Volume I Part 28 (2/2)

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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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.

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