoenician, Franklin dived into archaeological speculations:
He wrote a paper on the phenomenon of the aurora borealis (the northern lights) for the French Academy of Science, sent notes to Marie Antoinette’s physician, Felix Vicq d’Azyr, on the length of time infection could remain in the body after death, and investigated a story of some workmen in the Passy quarry who claimed to have found living toads shut up in solid stone. In a letter to another friend, the AbbÉ Soulavie, he pondered on why there were coal mines under the sea at Whitehaven and oyster shells in the Derbyshire mountains—indications of great geological changes in the past. Was it possible that the surface of the earth was a shell “capable of being broken and disordered by the violent movements of the fluid on which it rested?” Admittedly, this was only a guess: “I approve much more your method of philosophizing, which proceeds upon actual observations....” He still tinkered with inventions, and for his own comfort devised the first bifocal glasses, so he could see both near and far without changing his spectacles. He was old enough to be serious all the time, but he never could resist a hoax, even with his scientific friends. To the eminent French physician Georges Cabanis he confided that in the forests of North America he had observed a bird which “like the horned screamer or the horned lapwing, carries two horned tubercles at the joints of the wings. These two tubercles at the death of the bird become the sprouts of two vegetable stalks, which grow at first in sucking the juice from its cadaver and which subsequently attach themselves to the earth in order to live in the manner of plants and trees.” The inspiration for this weird creation of his imagination was perhaps the “vegetable animal” he thought he saw on the gulf weed he had fished out of the Gulf Stream at the age of twenty. His friend Cabanis, suspecting nothing, dutifully reported it in one of his books, taking only the precaution to note that “in spite of the great veracity of Franklin, I cite it with a great deal of reserve.” What endless marvels the world offered and how much there was to know about them! One lifetime was not nearly long enough. “The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon,” he wrote Joseph Priestley after their countries were at peace once more. “It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.... O that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity.” He could not guess that his fervent cry would still be echoed, in one form or another, more than a hundred and seventy-five years after his death. In 1784, the King of France chose him to serve on a commission of five to investigate the work of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, who claimed to effect cures through “animal magnetism,”—a universal fluid which flowed to his patients from the healer, or from some object “magnetized” by the healer, such as a tree. All fashionable Paris was flocking to Mesmer’s seances; his following was enormous throughout France. With Franklin on this commission served Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (whose name would survive in the French Revolution’s chief instrument of execution) and the scientist Lavoisier (whom the guillotine would claim as a victim). After many months of study, the commission concluded that “animal magnetism” did not exist, and that Mesmer’s cures were the result of “imagination.” The importance of imagination in physical illness was as yet unrecognized. Privately Franklin commented that Mesmer’s treatments certainly did some good—at least they kept some from taking injurious drugs. On the whole the findings of the commission brought both Mesmer and mesmerism into disrepute. Indirectly the shadow of its disapproval fell on a phenomenon first discovered by a Mesmer disciple, the Marquis de Puysegur—that some persons, in a state of trance and apparently asleep, are able to obey simple commands. Hypnotism, for many years after de Puysegur’s observations, was relegated to quacks rather than physicians and scientists. In August of 1784 Thomas Jefferson arrived from America to help negotiate treaties with European and North African powers. Franklin introduced him to his French scientific friends and found in his company the same harmony as when they were both members of the Second Continental Congress. His last winter in France, Polly Hewson and her children also joined him at Passy. Mrs. Stevenson, Polly’s mother, had died in England during the war. Franklin welcomed these members of his “English family” with joy and affection. He still had his two grandsons with him. There had been some objections from Congress to his making Temple his secretary, on the grounds that he was the son of a traitor. Franklin had been highly indignant: “Methinks it is rather some merit that I have rescued a valuable young man from the danger of being a Tory, and fixed him in honest republican Whig principles.” Yet there was some justification in the fears of Congress. At twenty-six, Temple was charming, handsome and spoiled. He spent his evenings at music halls and, wearing red heels, an embroidered coat, and with an Angora cat on a leash, paraded the boulevards with aristocratic young friends. Mockingly the Parisians dubbed him “Franklinet.” While Franklin was trying to kill a clause in the peace treaty conceding special privileges to Tories, Temple, without his knowledge, wrote to Lord Shelburne pleading a government post for his Tory father. Different as could be was Benjamin Bache, now sixteen, a husky wholesome youngster much like Franklin at his age. He wanted no more than to be a printer as his grandfather had been. Franklin taught him how to cast type, and in April 1785 persuaded the best printer in France to make him an apprentice. The arrangement was of short duration. In May, Franklin at last received permission from Congress to come home. Jefferson was appointed ambassador to France in his stead. “I am not replacing Franklin,” Jefferson said loyally. “No one could do that. I am only his successor.” He left Passy on July 12, 1785, traveling to Havre in a royal litter drawn by mules, which the King had provided for his comfort. His personal goods—128 boxes in all—went by barge down the Seine. He took with him Louis XVI’s personal gift—the King’s miniature, set with 408 diamonds. The whole population of Passy watched him leave, silent except for occasional outbursts of sobs. “All the days of my life I shall remember that a great man, a sage, wished to be my friend,” wrote Madame Brillon just before his departure. A farewell note from Madame HelvÉtius was waiting for him at Havre: “I see you in your litter, every step taking you further from us, lost to me and all my friends who love you so much and to whom you leave such long regrets.” He and his grandsons spent four days at Southampton, England. William Franklin came down from London, where he was now living, to see them, but the meeting with his father was brief and strained. Then Benjamin Franklin set off for his eighth crossing of the Atlantic. He knew it would be his last. |
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