Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed Volume I Part 28

One does not dream of consulting taste, age, congeniality of character; one marries a young girl whose heart is full of youth's fire and its cravings to a man who has used them up; then one exacts that this woman be virtuous--my friend, this story is mine, and of how many others! I shall do my best that it may not be that of my daughters, but alas, shall I be mistress of their fate?

The correspondence between Madame Brillon and Franklin was very voluminous.

Among the Franklin papers in the possession of the American Philosophical Society, there are no less than 119 letters from her to him, and in the same collection there are also the rough drafts of some of his letters in French to her. More than one of them are marked with corrections by her hand. Repeated statements of hers show that she took a very indulgent view of his imperfect mastery of the French language. When he sent to the Brillons his French translation of his _Dialogue between the Gout and M.

Franklin_, she returned it to him, "corrected and made worse in several particulars by a savant, and devoted to destruction by the critical notes of a woman who is no savant," and she took occasion at the same time to say:

Your dialogue has greatly amused me, but your corrector of French has spoiled your work. Believe me, leave your productions as they are, use words which mean something, and laugh at the grammarians who enfeeble all your phrases with their purisms. If I had the brains, I should utter a dire diatribe against those who dare to touch you up, even if it were the Abbe de la Roche, or my neighbor Veillard.

And after reading _The Whistle_ of Franklin, she wrote to him, "M. Brillon has laughed heartily over the Whistle: we find that what you call your bad French often gives a piquant flavor to your narrative by reason of a certain turn of phraseology and the words you invent."

It may well be doubted whether there is anything more brilliant in literary history than the letters which make up the correspondence between Madame Brillon and Franklin, and the marvel is that the intellectual quality of his letters should, in every respect, be as distinctly French as that of hers. His easy, fleeting touch, his unflagging vivacity, his wit, his fertility of invention, his amative coloring are all as thoroughly French as bonbons or champagne. The tame domesticity of his forty-nine years of sober American wedlock, the calm, well-regulated flow of his thoughts and habits in conservative England, under the roof of Mrs. Stevenson, and at the country seat of the "Good Bishop," the Philosophy of Poor Richard, the Art of Virtue, are exchanged for a character which, except when a suitable match was to be found for M. Franklinet, as Madame Brillon called William Temple Franklin, apparently took no account of anything but the pursuit of pleasure, as pleasure was pursued by the people, who have, of all others, most nearly succeeded in giving to it the rank of a respectable divinity.

In all the letters of Franklin to Madame Brillon, there is not a sentiment with a characteristic American or English inflection in it. How far his approaches to the beautiful and clever wife of M. Brillon were truly erotic, and how far merely the conventional courtship of a gifted but aged man, who had survived everything, that belongs to pa.s.sion but its language, it is impossible to say. We only know that, if his gallantry was specious merely, he maintained it with a degree of pertinacity, which there is only too much reason to believe might have had a different issue if it had been more youthful and genuine. A handsome, talented Frenchwoman, of the eighteenth century, burdened with a faithless husband, not too old for the importunity of a heart full, to use her own expression, of youth's fire and cravings, and tolerant enough to sit on an admirer's knees, and to write responsive replies to letters from him, accompanied by a perpetual refrain of s.e.xuality, would, to say the least, have been in considerable danger of forgetting her marriage vows if her Colin had been younger. As it was, the tenderness of Madame Brillon for her "cher Papa" appears to have produced no results worse than a series of letters from her pen, as finished as enamel, which show that in every form of defensive warfare, literary or amorous, she was quite a match for the great man, who was disposed to forget how long he had lingered in a world which has nothing but a laugh for the efforts of December to pa.s.s itself off as May.

"Do you know, my dear Papa," she wrote to him on one occasion, "that people have criticized my pleasant habit of sitting on your lap, and yours of asking me for what I always refuse?" In this world, she a.s.sured him, she would always be a gentle and virtuous woman, and the most that she would promise was to be his wife in Paradise, if he did not ogle the maidens there too much while waiting for her.

When the hardy resolution is once formed of reviewing the correspondence between Franklin and Madame Brillon, the most difficult task is that of compression.

What! [she wrote to "Monsieur Papa" from Nice, after the capitulation of Cornwallis] You capture entire armies in America, you burgoinise Cornwallis, you take cannon, vessels, munitions of war, men, horses, etc., etc. you capture everything and from everybody, and the gazette alone brings it to the knowledge of your friends, who befuddle themselves with drinking to your health, to that of Washington, of Independence, of the King of France, of the Marquis de la Fayette, of the Mrs: de Rochambault, Chalelux etc., etc. while you do not exhibit a sign of life to them; yet you should be a bon vivant at this time, although you rarely err in that respect, and you are surely twenty years younger because of this good news, which ought to bring us a lasting peace after a glorious war.

To this letter, Franklin replied on Christmas Day of the year 1781, the birthday of the Dauphin of Heaven, he called it in the letter. He was very sensible, he said, to the greatness of their victory, but war was full of vicissitudes and uncertainty, and he played its game with the same evenness of temper that she had seen him bring to the good and bad turns of a game of chess. That was why he had said so little of the surrender, and had only remarked that nothing could make him perfectly happy under certain circ.u.mstances. The point, of course, was that still another capitulation was essential to his happiness. He then proceeds to tell Madame Brillon that, everywhere from Paris to Versailles, everyone spoke of her with respect, and some with affection and even admiration; which was music to his ears.

I often pa.s.s before your house [he adds]. It wears a desolate look to me. Heretofore, I have broken the commandment in coveting it along with my neighbour's wife. Now I do not covet it. Thus I am the less a sinner. But with regard to the wife, I always find these commandments very inconvenient, and I am sorry that we are cautioned to practise them. Should you find yourself in your travels at the home of St. Peter, ask him to recall them, as intended only for the Jews, and as too irksome for good Christians.

These specimens are true to the language of the entire correspondence, but further excerpts from it will not be amiss for the purpose of enabling us to realize how agreeable the flirtation between the two must have been to have produced such a lengthy correspondence despite the fact that Franklin visited Madame Brillon at least every Wednesday and Sat.u.r.day.

On Nov. 2, 1778, she wrote to Franklin as follows:

The hope that I had of seeing you here, my dear Papa, has kept me from writing to you for Sat.u.r.day's tea.

Hope is the remedy for all our ills. If one suffers, one hopes for the end of the trouble; if one is with friends, one hopes to remain with them always; if one is away from them, one hopes to rejoin them,--and this is the only hope that is left to me. I shall count the days, the hours, the moments; each moment gone brings me nearer to you. We like to grow older when it is the only means of reuniting us to those whom we love. The person, who takes life thus, seeks unceasingly to shorten it; he plans, desires; without the future, it seems to him that he has nothing. When my children are grown up--in ten years--the trees in my garden will shade me. The years slip by, then one regrets them. I might have done such and such a thing, one says then.

Had I not been only twenty-five years old, I should not have done the foolish thing of which I now repent. The wise man alone enjoys the present, does not regret the past, and awaits peacefully the future. The wise man, who, like you, my Papa, has pa.s.sed his youth in acquiring knowledge and enlightening his fellow-men, and his mature years in obtaining liberty for them, brings a complaisant eye to bear on the past, enjoys the present, and awaits the reward of his labors in the future; but how many are wise? I try to become so, and am so in some respects: I take no account of wealth, vanity has little hold upon my heart; I like to do my duty; I freely forgive society its errors and injustices. But I love my friends with an idolatry that often does me much harm: a prodigious imagination, a soul of fire will always get the better of all my plans and thoughts. I see, Papa, that I must never lay claim to any but the one perfection of loving the most that is possible. May this quality make you love your daughter always!... Come, you always know how to combine a great measure of wisdom with a touch of roguishness; you ask Brillon for news of me at the very moment when you are receiving a letter from me; you play the part of the neglected one, just when you are being spoiled, and then you deny it like a madman when the secret is discovered. Oh, I have news of you!

... Mama, my children, and Mlle. Jupin present their respects to you. May I venture to beg you to give my kind regards to Mr. Franklinet?

Another letter in the same vein from Madame Brillon to Franklin bears date May 11, 1779:

You are quite right, my good Papa, we should find true happiness only in peace of mind; it is not in our power to change the nature of those with whom we live, nor to check the course of the contradictions that surround us. It is a wise man who speaks, and who tries to comfort his too sensitive daughter by telling her the truth. Oh, my father, I beseech your friendship, your healthy philosophy; my heart hears you and is submissive to you. Give me strength to take the place of an indifference that your child can never feel. But admit, my friend, that for one who knows how to love, ingrat.i.tude is a frightful misfortune; that it is hard for a woman who would give her life without hesitation to insure her husband's happiness to see the results of her exertions and her longings wiped out by intrigue, and falsity. Time will make everything right; my Papa has said so, and I believe it. But my Papa has also said that time is the stuff that life is made of. _My_ life, my friend, is made of a fine and thin stuff, that grief rends cruelly; if I had anything to reproach myself with, I should long have ceased to exist. My soul is pure, simple, frank. I dare to tell my Papa so; I dare to tell him that it is worthy of him; I dare still to a.s.sure him that my conduct, which he has deemed wise, will not belie itself, that I shall await justice with patience, that I shall follow the advice of my worthy friend with steadiness and confidence.

Adieu, you whom I love so much--my kind Papa. Never call me anything but "my daughter." Yesterday you called me "Madame," and my heart shrank, I examined myself, to see whether I had done you any wrong, or if I had some failings that you would not tell me of.

Pardon, my friend; I am not visiting you with a reproach, I am accusing myself of a weakness. I was born much too sensitive for my happiness and for that of my friends; cure me, or pity me; if you can, do one or the other.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, you will come to tea, will you not? Believe me, my Papa, that the pleasure I feel in receiving you is shared by my husband, my children, and my friends; I cannot doubt it, and I a.s.sure you of it.

Franklin's reply to this letter is for a brief moment that of a real father rather than Monsieur Papa. This reminds us that, in one of her letters to him, she states that in her own father she had lost her first and best friend, and recalled the fact that Franklin had told her of the custom of certain savages, who adopt the prisoners, that they capture in war, and make them take the place of the relations whom they have lost. In answer to her statement that ingrat.i.tude is a frightful misfortune, he says: "That is true--to ingrates--but not to their benefactors. You have conferred benefits on those that you have believed worthy of them; you have, therefore, done your duty, as it is a part of our duty to be kindly, and you ought to be satisfied with that and happy in the reflection." This was followed by the advice to his "very dear and always lovable daughter" to continue to fulfill all her duties as a good mother, a good wife, a good friend, a good neighbor, a good Christian, etc. We shall see a little later on what he deemed a part of the duty of a good charitable Christian to be.

The letter terminates with an apology for his bad French. "It may," he said, "disgust you, you who write that charming language with so much purity and elegance. But, if you can in the end decipher my awkward and improper expressions, you will, at least, perhaps, experience the kind of pleasure that we find in solving enigmas or discovering secrets."

His letter transmitting his _Dialogue with the Gout_ to Madame Brillon was not so decorous. It was in it that he had a word to say about the other kind of Christian conduct that he was in the habit of enjoining upon her. A part of this letter was the following:

One of the characters in your story, namely, the Gout appeared to me to reason well enough, with the exception of his supposition that mistresses have had something to do with producing this painful malady. I myself believe the entire contrary, and this is my method of reasoning. When I was a young man, and enjoyed the favors of the s.e.x more freely than at present, I had no gout. Therefore, if the ladies of Pa.s.sy had had more of that kind of Christian charity, that I have often recommended to you in vain, I would not have the gout at present. This seems to me to be good logic.

I am much better. I suffer little pain, but I am very feeble. I can, as you see, joke a little, but I cannot be really gay before I hear that your precious health is re-established.

I send you my Dialogue in the hope that it may amuse you at times.

Many thanks for the three last volumes of Montaigne that I return.

The visit of your ever lovable family yesterday evening has done me much good. My G.o.d! how I love them all from the Grandmother and the father to the smallest child.

The reply of Madame Brillon was in kindred terms:

Sat.u.r.day, 18th November, 1780.

There would be many little things indeed to criticise in your logic, which you fortify so well, my dear Papa.

"When I was a young man," you say, "and enjoyed the favors of the s.e.x more freely than at present, I had no gout." "Therefore," one might reply to this, "when I threw myself out of the window, I did not break my leg." Therefore, you could have the gout without having deserved it, and you could have well deserved it, as I believe, and not have had it.

If this last argument is not so brilliant as the others, it is clear and sure; what is neither clear nor sure are the arguments of philosophers who insist that everything that happens in the world is necessary to the general movement of the universal machine. I believe that the machine would go neither better nor worse if you did not have the gout, and if I were forever rid of my nervous troubles.

I do not see what help, more or less, these little incidents can give to the wheels that turn this world at random, and I know that my little machine goes very much the worse for them. What I know very well besides, is that pain sometimes becomes mistress of reason, and that patience alone can overcome these two nuisances. I have as much of it as I can, and I advise you, my friend, to have the same amount. When frosts have cast a gloom over the earth, a bright sun makes us forget them. We are in the midst of frosts, and must wait patiently for this bright sun, and, while waiting for it, amuse ourselves in the moments when weakness and pain leave us some rest. _This_, my dear Papa, is _my_ logic....

Adieu, my good Papa. My big husband will take my letter to you; he is very happy to be able to go to see you.

For me, nothing remains but the faculty of loving my friends. You surely do not doubt that I shall do my best for you, even to Christian charity, that is to say, with the exception of your Christian charity.

She writes a brief letter to Franklin on New Year's Day of 1781:

If I had a good head and good legs--if, in short, I had everything that I lack,--I should have come, like a good daughter, to wish a happy New Year to the best of papas. But I have only a very tender heart to love him well, and a rather bad pen to scribble him that this year, as well as last year, and all the years of my life, I shall love him, myself alone, as much as all the others that love him, put together.

Brillon and the children present their respects to the kind Papa; and we also send a thousand messages for M.

Franklinet.

Some four years later, after Franklin had vainly endeavored to marry Temple Franklin to a daughter of Madame Brillon, we find him writing a letter of congratulation to her upon the happy _accouchement_ of her daughter. It elicits a reply in which the cheek of the "beautiful and benignant nature,"

of which she speaks, undergoes a considerable amount of artificial coloring.

2nd December, 1784.

Your letter, my kind Papa, has given me keen pleasure; but, if you would give me still more, remain in France until you see my sixth generation. I only ask you for fifteen or sixteen years: my granddaughter will be marriageable early; she is fair and strong. I am tasting a new feeling, my good Papa, to which my heart surrenders itself with pleasure, it is so sweet to love. I have never been able to conceive how beings exist who are such enemies to themselves as to reject friendship. They are ingrates, we say; well we are deceived; that is a little hard sometimes, but we are not always so; and to feel oneself incapable of returning the treachery affords a satisfaction of itself that consoles us for it.

My little nurse is charming and fresh as a morning rose. The first days the child had difficulty,... but patience and the mother's courage overcame it; all goes well now, and nothing could be more interesting than this picture of a young and pretty person nursing a superb child, the father uninterruptedly occupied with the spectacle, and joining his attentions to those of his wife. My eyes are unceasingly moist, and my heart rejoices, my kind Papa. You realize so well the value of all that belongs to beautiful and benignant nature that I owe you these details. My daughter charges me with her thanks and compliments to you; _ma Cadette_ and my men present their regards, and as for me, my friend, I beg you to believe that my friendship and my existence will always be one as respects you.

Once Franklin sought to corner Madame Brillon with a story, which makes us feel for a moment as if the rod of transformation was beginning to work a backward spell, and the Benjamin Franklin of Craven Street and Independence Hall to be released from the spell of the French Circe:

To make you better realize the force of my demonstration that you do not love me, I commence with a little story:

A beggar asked a rich Bishop for a louis by way of alms. You are wild. No one gives a louis to a beggar.

An ecu then. No. That is too much. A liard then,--or your benediction. My benediction! Yes, I will give it to you. No, I will not accept it. For if it was worth a liard, you would not be willing to give it to me. That was how this Bishop loved his neighbor. That was his charity! And, were I to scrutinize yours, I would not find it much greater. I am incredibly hungry for it and you have given me nothing to eat. I was a stranger, and I was almost as love-sick as Colin when you were singing, and you have neither taken me in, nor cured me, nor eased me.

You who are as rich as an Archbishop in all the Christian and moral virtues, and could sacrifice a small share of some of them without visible loss, you tell me that it is asking too much, and that you are not willing to do it. That is your charity to a poor wretch, who once enjoyed affluence, and is unfortunately reduced to soliciting alms. Nevertheless, you say you love him. But you would not give him your friendship if it involved the expenditure of the least little morsel, of the value of a liard, of your wisdom.

But see how nimbly the coquette eludes her pursuer:

MY DEAR PAPA: Your bishop was a n.i.g.g.ard and your beggar a queer enough fellow. You are a logician all the cleverer because you argue in a charming way, and almost awaken an inclination to yield to your unsound arguments founded on a false principle. Is it of Dr.

Franklin, the celebrated philosopher, the profound statesman, that a woman speaks with so much irreverence? Yes, this erudite man, this legislator, has his infirmities (it is the weakness, moreover, of great men: he has taken full advantage of it). But let us go into the matter.