Volume I Part 27 (2/2)

Nor did the separation worked by the Atlantic produce any change in these feelings. In the letters written by Franklin to Madame Helvetius, and the members of her circle, after his return to Philadelphia, there is the same spirit of affection for her and for them, as well as a wistful retrospect of his chats with her on her thousand sofas, his walks with her in her garden, and the repasts at her table, always seasoned by sound sense, sprightliness and friends.h.i.+p. One of his commissions seems to have been to obtain a cardinal red bird for the ”good dame,” as he calls her in a letter to the Abbe Morellet from Philadelphia. ”The good Dame, whom we all love, and whose Memory I shall love and honour as long as I have any Existence,”

were his words. But the commission was difficult of execution. The Virginia cardinal, he wrote to the Abbe, was a tender bird that stood the sea but poorly. Several sent out to France for their dame by Mr. Alexander, in his tobacco s.h.i.+ps, had never arrived, he understood, and, ”unless a Friend was going in the s.h.i.+p who would take more than common Care of them,” he supposed, ”one might send an hundred without landing one alive.”

They would be very happy, I know [he said], if they were once under her Protection; but they cannot come to her, and she will not come to them. She may remember the Offer I made her of 1,000 Acres of Woodland, out of which she might cut a great Garden and have 1,000 Aviaries if she pleased. I have a large Tract on the Ohio where Cardinals are plenty. If I had been a Cardinal myself perhaps I might have prevail'd with her.

In his efforts to transport the Cardinal, Franklin even enlisted the services of Mr. Paradise, who, if contemporary gossip is reliable, might well have pleaded the preoccupation imposed upon him of protecting himself from the beak of his own termagant wife. Madame Helvetius, however, was not so eager for a cardinal as not to be willing to wait until one could be brought over by a proper escort. ”I am in no hurry at all,” she wrote to Franklin; ”I will wait; for I am not willing to be the death of these pretty creatures. I will wait.” In this same letter, there is an amusing mixture of tenderness and banter. Declining health and advancing years, she said, would but enable them the sooner to meet again as well as to meet again those whom they had loved, she a husband and he a wife; ”but I believe,” she wipes the moisture from her eyes long enough to say, ”that you who have been a rogue (_coquin_) will be restored to more than one.”

From what we have said, it is plain enough that the friends.h.i.+p felt by Madame Helvetius for the Abbes Morellet and de la Roche was shared by Franklin. When he touched at Southampton, after leaving Havre, on his return to America, he wafted another fond farewell to Madame Helvetius; ”I will always love you,” he said, ”think of me sometimes, and write sometimes to your B. F.” This letter, too, contained the usual waggish reference to the Abbes. ”Adieu, my very, very, very dear amie. Wish us a good voyage, and tell the good Abbes to pray for us, since that is their profession.”

The _Very Humble Pet.i.tion to Madame Helvetius from her Cats_ was long ascribed to Franklin, but it was really written by the Abbe Morellet. After reading it, Franklin wrote to the Abbe that the rapidity, with which the good lady's eighteen cats were increasing, would, in time, make their cause insupportable, and that their friends should, therefore, advise them to submit voluntarily either to transportation or castration. How deeply the Abbe Morellet was attached to Franklin is feelingly revealed in the letters which he wrote to him after the latter had arrived safely in America; to say nothing of the Abbe's Memoirs.

May your days [he wrote in one of these letters] be prolonged and be free from pain; may your friends long taste the sweetness and the charm of your society, and may those whom the seas have separated from you be still happy in the thought that the end of your career will be, as our good La Fontaine says, ”the evening of a fine day.”

Then, after some political reflections, suggested by the liberal inst.i.tutions of America, the Abbe indulges in a series of gay comments on the habit that their Lady of Auteuil had, in her excessive love of coffee, of robbing him of his share of the cream, on the vicious bulldog brought over by Temple to France from England and on the host of cats, that had multiplied in the woodhouse and woodyard at Auteuil, under the patronage of their mistress, and did nothing but keep their paws in their furred gowns, and warm themselves in the sun. Friends of liberty, these cats, the Abbe said, were entirely out of place under the governments of Europe. Nothing could be more suitable than to load a small vessel with them and s.h.i.+p them to America. Another letter from the Abbe concluded with these heartfelt words:

I shall never forget the happiness I have enjoyed in knowing you, and seeing you intimately. I write to you from Auteuil, seated in your arm-chair, on which I have engraved, _Benjamin Franklin hic sedebat_, and having by my side the little bureau, which you bequeathed to me at parting, with a drawer full of nails to gratify the love of nailing and hammering, which I possess in common with you. But believe me, I have no need of all these helps to cherish your endeared _remembrance_, and to love you,

”Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos reget artus.”

During their jolly intercourse in France, the Abbe Morellet and Franklin touched gla.s.ses in two highly convivial productions. On one of the anniversaries of the birth of Franklin, or of American liberty, the Abbe could not remember which, the Abbe composed a drinking song in honor of Franklin, and among the letters written by Franklin when he was in France was one to the Abbe in which wine is lauded in terms of humorous exaggeration. One of the verses of the Abbe's production refers to the American War, and has been translated in these words by Parton:

”Never did mankind engage In a war with views more sage; They seek freedom with design, To drink plenty of French wine; Such has been The intent of Benjamin.”

The other verses are no better and no worse, and the whole poem is even more inferior in wit to Franklin's letter to the Abbe than the _Very Humble Pet.i.tion to Madame Helvetius from her Cats_, clever though it be, is to Franklin's _Journey to the Elysian Fields_. If we had nothing but these bibulous productions to judge by, we might infer that love of wine, quite as much as love of Madame Helvetius was the tie of connection between the Abbe Morellet and Franklin. Indeed, in the letter to Franklin with respect to the cats, the Abbe was quite as candid about expressing his partiality for one form of spirits as Franklin was in his unblus.h.i.+ng eulogy of wine.

He did not know, he said, what duties his cats, in the unsettled condition of the commercial relations between France and the United States, would be made to pay on arriving at Philadelphia; ”and then,” he continued, ”if my vessel should find nothing to load with among you but grain, it could not touch at our islands to take in sugar, or to bring me back good rum either, which I love much.”

When the Abbe de la Roche made a gift to Franklin of a volume of Helvetius'

poems, Franklin was quick to give him a recompense in the form of a little drinking song which he had composed some forty years before. The plan of this poem is for the chorus, whenever the singer dwells upon any other source of gratification, to insist so vociferously upon friends and a bottle as the highest as to finally, so to speak, drown the singer out.

Thus:

SINGER

”Fair Venus calls; her voice obey, In beauty's arms spend night and day.

The joys of love all joys excel, And loving's certainly doing well.

CHORUS

”Oh! no!

Not so!

For honest souls know, Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.”

In a letter to William Carmichael, enclosing his brilliant little bagatelle, _The Ephemera_, Franklin described Madame Brillon in these terms:

The person to whom it was addressed is Madame Brillon, a lady of most respectable character and pleasing conversation; mistress of an amiable family in this neighbourhood, with which I spend an evening twice in every week. She has, among other elegant accomplishments, that of an excellent musician; and, with her daughters, who sing prettily, and some friends who play, she kindly entertains me and my grand son with little concerts, a cup of tea, and a game of chess. I call this _my Opera_, for I rarely go to the Opera at Paris.

Madame Brillon was the wife of a public functionary much older than herself, who yet, as her own letters to Franklin divulge, did not feel that strict fidelity to her was necessary to soften the difference in their ages.

My father [she wrote on one occasion to Franklin], marriage in this country is made by weight of gold. On one end of the scale is placed the fortune of a boy, on the other that of a girl; when equality is found the affair is ended to the satisfaction of the relatives.

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