It took Ben more than a month to reach the fishing village of Auray. It took me less than twelve hours. If progress is measured by speed, then, yes, this is progress. My journey was more comfortable than Ben’s and with significantly less drama. I did not suffer from the scurf or boils. British warships did not shadow me. The food, while not gourmet, was edible. The journey fatigued but did not demolish me.
Yet Ben and I shared one harrowing experience: a brush with ageism. For him, it came in the form of whispered misgivings about whether, at age seventy, he was fit for such a challenging assignment. For me, it came while transiting at Frankfurt International Airport. I was on a bus shuttling from terminal to airplane, and the bus was crowded. Standing room only. A young guy, wearing jeans and an attitude, offered me his seat—no, insisted I take his seat. He did so loudly and melodramatically, lest there be any doubt about the size of his vast and potent generosity.
“No thanks,” I said curtly. “I’m good.”
A few seconds later, he offered again, even more dramatically, and I repeated, “I’m good,” though in a tone that conveyed another sentiment: fuck you. So this is how it’s going to be? People offering me their seats. Carrying my bags. Taking pity on me. I won’t have it. Why should I? Ben didn’t.
I came across this story about Ben when he was well into his eighties. A visitor to his Philadelphia home, Manasseh Cutler, asked to see a particular book in Ben’s library. The volume was heavy, and Ben struggled to lift it. Cutler offered to help, the library equivalent of offering your seat. Ben demurred and, recalled Cutler, “with that senile ambition common to old people… insisted on doing it himself, and would permit no person to assist him, merely to show us how much strength he had remaining.” Good for you, Ben. Senile ambition? There’s another word for that: moxie.
I like Auray. I like how the town hugs the harbor like a warm blanket and how it wears its age nonchalantly, like a septuagenarian with nothing to prove. I like the dark and imposing Church of Saint-Sauveur, perched atop a hill, overlooking the old houses and cafés, listing this way or that, and the waterfront that has changed little since Benjamin Franklin and his two grandchildren washed ashore here nearly 250 years ago.
Ben did not share my fondness for Auray—a wretched place, he supposedly called it—and couldn’t leave fast enough. This hasn’t deterred the town from exploiting its moment of Ben. He’s everywhere, as I discover after two minutes. I walk past Franklin Quai and the small plaque marking the spot where a nearly demolished Franklin came ashore. I continue past the giant, colorful mural of Franklin splashed across a wall, past the ice cream parlor featuring a Franklin flavor (lemon with cassis and peach) before arriving at Bar Franklin. I can’t blame the good people of Auray for going full Franklin. Places don’t get to choose their historical cred. They work with what they have.
Dark wood pillars and pale stone blocks support Bar Franklin, barely. It is old and slanting and reminds me of something from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. On this summer day, Bar Franklin is doing a brisk business. The waiter is busy. Ben busy. I get his attention and order a beer and savory crepe. From my vantage on the terrace, I can survey all of Auray: the wooden sailboats bobbing in the small harbor, the black-roofed buildings contrasting nicely with the day’s cottony clouds, the sidewalk booksellers who arrange their offerings in neat, loving rows. The Brittany town doesn’t seem wretched at all. It has a pleasant, vaguely mystical feel, perhaps owing to its Celtic influence.
Maybe Ben’s grim assessment of Auray stemmed from his exhaustion (he could barely stand), or maybe it was here where the immensity of his mission hit him. George Washington’s Continental Army was in desperate need of ammunition, supplies, engineers, warships, and even uniforms. All of this cost money, and the young United States had virtually none. It had no credit either. French support wasn’t optional. The Americans couldn’t win the war without it.
Convincing the French to join the American cause would not be easy. France had fought four colonial wars with Britain in the past century and Louis XVI was reluctant to get entangled in a fifth, especially one whose stated goal was the ouster of a fellow monarch. French officials did not want to provoke their old rival, not yet, so they were unwilling to be seen in public with Franklin. Ben’s was not an impossible mission, but it was close.
With each passing year, Ben grew more, not less, bold. He took chances, tilted at a few windmills. Too many people play it safe as they grow older. They no longer tackle the impossible or indulge in the frivolous. Why? If anything, you’d think old age is the perfect time to experiment, take up scuba diving and windmill tilting. What do you have to lose? As I walk along Auray’s pleasant waterfront, gazing at the wooden boats and licking a scoop of Franklin, I vow to age boldly and recklessly. I will take chances, even dangerous ones. And I will stand, not sit, on buses—no matter what some smug punk thinks.
Ben was eager to get to Paris and dive into his mission. There was a hitch, though. His luggage was still aboard the Reprisal, floundering offshore. I’m surprised how often the problem of lost luggage appears in Franklin’s writing. I always thought of it as a problem born of the twentieth century, the enfant terrible of the jet age, but apparently not. Ben spent a lot of time searching for wayward luggage, either his own or that of fellow Americans abroad.
Another problem that’s not as new as I thought: disinformation. Even before Ben arrived in France, the British embassy was busy spreading rumors about him and the American war effort. Most were unfounded. One of the first letters he wrote from French soil was to an old friend, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, warning him not to believe everything he heard. “I see you have had some bad news about our business in America; but they are not true.”
Actually, in this case, they were. The war was going poorly for the Americans. The redcoats had pushed George Washington’s ragtag army out of Long Island and into New Jersey, in full retreat. It wasn’t looking good. Ben knew he had to spin the war news if he had any hope of gaining French support.
Ben and his grandsons soon departed Auray for nearby Nantes. It was another uncomfortable and dangerous journey. The carriage was “miserable,” the horses tired, and the road rife with bandits. The entourage kept a low profile, and for reasons beyond safety. Ben’s mission demanded secrecy so as not to embarrass the French government or, should they reject American overtures, “subject ourselves to the hazard of a disgraceful refusal.”
Ben tried not to call attention to himself but soon realized that was about as likely as a lightning rod not calling attention to lightning. In Nantes, word leaked that the famous American was in town, and Ben was flooded with invitations to balls and other social events. “I am made extremely welcome here,” he wrote to the Committee of Secret Correspondence in a massive understatement. “America has many friends.” So did Ben. When he arrived in Paris just before Christmas Eve 1776, a few hundred of those friends greeted him. Cheering crowds lined Rue de l’Université.
How to explain Benjamin Franklin’s enormous, borderline messianic fame in France? Was it genetic perhaps? “Some think we are of a French extract, which was formerly called Franks,” Ben’s father once speculated. Or was it his electrical experiments, which resonated in France, the epicenter of the Enlightenment, more than anywhere else? Was it his cheeky Poor Richard persona, dubbed Bon Homme Richard in France?
Partly by design, partly by happenstance, Franklin fulfilled a French wish for a certain archetype: the wise backwoodsman philosopher. Ben embodied Rousseau’s theory of the innate goodness of primitive man, the “noble savage,” but spiced with Voltaire’s urbane wit. An irresistible combination.
Chameleon Ben dressed the part. Gone were the gentleman’s suits of London. Instead, he donned a plain brown jacket, white stockings and shirt, and a marten fur cap he had acquired during the Great Canadian Fiasco. And most shocking of all, no wig. Writing to his friend Emma Thompson, he describes his new look: “Figure me in your mind as jolly as formerly, and as strong and hearty, only a few years older, very plainly dress’d, wearing my thin grey straight hair, that peeps out under my only coiffure, a fine fur cap, which comes down my forehead almost to my spectacles. Think how this must appear among the powder’d heads of Paris.” People mistook him for a simple Quaker. (He was not.) Franklin didn’t lie about his identity. He simply didn’t correct people’s misimpressions.
Ben stayed at hotels for a few months before finding accommodations befitting his stature and mission, an elegant and tranquil residence that would serve not only as his home for the next eight years but also as the de facto US embassy. Another first.
I am having breakfast at the Aero Café, a name I’m sure Ben would like. He was an early aviation enthusiast. Having witnessed a balloon ascension in Paris, he predicted not only air travel but aerial warfare as well.
I am in Passy. A separate village in Ben’s time, today it’s a posh enclave in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Passy is the kind of neighborhood where no one walks. They stroll, so I do too.
I stroll past the impromptu book stalls where each volume is displayed with great care and—let’s call it what it is—love. Printer Ben no doubt appreciated the French passion for books. I stroll past pricey boutiques and nail salons. I stroll past a scrum of utility workers, leather-apron men, wrestling with a tangle of cables. These are Ben’s people, not mine. My idea of manual labor is plugging in my laptop. I stroll past well-coiffed Parisians and their equally well-coiffed dogs. I stroll to the Marché de Passy, a covered market featuring an array of gout-inducing food: sides of beef, cuts of veal, wheels of cheese the size of my head. No wonder Ben had trouble resisting.
I notice a profusion of opticians in Passy. Very Ben, I think, given his invention of bifocals. A sign! Or is it my rational mind tricking me into seeing what I want to see? I note that possibility and continue my stroll. Soon I come upon Maison Balzac, the erstwhile home of the writer Honoré de Balzac that is now a small museum. The two great men didn’t know each other. Balzac was born nearly a decade after Franklin died, but he was a thoroughgoing Franklinista. He once remarked that Franklin had invented the lightning rod, the hoax, and the republic.
I stroll down Rue Franklin and then a sloping street, Rue Raynouard. I look to my left, and there’s the Eiffel Tower, materializing out of nothingness, or so it seems. Ben never saw the Parisian landmark, which wasn’t built for more than a century after his stay in France. He did see the Seine River, of course, a constant and reassuring presence. The world may be going to hell, but there was the trusty Seine, flowing serenely through the heart of Paris and neighboring Passy.
In another block or two, at last I spot it: a small plaque marking the spot where the Hôtel de Valentinois once stood. The sign references the building’s sybaritic heritage. The previous owner, the Countess of Valentinois, hosted gallant parties for her “libertine friends because ‘in Passy one enjoys one’s self.’ ” Lest there be any doubt, sex parties were once held at the Hôtel de Valentinois, but this was long before Ben chose it as his new residence and the makeshift US embassy.
The mansion was ideally situated—close to Paris but far enough away to give Ben some breathing space, and on the road to Versailles, the seat of government. It overlooked vineyards sloping toward the Seine. It had a wine cellar. (Ben’s collection would grow to more than 1,200 bottles.) Even more than his beloved Number Seven Craven Street, Ben adored the Hôtel de Valentinois, a sentiment he relayed to his sister Jane in early 1777.
I live in a fine airy house upon a hill, which has a large garden with fine walks in it, about ½ an hours drive from the city of Paris. I walk a little every day in the garden, have a good appetite and sleep well. I have got into a good neighbourhood, of very agreeable people who appear very fond of me; at least they are pleasingly civil: so that upon the whole I live as comfortably as a man can well do so far from his home and his family.
The Hôtel de Valentinois, like the Craven Street house, was more than a residence. It was a refuge, an oasis, his safe space (though it was not safe from British spies, as I soon learned). Ben installed a lightning rod on the roof and a printing press in the basement.
The new owner of the mansion, Ben’s landlord, was a wealthy arms dealer named Jacques Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont. He was sympathetic to the American cause and refused to accept rent from Franklin. As Ben moved in, Chaumont was already supplying American forces with much-needed gunpowder.
Ben loved his little village. He delighted in the fresh spring water, filtered through sand, and far healthier than anything in London. Passy checked off many of Ben’s Thirteen Virtues, and a few of his vices too. He marveled at the clean (virtue number ten) streets fit for walking, and the tranquil gardens (virtue number eleven) and the way they struck a balance, an order, between business and pleasure (virtue number three). If the French fell short when it came to temperance (virtue number one) and chastity (virtue number twelve), Ben cut them some slack, just like he did for himself.
Franklin maintained a low profile, but he was no recluse. He was a regular at the salons, especially those hosted by one Madame Helvetius, widow of a renowned philosopher and an intellectual force in her own right. Her cat-filled house in Auteuil, a short carriage ride from Passy, was called the Nine Sisters, after the Nine Muses, and the intellectuals and philosophes who gathered there were known as l’Academie d’Auteuil. Ben often played chess there late into the night, as long as the candles held out. He occasionally cheated, some said, and would throw his opponent off balance by drumming his fingers on the table.
Another favorite companion of Franklin was Madame Brillon. She was a talented harpsichordist and composer who played and sang for Ben, accompanied by her two daughters. “My opera,” Ben called it. It was Madame Brillon who dubbed Ben mon cher papa, a term of endearment adopted by most of his close friends in Paris, including the men. By this point, everyone knew he was the US representative, which only enlarged his fame.
It’s time to address the elephant in the salon: Ben Franklin and the ladies of France. Was he, as fellow American Arthur Lee alleged, “a wicked old man” who had converted the American mission into “a corrupt hotbed of vice”? No. First, Ben was not unfaithful to his wife, Deborah. She had died two years before he landed in Auray. Also, Franklin was in his seventies and bedeviled by kidney stones, gout, and other ailments. Some days, he could barely get out of his own bed, let alone hop into others. “There is no shred of evidence” Ben actually had affairs with French women, conclude two historians who wrote the definitive account of Franklin’s private life.
For fleshly and fluid Ben, “that hard-to-be-govern’d passion of youth” had subsided. Good riddance, he said, before indulging his latest diversion: flirtation for its own sake. In France, he elevated it to an art form. He flirted in the salons and he flirted in the music chambers. He flirted on the rivers and he flirted in the gardens. He flirted in the daytime and he flirted at night. Kissing cheeks or lips was not fashionable at the time. Not to worry, Ben wrote to a friend. “The French ladies have however 1000 other ways of rendering themselves agreeable; by their various attentions and civilities, & their sensible conversation.” The brain remained Ben’s favorite organ.
At least one Franklin scholar, Lorraine Pangle, believes Ben’s flirtations were an extension of the skill set that enabled him to charm the French government and help win the Revolutionary War. “He had an instinctive knowledge of how to reach people, disarm them, draw them out, and win them over, and it is perhaps inevitable that a man with such talents would be incorrigibly flirtatious.”
Ben was popular with everyone, not just women. He was constantly buttonholed by “projectors, speculators, and adventurers of all descriptions,” including writers, philosophers, runaway teens, would-be immigrants to America, country priests, and, one day, an ex-convict with a quixotic “plan for perpetual peace.” Pierre-André Gargaz arrived at Franklin’s doorstep dirty and disheveled, having walked from a village in the south of France. Most diplomats, most people, would have sent Gargaz packing, but not Ben. He welcomed him and read his possibly visionary, possibly crackpot plan for world peace. He found it contained “some very sensible remarks”—Gargaz is the first person to use the term “United Nations”—and printed several copies at his own expense. Ben at his most possibilian.
Negotiating with the French was his most important task, but it was not his only one. He helped Americans track down lost luggage, disposed of booty snagged by privateers, and hosted weekly dinners for fellow Americans in Paris.
Let’s pause for a moment and survey Ben’s situation. He is nearly seventy-one years old and, once again, beginning life anew. Not only did he face a nearly impossible mission; he had to adapt to a new culture, language, and political scene. And he did. Whether it was a matter of disposition or worldview or some ineffable chemistry, Ben and his new home proved remarkably compatible. The French loved Ben, and he loved the French. France, he said, is “a most amiable nation” and without a “national vice.” That wasn’t exactly true. France did have a national vice—several—but they meshed perfectly with Ben’s: his love of laughter and music and wine and, yes, women. Perhaps never before have a person and a place so wholly complemented each other as Ben Franklin and the nation of France.
At first, the French government was reluctant to bet big on the Americans. They doled out just enough to stay in the game: one million livres ($200,000) funneled through a dummy company set up by the playwright Pierre Beaumarchais, author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. And so it went for more than a year. The French dispensed a trickle of aid, enough to placate the Americans but not so much as to infuriate the British.
All that changed on the morning of December 4, 1777. Word reached France of a major American victory in Saratoga. Some eight thousand British troops led by General John Burgoyne surrendered to George Washington’s Continental Army. The Americans now looked like a much better bet. Franklin entered talks with the French foreign minister, Comte de Vergennes, about a possible alliance. Firmly pro-American, Vergennes was a careful and professional diplomat and, thankfully for Ben, a good judge of character.
Franklin succeeded in France, spectacularly so. In a few short years, he negotiated two treaties, managed to extract more than 48 million livres ($1.4 billion today) in loans and gifts, not to mention direct military aid in the form of French warships and soldiers. America would not have won the war without the Old Conjurer’s diplomatic magic. How did a seventy-something overweight man who hated begging for money and detested conflict of any kind immerse himself in a doozy of one—a conflict within a conflict, a Matryoshka doll of enmity—and emerge not only victorious but with his trademark sanity intact? If anything, Franklin grew more sane during his time in France. Serene is the word many French friends used to describe him.
I could use some of that Franklinian serenity. Early one morning in Passy, I wake to find my right leg red and swollen. Worried, I consult Dr. Google, who is even less of a real doctor than Ben or me. The not-so-good Dr. Google informs me it might be deep vein thrombosis, which might lead to a blood clot, which might be fatal. Or it could be a touch of skin irritation.
I’m not taking any chances. I call my real doctor back home, the time difference be damned. He sounds annoyed for some reason but calms me and suggests I drop by a local pharmacy for an antibacterial cream.
It turns out it was not deep vein thrombosis. It was not even a skin infection. It was—what is the proper medical terminology?—nothing. Ben didn’t suffer from such chronic hypochondria and he had a lot more to be hypochondriacal about. What did he know that I don’t?
Being a non-French speaker in France is a lot like being old. The world is familiar yet not, as if viewed through a funhouse mirror. You pick up dribs and drabs, linguistic scraps, but little more. You understand just enough to confuse you. You occupy a netherworld, simultaneously present and absent. Even the most innocuous encounters make you sweat. Most people ignore you. A few are nice, but you suspect they’re motivated by pity, not kindness. You live in constant fear that something will be asked of you that you cannot do, like convey the correct time or give directions. When you speak, people strain to understand. A few look physically pained by the sounds you emit. Others offer to help, to speak your language, but you refuse such entreaties, clinging to your last scraps of pride the way Ben clung to that heavy book in his library.
Ben learned French the way he did everything else: socially, with a playful attitude and a willingness to make mistakes. His spoken French wasn’t fluent, but it was more than adequate. This gift irked John Adams (also in France at the time) who dutifully spent hours—days!—hunched over grammar textbooks and grim tomes such as Bossuet’s Funeral Orations, all the while grumbling about Franklin’s ungrammatical French and the undeserved praise it received.
In large gatherings, Ben had trouble following the conversation, so he remained silent (virtue number two). People mistook his reticence for wisdom. Women, in particular, talked to him for hours on end “without noticing that he understood little because of his limited command of our language,” observed his friend Abbé Lefebvre de la Roche.
I reach the sad conclusion that at my age (older but not old), I will never learn to speak French, not even poorly. I will never climb Mount Everest or star in a Broadway play or even an off-off-Broadway one. I will never spelunk. A stanza from a poem by Donald Justice comes to mind: Men at forty/Learn to close softly/The doors to rooms they will not be/Coming back to. I am well past forty, and the doors are slamming shut so rapidly I am beginning to feel trapped.
Doors closed for Ben too. The swimming door (though it never shut completely), the sex door, and eventually even the walking door. Yet he never succumbed to despair and continued to derive joy from the doors that remained open, or at least ajar. Even closed doors have their advantages. They enable you to focus on the ones that remain open, the ones that truly matter, like the “doors of wisdom,” which, Ben noted, never close.
Ben remained active but did not cling to youth. He did not mimic the young or envy them. He fully accepted his age, celebrated it even. He owed his vigor, I think, to the fact that his life wasn’t only busy; it was meaningful. In the American Revolution, Ben found the purpose—the home—he had been looking for. And at age seventy! Maybe, just maybe, I still have time.
I reach into my rucksack and retrieve a book. It contains a collection of portraits of Ben. My favorite was rendered by a French artist named Anne-Rosalie Bocquet Filleul, a neighbor of Franklin in Passy and a friend. Her painting is different from the stiff and lifeless portraits popular at the time. Franklin is dressed casually in a white open-neck shirt and a green, fur-lined gown. He is wigless, his thinning light brown hair spilling nearly to his shoulders. His left arm rests on his lap while his right hovers above a map and a pair of spectacles (bifocals perhaps) sitting on a table. His palm is open and gesturing generously, as if conceding a point mid-conversation. His lips are turned slightly upward in just a hint of a smile. It is his eyes that I find most arresting. They are at once self-assured and vulnerable. He looks like a man you want to know.
Ben was seventy-two when he sat for the portrait, yet he does not look old. He doesn’t look young either. He exudes a quiet vitality, a rawness and—I’ll just say it—lustfulness I’ve never associated with a septuagenarian. The painting fills me with admiration, and hope.
I return to the Great French Enigma. How did Ben pull off the ultimate diplomatic feat? I scour historical records: treaties, financial documents, portraits, contemporary accounts and letters, lots of letters. I trace Ben’s footsteps, from the streets of Passy to the tables of Café Procope (Paris’s oldest café and one of Ben’s favorites) and the banks of the Seine, and eventually unearth the answer—or answers.
Franklin’s mission to France was his masterpiece, his White Album. Success demanded not one tool but the entire kit. It was all Bens on deck. Angry Ben was there, as were Social Ben and Busy Ben and Funny Ben, and the others. A few new Bens showed up too.
Franklin needed a method for everything. It was how he converted his sizable but scattered energy into productive, useful ends. He had his Thirteen Virtues for leading a good life, and what he called Articles of Belief for leading a spiritual one. He also had a method for diplomacy, for winning people over. He never named it explicitly, but I do. I don’t think Ben would object. He was always open to new ideas, new formulations.
Ben had little with which to work. There was no US embassy or staff awaiting his arrival. He had to invent the American Foreign Service from scratch, and in secrecy. Never before or since has a US diplomat been so alone, and so needed. Today, the State Department keeps its ambassadors, especially those serving in sensitive posts, on a short leash. Not in Franklin’s day. It took three months to pose a question to Congress and receive a reply. Franklin was very much on his own. This proved to be more blessing than curse. It gave him the time and space to do what he did best: improvise.
Since he had no staff, he appointed his grandson Temple, William’s son, as his private secretary. People dubbed him “Franklinet” because of the physical resemblance and the fact that the two were inseparable. Temple, Ben said, “is my right hand.”
Ben improvised in other ways. The United States had no national emblem yet, so Ben and his fellow commissioners sent official documents with Franklin’s personal seal, his adopted coat of arms. The embassy had no printing press, so Ben set up one, churning out US passports, legal documents, and invitations to embassy receptions. He also printed his bagatelles and gave them to friends. Ben compensated for his lack of social standing by tapping into several French social networks, like the scientific community and the Freemasons.
He had something else working in his favor, something intangible but potent: fame. To say the French loved Ben Franklin is like saying Americans love big portions. A massive understatement. France was a nation of panting Franklinistas. When Ben attended sessions of the French parliament, applause greeted him. Every French painter and sculptor wanted Ben to sit for them, and he usually obliged. Soon his image was everywhere. As he told his sister Jane, “My face is now almost as well known as that of the moon.”
This fame delighted Franklin but irked his fellow American diplomats. John Adams moaned about “a scene of continual dissipation” that permeated Franklin’s daily routine, the parade of acolytes who “come to have the honour to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his simplicity, his bald head and scattering strait hairs.” Abigail Adams, on a visit to France, was also shocked. She attended a dinner with Franklin and his good friend Madame Helvetius, whom she describes as “once a handsome woman” (ouch!) with “a careless jaunty air.”
Then, reports Abigail Adams, something truly scandalous transpired. “When we went into the room to dine she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. Madame Helvetius carried on the chief of the conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hand into the doctor’s and sometimes spreading her arms on the backs of both the gentlemen’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly on the doctor’s neck.” The topper: “After dinner, she threw herself upon a settee where she showed more than her feet.” Quelle horreur!
The Adamses failed to grasp that Ben’s social and professional lives were of a piece. He was meeting the French on their own terms. What his prudish colleagues saw as indulgence and depravity, Ben saw as gentle persuasion.
John Adams worried aloud that all this fame had gone to Franklin’s bald head and he was too much under the French influence. Thomas Jefferson replied, coolly, that the good doctor had earned the confidence of the French and “it may truly be said, that they were more under his influence, than he under theirs.”
Fame is a powerful force. It can be used for good or ill. Franklin used it for good.
Arthur Lee and the other American commissioners saw the French government as a giant cash dispenser. Franklin did not. He saw the world through their eyes, understood their desires and fears. He didn’t ask for money when it suited the Americans. He timed his requests to the workings of the French budgetary system. Franklin, observed one historian, “had the common sense not to annoy the French.”
Ben’s empathy made him a perceptive diplomat and an extremely useful one. Vergennes, the French foreign minister, preferred dealing with Franklin in confidence and one-on-one. He liked Franklin and considered him wise and collaborative, even if a bit old and odd. He found John Jay vain and ill-humored. As for John Adams, he refused to have anything to do with him. (In 1779, Congress appointed Franklin sole plenipotentiary, de facto ambassador.)
Where did Ben’s empathy come from? His upbringing explains a lot. Unlike many of the founders, Ben was not born into privilege. He was a skilled laborer, a leather-apron man. His profession, printing, deepened his empathy. Printers had to handle writings that expressed a variety of viewpoints. And recall that typeface was arranged upside down and backward. Printers like Ben were accustomed to seeing the world from different perspectives.
Franklin didn’t seek enemies, but they found him. George III called him an “insidious man.” Confronted with such barbs, Ben’s usual strategy was to ignore them. He wasn’t going to fan the flames of enmity by responding to hatred with hatred. Instead, he responded with humor.
Lord Stormont, the British ambassador to France, was a chronic pain in Ben’s ample backside. He schemed to undermine Franklin’s reputation and cast doubts on the prowess of the American army. At one point, rumors circulated that six battalions of the Continental Army had surrendered. Asked if these reports were true, Ben replied, “No, it is only a Stormont.” The gibe stuck, and soon a new word reverberated across French high society: stormonter, “to tell a falsehood.”
Ben made it a point not to alienate those with whom he disagreed. He always kept doors open and bridges unburned. This approach served him well, but sometimes he was too trusting. Consider the case of Edward Bancroft, an amiable friend, fellow member of the Royal Society, and unofficial secretary at the unofficial American embassy. He was also a British spy. For more than eight years, Bancroft slipped into Paris’s Tuileries gardens every Tuesday at 9:30 p.m. and placed a sealed bottle inside a hollow tree, to be retrieved later by a British agent. Classic dead drop. Bancroft betrayed his fellow Americans for the usual reason: money—four hundred pounds a year, to be precise. No one, not even the leery John Adams, suspected him. Historians would not uncover Bancroft’s double dealings until the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Franklin appealed to the French in a number of ways. One was their self-interest. He reminded French officials and business owners of the vast market that awaited them in an independent United States, and he dangled the prospect of a trade treaty that would open American ports to French ships. (He didn’t need to remind the French that an American victory would weaken their longtime rival, Britain; it was understood.)
But he knew self-interest alone was rarely enough to sway people. He made other, more high-minded appeals, best articulated in a letter to his friend Samuel Cooper. “ ’Tis a common observation here, that our cause is the cause of all mankind; and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own.” Aiding the Americans was more than a mercenary move. It was a noble one. It was a case of “moral beauty,” that elevated, ineffable feeling we experience when witnessing an act of pure selflessness. It is, as Ben knew, a powerful motivation. It’s what he had in mind when, years earlier, he extolled “the beauty and usefulness of virtue.” It’s a rare combination today, beauty and utility, but one that defined Franklin’s philosophy, and his life.
There was another dynamic at work, a quirk of human nature today known as the Ben Franklin effect. He stumbled across it in 1736 when serving as clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly. A powerful new member of the assembly, “a gentleman of fortune, and education,” didn’t care for Franklin and threatened to make life miserable for him. What to do? Ben could have kowtowed to this member and attempted to win him over with flattery. He took a different approach.
Having heard that the man owned a rare and valuable book, Ben asked if he could borrow it for a few days. The man agreed, and Ben returned it dutifully with a nice note. “When we next met in the House he spoke to me, (which he had never done before) and with great civility,” Ben recalled. The two became fast friends. Ben’s takeaway: “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
It sounds counterintuitive, even a little loopy, I know. Wouldn’t we favor those who do us favors? Not necessarily. As Franklin discovered and recent studies confirm, the opposite is true. We don’t like people who are nice to us. We like people to whom we are nice. Why? One explanation is cognitive dissonance. It’s difficult to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. It makes us uncomfortable. We resolve this tension by changing our mind. I don’t like Joe, but I am doing a favor for Joe, so maybe I do like him after all. There is a simpler explanation: We like being useful and, by extension, we like those who give us the opportunity to do so.
Despite what his detractors said, Ben was no slacker. He clocked twelve-hour days and hardly took a vacation. He worked hard, but he also worked smart. In his seventies, Ben knew he had to conserve energy. A good swimmer is efficient, never squandering momentum. Franklin sensed when to propel and when to glide, when to apply (subtle) pressure and when to ease up.
I can’t help but think of Franklin’s main electrical discovery: the theory of conservation of charge. Electrical currents, like a flowing river, seek balance, neither a surplus of positive or negative charges. Likewise, Ben saw Britain and France as two counterweights, positive and negative charges seeking equilibrium, whether they knew it or not. Ben was not beyond exploiting this balancing act and playing one side off the other. Before sailing for France, he drafted a dummy peace proposal between the American colonies and Britain. He knew this would worry the French and could be used to pressure them into supporting the Americans. He kept it in his pocket, just in case, but never used it.
Franklin’s fellow American commissioners saw no need to thank the French for their support. They viewed gratitude as a sign of weakness. If anything, the French should thank the Americans for giving them a chance to invest early in this promising start-up called the United States of America. Franklin didn’t see it that way. He thanked the French every chance he had. “Such an expression of gratitude is not only our duty but our interest,” he said. Virtue and utility fused once again.
Franklin’s philosophy of gratitude paid off, both for the young United States, which continued to receive support from France even after the war, and for Ben. To this day, Franklin is revered in France. As for the others, well, let’s just say there is no Rue Adams or Rue Lee.
While in France, Ben wrote a bagatelle titled “The Ephemera.” It’s told from the perspective of a mayfly, or ephémère, which has a life span of only a single day. “I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire,” the fly says. “My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for by the course of nature, tho’ still in health, I cannot expect to live above 7 or 8 minutes longer.”
The fly is bereft. What is the point of doing fly things, like collecting honeydew, if there is no time to enjoy it? The fly’s friends try to console him, reminding him that he will leave a name behind. “But what will fame be to an ephemere who no longer exists?” the fly says, channeling Ben.
It was, I think, this keen awareness of the transience of life that enabled Franklin to weather storms that would have broken anyone else. He knew the stakes were both extremely high and not high at all.
Franklin’s advanced age was not incidental. I don’t think a younger Franklin would have succeeded in France. He was too green, and too arrogant. He cultivated his methods, his habits, over a lifetime, so when it was time to go Full Ben, he knew what to do.
On a cloudy summer day, I wake early. Ben rarely did. He was still industrious (virtue number six) and resolute (virtue number four) but strictly on French time. He knew dinner, not breakfast, was when plans were discussed, ideas aired, deals struck. There was no point in waking early. If anything, it made you suspect in French eyes.
I cross the Seine at Pont de Grenelle, the sky brightening while a light breeze stirs the river below. A not-unpleasant briny odor fills my nostrils while a boat called Yacht de Paris glides by. Ben swam in the Seine—not as often or as fast as he once did, but he swam, and that was something. He would swim alone or sometimes with his grandson Benny, whom he taught how to swim. Passing the torch.
I try to picture Franklin here, wrinkled and flabby, plunging into the river, naked. Did Naked Ben attract curious looks or sneers of disapproval? I doubt it. What the British found shocking, the French found perfectly normal and hardly worthy of comment. They glossed over Franklin the (alleged) fornicator and focused on Franklin the scientist, Franklin the philosopher, and Franklin the man—in all his naked glory.
After a few wrong turns, I find the station and board the train for Versailles. It takes thirty-five minutes. Ben made the same journey, by carriage, many times. It took several hours, and the rough, bumpy ride aggravated his kidney stones.
The train arrives at the Versailles station and deposits me into a cornucopia of Americana: KFC, McDonalds, and Starbucks. What would Ben make of this unholy trinity? He’d smile, I’m sure, pleased that his prediction proved correct. American culture was indeed ascendant. “The arts delight to travel westward,” he said. Fast food, apparently, travels in the opposite direction.
I walk along a gravel, tree-lined path. Some 250 years ago, a trio of Americans, led by Ben, came to Versailles, hat in hand, looking for money and guns. Today Americans come by the thousands looking for trinkets and Instagram pics and, perhaps most of all, a whiff of the royal scent that, inexplicably, we children of rebels can’t seem to get enough of.
I skirt the crowds, heading to one room. Markedly smaller than the others and furnished more simply, the Council Room is among the palace’s least popular draws. I see why. The ceiling is bare, the few mirrors small and dirty. The floors are simple parquet, like something you’d see in a basement rec room, not a French palace. On one side of the room is a fireplace and, above it, two vases depicting Mars, the Roman god of war, and Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. In the center of the room is a small and simple wooden desk. King Louis XVI conducted business here.
I can’t picture Ben in Versailles’s over-the-top spaces, but I can picture him here, in this simple and serious room where sleeves were rolled up and important decisions made. It was here where, on March 20, 1778, the first day of spring, Benjamin Franklin had an audience with King Louis XVI. They were commemorating the two treaties France and the infant United States had signed six weeks earlier. No more half measures or clandestine operations or dummy companies. France was now all in with les insurgens, as they called the Americans. After more than a year of furtive courtship, France and the United States had taken their relationship public.
Ben was lucky he got this far. The king was not a fan. He didn’t trust Ben and bristled at the simple American’s outsized popularity. Franklin’s visage was ubiquitous in France, so the king added it to one more location: the bottom of chamber pots, which he gave to friends. Thankfully, cooler voices were whispering in the king’s ear—namely, his foreign minister, Vergennes, who persuaded Louis to back the Americans.
Marie Antoinette was a bit less Ben-skeptical than her husband. The queen “was amazed to find so much genius behind such genuine simplicity amid the opulent ministers of the great European powers,” recalled Franklin’s friend Abbé Lefebvre de la Roche. One day, the queen asked a courtier what Franklin’s profession was before becoming ambassador.
“Foreman of a print shop,” he said.
“Is that so?” replied the queen. “In France he would have become no more than a bookseller.”
She was charmed, though, and deigned to allow Ben watch her at the gaming table. We don’t know if cake was served, but I bet it was, and eaten too. And so went the French aristocracy’s relationship with Ben. They were at once repulsed by and attracted to his simple dress and folksy wisdom.
Legend has it that when Franklin met the king, he wore a russet velvet coat, the same one he had worn during his ritual humiliation in the London Cockpit. Payback. Most startling, though, was what he was not wearing. No wig. No ceremonial sword. This was a breach of court etiquette, but one the courtiers of Versailles delighted in.
I spot an American couple nearby—their Skechers give them away—and decide to play unsolicited tour guide. This is the room where Franklin met the king, I inform them before reaching higher. “This,” I say, pausing for dramatic effect, “is where the American Revolution succeeded.” An exaggeration? Perhaps, but not by much. Had Franklin not sealed the alliance with France, the Continental Army would not have had the resources it needed to defeat the British. It is that simple.
I’m exiting the palace when it occurs to me that the last time I was here was almost forty years ago. I was on a break from college, touring Europe with a wildly incompatible girlfriend. Am I the same person I was then? In a physical sense, no. My younger self had a lot more hair and many fewer pounds. On a cellular level, too, I am not the same person. Most (not all) cells in the human body regenerate on average every seven to ten years so, technically, I am at least six times removed from my younger self. In other ways, too, I am different. My younger self had his whole life ahead of him, open doors as far as the eye can see. All I had to do was choose which ones to enter. Surely, though, some vestige of my twenty-year-old self remains, a psychological through line that links younger and older me.
Older Franklin was, of course, also different from young Ben. His muscular swimmer’s body had morphed into rolls of fat encased in flaky, reddish skin. His hairline had traveled north, and not to Canada. He moved more slowly, careful not to trigger an attack of “the stone” or any of his other ailments. He was a softer person in other ways too. Less saucy and provoking, more conciliatory and agreeable. So, yes, he was a different Ben, but he was also the same. He never lost his belief in equality (even if he didn’t always live up to it) or in the power of compromise or the primacy of personal experience or the quiet dignity of leading a useful life.
On my last full day in France, I return to Rue Franklin. At one end of the street is a bronze statue of Ben. He is seated, upright and alert, as if he might spring into action at any moment. His left hand is clutching an armrest, his right a sheath of papers. His expression is bright and attentive, his lips revealing a trace of a smile, as if he is reprising one of the bawdy jokes he liked to tell. At the base of the statue, a tablet reads: “The man whose genius raised America’s standards, whose wisdom spilled over to Europe, the man two worlds claim as their own.”
I want to touch Ben but can’t. The statue is set back some twenty yards from the sidewalk, behind a chain-link fence. This seems wrong. Ben, a man of the people, should be more accessible. I won’t stand for this, I declare silently, with unaccustomed conviction. I try to open the fence, but it is padlocked shut. I try shaking it open. Nothing.
I consider jumping the fence. That is what Samuel Adams would do. He’d grab hold of the metal fence with both hands and hoist himself over, the rules be damned, then demolish the fence for good measure. John Adams would curse the fence and the system that installed it—a rigged system that was at this very moment scheming to undermine him. Thomas Jefferson would write eloquently about the unalienable right of all men (except enslaved ones) to live fence-free and happily, but leave the fighting to others.
What would Ben do? I look at him for an inordinately long time, as if a statue could supply the answer. Then it dawns on me. Franklin would find the local fence authority and, in charmingly broken French, make the case that it was not only in Ben’s interest to open the fence but in the man’s interest too. Ben would do this patiently but persistently, for as long as it took, until the fence man happily opened it for him, as if it were the American who was doing him a favor and not the other way around. Then Ben would join a few friends for Madeira and chess and amuse all by recounting tales of his fence diplomacy.
I take the Metro to St. Germain, then I walk—no, I am walked, swept along by the crowds on the sunny summer day. I catch snippets of English. “The sun feels good,” says an older (but not old) woman. “I mean, there’s no air-conditioning in Paris,” says another, with a New York accent. Two older (not old) men with Texan accents are, I swear, talking about oil prices. I turn onto Rue Bonaparte and walk a few more minutes before realizing I’ve overshot my destination and make a disruptive U-turn. Pardon, pardon.
I see why I missed 59 Rue Bonaparte. It is an ordinary Parisian building, four stories high with Juliet balconies and fronted with peeling white paint. Immediately adjacent is a window display, though “display” is generous. It’s just a pile of random books: The American Heritage Dictionary, Ecole et Intégration des Immigrés, and, for some reason, a smattering of titles in Russian and Chinese. One sign informs me that this is currently a printing house. Of course, I think. Print followed Ben everywhere. Another sign reveals the building’s historic significance. “In this building, formerly the Hotel of York, the 3rd of September 1783, David Hartley, in the name of the King of England, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, John Adams, in the name of the United States of America, signed the definitive peace treaty recognizing the independence of the United States.”
The war was over. Franklin, along with Jay and Adams, spearheaded the peace negotiations. They culminated in the summer of 1783, an unusual time when Europe hardly saw the sun. A blue haze and dry “blood-colored” fog blanketed the continent for several months. People had trouble breathing. Ships, unable to navigate, remained at port. Ben speculated the strange weather was caused by either a meteorite or a volcano. His second supposition was correct. In June of that year, an Icelandic volcano had erupted, spewing billions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.
The negotiations were long and contentious, stretching to nearly two years. But Ben stayed cool under pressure. He was in no hurry. He would wait until the British came around and signed a peace treaty on America’s terms. He was such a cool customer that in the midst of the negotiations, he somehow found time to send a friend a twenty-page letter on the effects of lightning.
Ben’s patience paid off. In late July 1783, the new British prime minister, Lord Shelburne, eager to strike a deal and realizing the Americans would accept nothing short of full independence, relented on this sticking point. Franklin and the other negotiators secured a treaty that was incredibly favorable to the Americans, including a western border that stretched all the way to the Mississippi River. Ben suggested the British also cede Canada to the Americans. They did not, but I admire Ben for trying.
Franklin did make one blunder. The Continental Congress had explicitly instructed him to consult with France about the negotiations. He did not. Once the peace treaty was signed, Franklin made the bumpy journey to Versailles to meet Vergennes and grovel. Ben was an excellent groveler. He was sorry, very sorry, he told the foreign minister, and hoped an otherwise perfect treaty would “not be ruined by a single indiscretion of ours.” It was not. Vergennes forgave Franklin and even agreed to a new loan for the now fully independent United States.
Ben was ready to go home. He had been ready for some time and, despite his rule to never quit public positions, had submitted his resignation. Congress refused to accept it and insisted he stay in France. This is the downside of being extraordinarily useful. You get little rest. “It seems my fate, constantly to wish for repose, and never to obtain it,” Ben sighed.
His health was deteriorating. “I feel the infirmities of age coming on so fast, and the building to need so many repairs, that in a little time the owner will find it cheaper to pull it down and build a new one.”
In 1785, Congress finally relieved Franklin of his duties, dispatching Thomas Jefferson to succeed him. “Having finish’d my day’s task, I am going home to go to bed,” he told David Hartley, his British counterpart at the peace negotiations. But there was no guarantee he would survive the long journey to Philadelphia. Not only was there the perilous ocean crossing, but first he had to get from Passy to the port town of Le Havre, 146 miles away. His kidney stone had migrated south to his bladder and was now more painful than ever. Walking even short distances resulted in excruciating pain. Riding a carriage over rough cobblestone was out of the question.
Stay, his French friends pleaded. Spend the rest of your days here, attended by skilled physicians and in the company of those who love you. It was tempting, and Ben considered the idea. He had a fierce case of place attachment. I am the same way. Wherever I go, I ask myself, “Could I live here? Could I be happy here?” More often than not, the answers are yes. Yet I do not move there, wherever “there” is. I go home. And in the end, that is exactly what Benjamin Franklin decided to do.
Thomas Jefferson was relieved. He was worried Franklin might die during surgery in Paris, and he’d have a lot of explaining to do. Ben’s French friends were saddened, as was he. He implored them not to add to his sorrow. “Help me sustain the spirit I need to leave. My task is unfinished.”
Ben explained his difficult decision in a letter to his friend, the sea captain Nathaniel Falconer. “The French are an amiable people to live with: They love me, and I love them. Yet I do not feel my self at home, and I wish to die in my own country.” This is the true definition of home—not where you want to live but where you want to die.
His decision was made—he was going home—but a sizable problem remained: how to get to Le Havre. Typically, taking a barge up the Seine was a viable option, but the summer of 1785 was not typical. It was hot and dry. The water levels were low and the river unnavigable. Ben considered floating in a balloon from Passy to Le Havre. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Just six months earlier, two intrepid aviators (including fellow American John Jeffries) had completed the first crossing of the English Channel by balloon. This option was possible but risky.
Queen Marie Antoinette came to the rescue. She lent Ben her royal litter and two of her best, most sure-footed mules. The litter, suspended on long poles and attached to the mules, was curtained, with a couch where Ben could sit or recline.
It was time to say goodbye. Ben, like me, dreaded them. My wife claims I once said farewell in India by hurling her backpack at her, then walking away. I don’t recall this episode, but it sounds plausible. I come from a long line of crummy goodbye-ers. My father was the worst. Dropping him off at his Florida home, he would regularly exit the car before it came to a complete stop. I wish I were making that up, but I am not. Ben wasn’t much better at goodbyes. The outpouring of raw emotion overwhelmed him.
In early June 1785, workers began packing Ben’s belongings: a total of seventy-seven crates that included books, a dismantled printing press, scientific instruments, and jugs of mineral water from the Passy springs. Finally, on July 12, it was time to leave. A large crowd of friends and well-wishers gathered to see him off, a moment chronicled by Franklin’s grandson, Benny. “My grandfather mounted his litter among a great number of people at Passy. A solemn silence reigned around him, interrupted only by sobs.” Thomas Jefferson, also on hand, said it looked as if Passy had lost its patriarch.
Franklin tolerated the overland journey well. Marie Antoinette’s royal litter proved not only elegant but useful too, swaying gently with each step the mules took. Within a week, the Franklin caravan had reached Le Havre. One last letter from Madame Helvetius awaited him: “I picture you in the litter farther from us at every step, already lost to me and to those who loved you so much and [miss] you so. I fear you are in pain.… If you are, come back, mon cher ami, come back to us!”
But Ben was not coming back. His voyage across the English Channel and then to Philadelphia was about to begin. Benjamin Franklin, a man with a deeply Gaelic soul, would never step foot on French soil again.
I depart France not by royal litter but by SNCF, the French railway, then by ferry across the English Channel. Two German women staying at my hotel suggest we share a taxi to the train station, and I agree. One speaks excellent English and, starved for conversation in my mother tongue, I find myself blabbing about my Franklin fixation and how I see him as a role model—for people everywhere but especially for my fractured homeland. I tell her how I have retraced his steps from Auray to Passy and, now, was heading to Southampton, England, where he would briefly see his estranged son William one last time.
“But how is he a role model if he broke with his son?” she asks. “What if every American family did that when they disagreed politically?”
I’m not sure how to respond. I mumble something about Ben not being perfect. She nods politely, but I can tell she finds my answer inadequate. So do I.
We say goodbye, bon voyage, but her question stays with me. It follows me aboard the train and then the ferry. I turn it over in my mind again and again. How can Ben be a role model for an entire people when he wasn’t even one for his own family?
By the time the ferry docks at Portsmouth harbor, the summer light fading, I am exhausted, but still have no answer. I vow to revisit the question. Soon, after a good night’s sleep.