Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed Volume I Part 31

Lavoisier was a member with Franklin of the commission which investigated the therapeutic value of mesmerism, and exposed the imposture of Mesmer.

There are no social incidents in the intercourse of the two men, friendly as it was, so far as we know, worthy of mention; but, in a pa.s.sage in one of Franklin's letters to Jan Ingenhousz, we have a glimpse of the master, of whom, when guillotined, after the brutal declaration of Coffinhal, the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, that the Republic had no need for _savants_, Lagrange remarked, "They needed but a moment to lay that head low, and a hundred years, perhaps, will not be sufficient to reproduce its like." Speaking of an experiment performed by Lavoisier, Franklin wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "He kindled a hollow Charcoal, and blew into it a Stream of dephlogisticated Air. In this Focus, which is said to be the hottest fire human Art has yet been able to produce, he melted Platina in a few Minutes."

Franklin's friend, the Chevalier (afterwards Marquis) de Chastellux, who served with the Comte de Rochambeau in America, and was the author of the valuable _Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 81 and 82_, succeeded in making himself as agreeable to American women as Franklin succeeded in making himself to French women. There is an echo of this popularity in one of Franklin's letters to him. "Dare I confess to you," he said, when he was still at Pa.s.sy, and the Chevalier was still in America, "that I am your rival with Madame G----? (Franklin's Katy). I need not tell you, that I am not a dangerous one. I perceive that she loves you very much; and so does, dear Sir, yours, &c."

Through the influence of Leray de Chaumont, Ferdinand Grand, who was a Swiss Protestant, became the banker of our representatives in France, and, after Franklin's return to America, he remained entrusted with some of Franklin's private funds upon which the latter was in the habit of drawing from time to time. The correspondence between Franklin and himself is almost wholly lacking in social interest, but it indicates a deep feeling of affection upon Franklin's part.

For Dupont de Nemours, the distinguished economist, and the founder of the family, which has been so conspicuous in the industrial, military and naval history of the United States, Franklin cherished a feeling distinctly friendly. His acquaintance with Dupont as well as with Dubourg, who, like Dupont, was a member of the group of French Economists, known as the Physiocrats, was formed, as we have seen, before his mission to France. The correspondence between Franklin and Dupont, however, like that between Franklin and Grand, has but little significance for the purposes of this chapter.[40]

This, however, is not true of the relations between Dr. Barbeu Dubourg, a medical pract.i.tioner of high standing, and Franklin. They not only opened their minds freely to each other upon a considerable variety of topics, but their intercourse was colored by cordial a.s.sociation. Of all the men who came under the spell of Franklin's genius, Dubourg, who was, to use Franklin's own words, "a man of extensive learning," was one of the American philosopher's most enthusiastic pupils. "My dear Master," was the term that he habitually used in speaking of him, and his reverence for the object of his admiration led him to translate into French, with some additions, the edition of Franklin's scientific papers, brought out in London by David Henry in 1769. Nothing that he had ever written, he told his master, had been so well received as the preface to this compilation.

"So great," he declared, "is the advantage of soaring in the shadow of Franklin's wings." We pa.s.s by the communications from Franklin to Dubourg on purely scientific subjects. One letter from the former to him brings to our knowledge a curious habit into which Franklin was drawn by the uncompromising convictions that he entertained in regard to the origin of bad colds and the virtues of ventilation, of which we shall hereafter speak more particularly.

You know [he said] the cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic; but the shock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my const.i.tution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the least painful, but, on the contrary, agreeable; and, if I return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night's rest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined. I find no ill consequences whatever resulting from it, and that at least it does not injure my health, if it does not in fact contribute much to its preservation.

Another letter from Franklin to Dubourg is a dissertation on swimming--the only form of outdoor exercise, to which he was addicted--but in which he was, throughout his life, such an adept that he could even make the following entry in his Journal, when he was at Southampton on his return to America from France: "I went at noon to bathe in Martin's salt-water hot-bath, and, floating on my back, fell asleep, and slept near an hour by my watch without sinking or turning! a thing I never did before, and should hardly have thought possible. Water is the easiest bed that can be!" In the letter to Dubourg, he recalls the a.s.sertion of a M. Robinson that fat persons with small bones float most easily upon the water, makes a pa.s.sing reference to the diving bell and the swimming waist-coat, now known as the life-preserver, and suggests the comfort of varying the progressive motion of swimming by turning over occasionally upon one's back, and otherwise. He also states that the best method of allaying cramp is to give a sudden vigorous and violent shock to the affected region; which may be done in the air as the swimmer swims along on his back, and recalls an incident ill.u.s.trative of the danger of throwing one's self, when thoroughly heated, into cold spring water.

The exercise of swimming [he declared] is one of the most healthy and agreeable in the world. After having swam for an hour or two in the evening, one sleeps coolly the whole night, even during the most ardent heat of summer. Perhaps, the pores being cleansed, the insensible perspiration increases and occasions this coolness. It is certain that much swimming is the means of stopping a diarrhoea, and even of producing a constipation.

In this letter, too, Franklin tells Dubourg how, when he was a boy, he quickened his progress in swimming by aiding the stroke of his hands with oval palettes, and attempted to do so by attaching a kind of sandals to the soles of his feet; and also how in his boyhood, on one occasion, he lay on his back in a pond and let his kite draw him across it without the least fatigue, and with the greatest pleasure imaginable. He thought it not impossible to cross in this manner from Dover to Calais.

Another letter from Franklin to Dubourg on what he calls the doctrines of life and death is a delightful example of both his insatiable inquisitiveness and the readiness with which he could give a pleasant fillip to any subject however grave. He is speaking of some common flies that had been drowned in Madeira wine, apparently about the time when it was bottled in Virginia to be sent to London, where the writer was:

At the opening of one of the bottles, at the house of a friend where I then was [he said], three drowned flies fell into the first gla.s.s that was filled. Having heard it remarked that drowned flies were capable of being revived by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment upon these; they were therefore exposed to the sun upon a sieve, which had been employed to strain them out of the wine. In less than three hours, two of them began by degrees to recover life. They commenced by some convulsive motions of the thighs, and at length they raised themselves upon their legs, wiped their eyes with their fore feet, beat and brushed their wings with their hind feet, and soon after began to fly, finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how they came thither. The third continued lifeless till sunset, when, losing all hopes of him, he was thrown away.

I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they may be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to any ordinary death, the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time, to be then recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But since in all probability we live in an age too early and too near the infancy of science, to hope to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection, I must for the present content myself with the treat, which you are so kind as to promise me, of the resurrection of a fowl or turkey c.o.c.k.

The friendship of Dubourg for Franklin bore good fruit for America, when the American Revolution came on; for a sanguine letter from him exerted a determining influence in inducing Congress to send Franklin to France.

Le Veillard, who was a neighbor of Franklin at Pa.s.sy, was one of the friends whom Franklin loved as he loved Hugh Roberts or John Hughes, Strahan or Jan Ingenhousz. And this feeling, as usual, included the members of his friend's family. Public cares, he wrote to Le Veillard, after his return to America, could not make him forget that he and Le Veillard loved one another. In the same letter, he spoke of Madame Le Veillard, as "the best of good women," and of her daughter as the amiable daughter, who, he thought, would tread in her footsteps. In a later letter, he told Le Veillard that he could not give him a better idea of his present happiness in his family than by informing him that his daughter had all the virtues of a certain good lady whom Le Veillard allowed him to love; the same tender affections and intentions, ingenuity, industry, economy, etc.

"Embrace that good dame for me warmly, and the amiable daughter," he added.

"My best wishes attend the whole family, whom I shall never cease to love while I am B. Franklin." This wealth of affection was richly repaid. The closest relations existed between Franklin and the Le Veillard family, while he was in France, and, when he left that country, Le Veillard was not content to accompany him simply to the seacoast, but was his companion as far as Southampton. To him, Abel James, Benjamin Vaughan and the Shipleys we are beholden for the fact that the _Autobiography_ was brought down to the year 1757; there to stop like the unfinished tower which tantalized the world with a haunting sense of its rare worth and incompleteness. Like a faithful, good wife, who avails herself of her intimacy with her husband to bring the continuous pressure of her influence to bear upon him for the purpose of arousing him to a proper sense of his duty, Le Veillard spared neither entreaty nor reproach to secure additions to the precious sibylline leaves of the _Autobiography_. "You blame me for writing three pamphlets and neglecting to write the little history," Franklin complained. "You should consider they were written at sea, out of my own head; the other could not so well be written there for want of the doc.u.ments that could only be had here." After this bit of self-defense, Franklin goes on to describe his physical condition. He realized that the stone in his bladder had grown heavier, he said, but on the whole it did not give him more pain than when he was at Pa.s.sy, and, except in standing, walking or making water, he was very little incommoded by it. Sitting or lying in bed, he was generally quite easy, G.o.d be thanked, and, as he lived temperately, drank no wine, and used daily the exercise of the dumb-bell, he flattered himself that the stone was kept from augmenting so much as it might otherwise do, and that he might still continue to find it tolerable. "People who live long," the unconquerable devotee of human existence declared, "who will drink of the cup of life to the very bottom, must expect to meet with some of the usual dregs."

The view taken by Franklin in this letter of his physical condition was entirely too cheerful to work any alteration in the resolution of Le Veillard that the _Autobiography_ should be completed, if the unremitting appeal of an old friend could prevail. In a subsequent letter, Franklin tells him that in Philadelphia his time was so cut to pieces by friends and strangers that he had sometimes envied the prisoners in the Bastile. His three years of service as President, however, would expire in the succeeding October, and he had formed the idea of retiring then to Temple's farm at Rancocas, where he would be free from the interruption of visits, and could complete the work for Le Veillard's satisfaction. In the meantime, in view of the little remnant of life left to him, the accidents that might happen before October, and Le Veillard's earnest desire, he had resolved to proceed with the _Autobiography_ the very next day, and to go on with it daily until finished. This, if his health permitted, might be in the course of the ensuing summer.

In a still later letter, Franklin declared that Le Veillard was a hard taskmaster to his friend. "You insist," he said, "on his writing _his life_, already a long work, and at the same time would have him continually employed in augmenting the subject, while the time shortens in which the work is to be executed." Some months later, he is able to send to Le Veillard the joyful intelligence that he had recently made great progress in the work that his friend so urgently demanded, and that he had come as far as his fiftieth year. Indeed, he even stated that he expected to have the work finished in about two months, if illness, or some unforeseen interruption, did not prevent. This expectation was not realized, and the reason for it is stated in painful terms in a subsequent letter from Franklin to Le Veillard.

I have a long time [he said] been afflicted with almost constant and grevious Pain, to combat which I have been obliged to have recourse to Opium, which indeed has afforded me some Ease from time to time, but then it has taken away my Appet.i.te and so impeded my Digestion that I am become totally emaciated, and little remains of me but a Skeleton covered with a Skin. In this Situation I have not been able to continue my Memoirs, and now I suppose I shall never finish them. Benjamin has made a Copy of what is done, for you, which shall be sent by the first safe Opportunity.

The copy was subsequently sent to Le Veillard, and, after the death of Franklin, was given by him to William Temple Franklin, to whom Franklin bequeathed most of his papers, in exchange for the original ma.n.u.script of the _Autobiography_. The motive for the exchange was doubtless the desire of Temple to secure the most legible "copy" that he could find for the printer of his edition of his grandfather's works. The original ma.n.u.script finally became the property by purchase of the late John Bigelow. There is reason to believe that, even after the receipt of the copy of the _Autobiography_, Le Veillard still cherished the hope that the work might be brought down to a later date. Writing to Le Veillard only a few days before Franklin's death, Jefferson said:

I wish I could add to your happiness by giving you a favourable account of the good old Doctor. I found him in bed where he remains almost constantly. He had been clear of pain for some days and was chearful and in good spirits. He listened with a glow of interest to the details of your revolution and of his friends which I gave him. He is much emaciated. I pressed him to continue the narration of his life and perhaps he will.

That Le Veillard had a lively mind we may well infer from an amusing paragraph in one of his letters to Franklin in which he pictures the jealousy with which Madame Helvetius and Madame Brillon regarded each other after the departure of Franklin from France.

You had two good friends here [he said] who might have lived harmoniously enough with each other, because they almost never saw each other, and you a.s.sured each of them privately that it was she that you loved the best; but do you venture to write to one and keep silent to the other? The first does not fail to brag and show her letter everywhere; what do you wish to become of the other? Two women draw their knives, their friends take sides, the war becomes general, now see what you have done. You set fire with a bit of paper to one half of the world, you who have so effectively aided in pacifying the other half!

It was a singularly unhappy prophecy that Franklin, after his return to Philadelphia, made to this friend whose lips were so soon to be dyed with the red wine of the guillotine. "When this fermentation is over," he wrote to him with regard to the popular tumults in which France was then involved, "and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and good, and cheer the hearts of those who drink it."

A bright letter from the daughter of Le Veillard merits a pa.s.sing word. In reply to the statement of Franklin that she did not embrace him with a good grace, she says:

You know doubtless a great number of things; you have travelled much; you know men, but you have never penetrated the head of a French girl. Well! I will tell you their secret: When you wish to embrace one and she says that it does not pain her, that means that it gives her pleasure.

Very dear, too, to Franklin, was Dr. Jan Ingenhousz, the eminent scientist and physician to Maria Theresa. Many years after Franklin made his acquaintance, he received from Franklin the a.s.surance that he had always loved him ever since he knew him, with uninterrupted affection, and he himself in a previous letter to Franklin styled him in his imperfect English "the most respectful" of all his friends. Only a few of the numerous letters that Franklin must have written to this friend are known to be in existence, and these are not particularly interesting from a social point of view. In one respect, however, they strikingly evince the kindness of heart which made Franklin so lovable. As was true of many other Europeans of his time, Ingenhousz incurred considerable pecuniary loss in American business ventures, and, like King David, who in his haste called all men liars, he was disposed at one time to call all Americans knaves.

One of his American debtors, as we have already stated, was Samuel Wharton, of Philadelphia.

I know we should be happy together [wrote Franklin to Ingenhousz when the writer was about to return to America], and therefore repeat my Proposition that you should ask Leave of the Emperor to let you come and live with me during the little Remainder of Life that is left me. I am confident his Goodness would grant your Request. You will be at no expence while with me in America; you will recover your Debt from Wharton, and you will make me happy.

And the letter concludes with the request that Ingenhousz, who shared his enthusiasm for electrical experiments, would let him know soon whether he would make him happy by accepting his invitation. "I have Instruments," he declared, in terms that remind us of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, when they were planning their future military diversions together, "if the Enemy did not destroy them all, and we will make Plenty of Experiments together."

Such were the more conspicuous of the friendships which cl.u.s.tered so thickly about the life of Franklin.[41] When we remember that all these men and women have with him said "good-night" to his Landlord of Life and Time, and gone off to their still chambers, we experience a feeling something like that of Xerxes when he gazed upon his vast army and reflected that not a man in it might return from Greece. The thought that there might never again be any movement in those cheerless rooms, nor any glimmer of recurring day was well calculated to make one, who loved his friends as Franklin did, exclaim, "I too with your Poet trust in G.o.d." The wide sweep of his sympathies and charities, the open prospect ever maintained by his mind, are in nothing made clearer to us than in the extent and variety of his friendships. They were sufficiently elastic, as we have seen, to include many diverse communities, and such extremes as Joseph Watson and James Ralph, George Whitefield and Lord le Despencer, John Jay and General Charles Lee, Polly and Madame Brillon. The natural, instinctive side of his character is brought to our attention very plainly in a letter from him to David Hartley, which reveals in an engaging manner the profound effect worked upon his imagination by a poor peasant, but _veritable philosophe_, who had walked all the way to Paris from one of the French provinces for the purpose of communicating a purely benevolent project to the world. But, at the same time, he never found any difficulty in accommodating himself to aberrant or artificial types of character, or to alien usages, customs and modes of thought. He belonged to the _genus h.o.m.o_ not to the species _h.o.m.o America.n.u.s_ or _Britannicus_. Like the politic and much-experienced Ulysses of Tennyson, familiar with

"Cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments,"

he could say,

"I am a part of all that I have met."

Wherever he went into the world, he realized his own aspiration that the time might come when a philosopher could set his foot on any part of the earth, and say, "This is my Country." Wherever he happened to be, he was too exempt from local bias, thought thoughts, cherished feelings, and spoke a language too universal not to make a strong appeal to good will and friendship.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] In a letter to Count de Moustiers, dated Philadelphia, Feb. 10, 1788, Franklin termed Louis XVI. and France "the best of Kings & the most beloved of Nations."

[39] Franklin was too old when he entered upon the French mission to acquire a real mastery of the French language. On one occasion, when at the theatre with Madame de Boufflers, from whom he took his cue in helping to swell the plaudits of the evening, he was chagrined to find that his most vigorous applause had been bestowed on flattering allusions to himself.

[40] No humanitarian levels were too high for the aspirations of Franklin, but he always took care, to use one of the sayings that he conceived or borrowed, not to ride before the horse's head. There is just a suspicion of unconscious sarcasm in a letter from him to Dupont in which he expresses the wish that the Physiocratic philosophy may grow and increase till it becomes the governing philosophy of the human species, "as it must be that of superior beings in better worlds."

[41] Franklin had many intimate friends besides those mentioned in our text. In two letters to Samuel Rhoads he refers to his "dear old Friend Mrs. Paschal." In a letter to Thomas Mifflin, congratulating him upon his election as President of Congress, he speaks of their "ancient friendship."

William Hunter he addresses in 1786 as "my dear old friend." In a letter to him in 1782, Thomas Pownall, the former Colonial Governor, says: "Permett me to say how much I have been your old invariable friend of four or five and twenty years standing." Jean Holker and his wife, of Rouen, were "dear friends" of his, and he was on terms of intimacy with John Joseph Monthieu, a Paris merchant, and Turgot, the French statesman. He writes to Miss Alexander from Pa.s.sy that he has been to pay his respects to Madame La Marck, "not merely," he says, "because it was a Compliment due to her, but because I love her; which induces me to excuse her not letting me in." One of Franklin's friends, Dr. Edward Bancroft, a native of Ma.s.sachusetts, who kept one foot in London and one foot in Paris during the Revolution, for the purpose, as was supposed by those of our envoys who were on good terms with him, of collecting, and imparting to our mission, information about the plans of the British Ministry, has come to occupy an equivocal position in the judgment of history. George Bancroft, the American historian, has set him down as "a double spy," and the view of Bancroft has been followed by others, including Henri Doniol, in his work on the partic.i.p.ation of France in the establishment of the United States. But it would seem difficult for anyone to take this view after reading the acute and vigorous discussion of the subject by Dr. Francis Wharton in the _Diplomatic Correspondence of the Revolution_. In a letter to David Hartley of Feb. 22, 1779, Franklin p.r.o.nounced Bancroft a "Gentleman of Character and Honour."