Benjamin Franklin

pianos that were becoming fashionable in France. When she first met Franklin in the spring of 1777,
she worried that she had been too shy to make a good impression. So the next day she asked a mutual
friend to send her some of the Scottish melodies she knew Franklin loved. “I would try to play them
and compose some in the same style!” she wrote. “I do wish to provide the great man with some
moments of relaxation from his occupations, and also to have the pleasure of seeing him.”

Thus began their intense companionship, which soon became sexually charged and the fodder for
much gossip. Adams and others were shocked by what Madame Brillon called her “sweet habit of
sitting on your lap” and by stories of their late nights spent together. “I am certain you have been
kissing my wife,” her husband once wrote Franklin.

Yet Monsieur Brillon added in his letter, “My dear Doctor, let me kiss you back in return.”
Franklin’s relationship with Madame Brillon, like so many of his others with distinguished ladies,
was complex and never fully consummated. It was, as Claude-Anne Lopez has ably described, an
amité amoureuse in which Franklin had to settle for playing the role of “Cher Papa,” an oddly
flirtatious father.10

Madame Brillon, who was 33 when she met Franklin, was buffeted by conflicting passions and
variable moods. Her husband, twenty-four years her senior (but fourteen years younger than Franklin),
was wealthy, doting, and unfaithful. She had two daughters with beautiful singing voices and lived in
one of the most elegant estates in Passy, yet she was prone to fits of depression and self-pity.
Although she spoke no English, she and Franklin exchanged more than 130 letters during their eight-
year relationship, and she was able not only to enchant him but also to manipulate him.

She did so by composing and playing music for him, creating a salon around him, and writing
him flattering letters in French and in the third person. “It is,” she declared, “a real source of joy for
her to think that she can sometimes amuse Mr. Franklin, whom she loves and esteems as he deserves.”
When the Americans won the Battle of Saratoga, she composed a triumphal overture entitled “Marche
des Insurgents” (which is still sometimes performed) and played it for him in a private concert. They
also flirted over the chessboard. “She is still a little miffed,” Madame Brillon teasingly wrote of
herself, “about the six games of chess he won so inhumanly and she warns him she will spare nothing
to get her revenge.”11

By March 1778, after months of just music and chess, Franklin was ready for something more.
So he shocked her with some of his libertine theology and challenged her to save his soul. “You were
kind enough,” she wrote, now comfortable in the first person, “to entrust me with your conversion.”
Her propositions were promising, even suggestive. “I know my penitent’s weak spot, I shall tolerate
it! As long as he loves God, America, and me above all things, I absolve him of all of his sins,
present, past and future.”

Madame Brillon went on to describe the seven cardinal sins, merrily noting that he had
conquered well the first six, ranging from pride to sloth. When she got to the seventh, the sin of lust,
she became a bit coy: “The seventh—I shall not name it. All great men are tainted with it…You have
loved, my dear brother; you have been kind and lovable; you have been loved in return! What is so
damnable about that?”

“She promises to lead me to heaven along a road so delicious,” Franklin exulted in his reply to
her. “I am in raptures when I think of being absolved of the future sins.” Turning to the Ten
Commandments, he argued that there were actually two others that should be included: to multiply and
fill the earth, and to love one another. He had always obeyed those two very well, he argued, and
should not that “compensate for my having so often failed to respect one of the ten? I mean the one
which forbids us to covet thy neighbor’s wife, a commandment which (I confess) I have consistently
violated.”12

Alas, Madame Brillon took that cue to beat a hasty retreat. “I dare not decide the question
without consulting that neighbor whose wife you covet,” she wrote, referring to her husband. There
was, she explained, a double standard she must obey. “You are a man, I am a woman, and while we
might think along the same lines, we must speak and act differently. Perhaps there is no great harm in
a man having desires and yielding to them; a woman may have desires, but she must not yield.”

Little did she know that her own husband was engaging in this double standard. Once again, it
was John Adams who recorded the situation in shocked detail after Franklin took him to dine with “a
large company of both sexes” at the Brillons. Madame Brillon struck Adams as “one of the most
beautiful women of France,” her husband as “a rough kind of country squire.” Among the crowd was
a “very plain and clumsy” woman. “I afterwards learned both from Dr. Franklin and his grandson,”
Adams noted, “that this woman was the amie of Mr. Brillon.” He also surmised, this time incorrectly,
that Madame Brillon was having an affair with another neighbor. “I was astonished that these people
could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats. But I
did not know the world.”

A year later, Madame Brillon found out about her husband’s affair with this “clumsy” young
woman, Mademoiselle Jupin, who was the governess of the Brillon girls. She banished the young
woman from the house, and then began to fear that she might take a job as Franklin’s housekeeper.
After Franklin assured her, in a closed-door session at his office, that he had no intention of hiring the
woman, Madame Brillon wrote him a relieved letter. “My soul is calmer, my dear Papa, since it has
unburdened itself into yours, since it does not fear anymore that Mlle J——might settle down with
you and be your torment.”13

Even before this fit of jealousy, Madame Brillon had begun a crusade to stop Franklin from
turning his attentions to other women, despite being unwilling to satisfy his ardor. “When you scatter
your friendship, as you have done, my friendship does not diminish, but from now on I shall try to be
somewhat sterner to your faults,” she threatened.

In a forceful yet seductive reply, Franklin argued that she had no right to be so possessive. “You
renounce and totally exclude all that might be of the flesh in our affection, allowing me only some
kisses, civil and honest, such as you might grant your little cousins,” he chided. “What am I receiving
that is so special as to prevent me from giving the same to others?”

He included in the letter a proposed nine-article treaty of “peace, friendship and love” between
the two of them. It began with articles that she would accept, followed by ones declaring pretty much
the opposite that he would accept. The former included one saying that “Mr. F. shall come to her

whenever she sends for him” and another saying that he would “stay with her as long as she pleases.”
His stipulations, on the other hand, included one saying that “he will go away from Madame B’s
whenever he pleases,” and another that “he will stay away as long as he pleases.” The final article of
the treaty was one on his side: “That he will love any other woman as far as he finds her amiable.”
He added, however, that he was “without much hope” that she would agree to this final provision, and
in any event “I despair of finding any other woman that I could love with equal tenderness.”14

In describing his sexual desires, Franklin could be quite salacious. “My poor little boy, whom
you ought to have cherished, instead of being fat and jolly like those in your elegant drawings, is thin
and starved for want of the nourishment that you inhumanely deny him.” Madame Brillon continued
the colloquy by calling him an Epicurean, who “wants a fat chubby love,” and herself a Platonist,
who “tries to blunt his little arrows.” In another suggestive letter, he told a fable about a man who
refused to lend out his horses to a friend. He was not like that. “You know that I am ready to sacrifice
my beautiful big horses.”

After dozens of such sensuous parries and thrusts had passed between them, at least on paper,
Madame Brillon ended up rejecting once and for all his desires for a more corporeal love. In return,
she also abandoned her attempt to prevent him from seeking it elsewhere. “Platonism may not be the
gayest sect, but it is a convenient defense for the fair sex,” she wrote. “Hence, the lady, who finds it
congenial, advises the gentleman to fatten up his favorite at other tables than hers, which will always
offer too meager a diet for his greedy appetites.”15

The letter, which concluded with an invitation for tea the next day, did not end their relationship.
Instead, it took on another form: Madame Brillon declared that she would henceforth like to play the
role of an adoring daughter, and she assigned to him the role of a loving father.

It is to her father that this tender and loving daughter is speaking; I had a father once,
the best of men, he was my first, my closest friend. I lost him too soon! You have often
asked me: “Couldn’t I take the place of those you regret?” And you have told me about the
humane custom of certain savages who adopt their prisoners of war and put them in the
place of their own dead relatives. You have taken in my heart the place of that father.

Franklin, either out of desire or necessity, formally agreed. “I accept with infinite pleasure, my dear
friend, the proposal you make, with such kindness, of adopting me as your father,” he wrote. Then he
turned philosophical. It was, as he had said of Benny and Temple, important for him, now that he was
separated from his own “affectionate daughter” in Philadelphia, to have always some child with him
“to take care of me during my life and tenderly close my eyelids when I must take my last rest.” He
would work hard, he promised, to play the role properly. “I love you as a father, with all my heart. It
is true that I sometimes suspect that heart of wanting to go further, but I try to conceal it from
myself.”16

The transformation of their relationship evoked from Franklin one of his most wistful and self-
revealing little tales, The Ephemera, written to her after a stroll in the garden. (The theme came from
an article he had printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette fifty years earlier.) He had happened to

overhear, he wrote, a lament by one of the tiny short-lived flies who realized that his seven hours on
this planet were nearing an end.

I have seen generations born, flourish and expire. 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, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above
seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor in amassing honey-
dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy!…

My Friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind
me; and they tell me I have lived long enough, to nature and to glory. But what will fame be
to an Ephemere who no longer exists?…

To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but the reflection of
a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good Lady-
Ephemeres, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever-amiable BRILLANTE. [In
the original French version, the final words more clearly refer to the recipient: “toujours
amiable Brillon.”]17

Throughout his remaining years in France, and even in letters after his return to America,
Franklin would stay emotionally attached to Madame Brillon. Their new arrangement still allowed
him such liberties as playing chess with a mutual friend, late into the night, in her bathroom, while she
soaked in her tub and watched. But it was, as bathtub chess games go, rather innocent; the tub was
covered, as was the style, by a wooden plank. “I’m afraid that we may have made you very
uncomfortable by keeping you so long in the bath,” he apologized the next day, adding a wry little
promise: “Never again will I consent to start a chess game with the neighbor in your bathing room.
Can you forgive me this indiscretion?” She certainly could. “No, my good papa, you did not do me
any ill yesterday,” she replied. “I get so much pleasure from seeing you that it made up for the little
fatigue of having come out of the bath a little too late.”

Having forsaken the possibility of an earthly romance, they amused themselves by promising
themselves one in heaven. “I give you my word,” she teased him at one point, “that I will become
your wife in paradise on the condition that you will not make too many conquests among the heavenly
maidens while you are waiting for me. I want a faithful husband when I take one for eternity.”

More than almost anyone, she could articulate what made him so charming to women, “that
gaiety and that gallantry that cause all women to love you, because you love them all.” With both
insight and affection, she declared, “You combine the kindest heart with the soundest moral teaching,
a lively imagination, and that droll roguishness which shows that the wisest of men allows his
wisdom to be perpetually broken against the rocks of femininity.”18

In the ensuing years, Franklin would help guide Madame Brillon through her bouts of
depression, and he would try, as we shall see, to encourage a marriage between Temple and either of
her daughters. But increasingly, by 1779, he was turning more of his attention toward another woman,
one with an even more fascinating household, who lived in the neighboring village of Auteuil.

Madame Helvétius

Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d’Autricourt was born to one of the great aristocratic families of
Lorraine, but she was the tenth of twenty children and thus lacked a dowry. So when she was 15 and
of marriageable age, she was sent off to a convent. As it turned out, she certainly did not have the
temperament for a cloistered life nor, for that matter, the funds. At age 30, her pension ran out and so
did she, to Paris, where she was taken in by a kindly aunt who had left her husband, become a
novelist, and created a salon filled with bright and slightly bohemian intellectuals.

There Anne-Catherine’s vivacity and beauty attracted many suitors, most notably the economist
Turgot, eight years her junior, who would later become France’s comptroller and a friend of Franklin.
Turgot was engaging but not wealthy enough, so she instead married someone more established,
Claude-Adrien Helvétius.

Helvétius was one of France’s fifty or so Farmers General, a royal-chartered group with the
very lucrative assignment of collecting taxes and holding leases. Once he had made his fortune,
Helvétius set out to satisfy his social and intellectual aspirations. So the rich financier married the
poor aristocrat and became, as mentioned above, a noted philosopher who helped plan the Nine
Sisters Masonic Lodge. His great work, De l’Esprit (1758), was a controversial espousal of godless
hedonism, which argued that the love of pleasure motivated human activity. Around him he gathered
the stars of the Enlightenment, including Diderot, Condorcet, Hume on his occasional visits from
Edinburgh, and Turgot, still in favor though spurned as a suitor.

When Helvétius died in 1771, five years before Franklin’s arrival, his widow Anne-Catherine,
now Madame Helvétius, married off their two daughters to men of their own choosing, gave each of
them one of the family chateaux, and bought a rambling farm in Auteuil near Passy. She was lively,
outgoing and, as befitted her aristocratic birth but impoverished upbringing, somewhat of a free-
spirited bohemian who enjoyed projecting an earthy aura. There is an oft-repeated remark that has
been attributed to many but was likely first famously uttered by the writer Fontenelle, who was in his
late nineties when he frequented her salon. Beholding Madame Helvétius in one of her more casual
states of undress, he proclaimed, “Oh, to be seventy again!”

At Auteuil she cultivated a free-spirited garden that was devoid of all French formality, a
collection of ducks and dogs that formed a noisy and motley menagerie, and a salon that displayed
many of the same attributes. Friends brought her rare plants, unusual pets, and provocative ideas, and
she nurtured them all at what became jokingly known as “l’Académie d’Auteuil.”19

Living with Madame Helvétius were two priests and one acolyte:

The Abbé André Morellet, a noted political economist and contributor to the Encyclopédie, in
his late forties who had first befriended Franklin in 1772 at the English house party where he
played the trick of stilling the waves with his magic cane, and who shared his love for fine wine,
song, economic theories, and practical inventions.
The Abbé Martin Lefebvre de la Roche, in his late thirties, a former Benedictine whom (in
Morellet’s words) “Helvétius had after a fashion secularized.”
Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, a bachelor poet in his early twenties, who translated Homer,

studied medicine, wrote a book on hospitals, and revered Franklin, whose tales and anecdotes
he faithfully recorded.

“We discoursed of morality, of politics, and of philosophy,” la Roche recalled. “Notre Dame
d’Auteuil excited your coquetry, and the Abbé Morellet wrangled over the cream and ushered his
arguments to prove what we did not believe.”20

It was Turgot, still smitten by Madame Helvétius, who first brought Franklin to visit her in 1778,
when she was nearly 60 but still both lively and beautiful. Her domestic menagerie, filled with banter
and intellectual irreverence, was perfectly tailored to Franklin’s tastes, and shortly thereafter he
wrote her a letter in which he described her electromagnetism:

I have in my way been trying to form some hypothesis to account for your having so
many friends and of such various kinds. I see that statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets
and men of learning of all sorts attach themselves to you as straws to a fine piece of
amber…We find in your sweet society that charming benevolence, that amiable attention to
oblige, that disposition to please and be pleased, which we do not always find in the
society of one another…In your company, we are not only pleased with you, but better
pleased with one another and with ourselves.21

Not surprisingly, John Adams was shocked by both Madame Helvétius and her household when
Franklin brought him for a visit. The two abbots, he sniped, “I suppose have as much power to pardon
a sin as they have to commit one.” Of the moral “absurdities” at the house he commented, “No kind of
republican government can ever exist with such national manners.” His wife, Abigail, was even more
horrified when she visited later, and she described Madame Helvétius with a delightfully vicious
pen:

Her hair was frizzled; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty gauze
handkerchief behind…She carried on the chief of the conversation at dinner, frequently
locking her hand into the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the arms of
both the gentlemen’s chairs, then throwing her arms carelessly upon the Doctor’s neck…I
was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with ladies of this cast. After
dinner, she threw herself on a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little
lap-dog, who was, next to the doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the
floor she wiped it up with her shirt.22

Franklin did more than flirt with Madame Helvétius; by September 1779, he was ardently
proposing marriage in a way that was more than half-serious but retained enough ironic detachment to
preserve their dignities. “If that Lady likes to pass her days with him, he in turn would like to pass his
nights with her,” he wrote through Cabanis, using the third person. “As he has already given her many
of his days, though he has so few left to give, she appears ungrateful never to have given him a single
one of her nights, which steadily pass as a pure loss, without giving happiness to anyone except

Poupon [her dog].”23

She led him on lightly. “I hoped that after putting such pretty things on paper,” she scrawled,
“you would come and tell me some.” He continued his quest in a clever, yet still humorously
detached, fashion by composing for her two little tales. The first was written in the voice of the flies
living in his apartment. They complain about the dangers they faced from the spiders at Passy and
thank her for making him clean out their webs. “There only remains one thing for us to wish,” they
conclude. “It is to see both of you forming at last but one ménage.”24

Turgot, now more jealous than amused by Franklin, counseled her to decline his marriage
proposals, which she did. Franklin nevertheless renewed his suit with one of his most famous tales,
“The Elysian Fields,” in which he recounted a dream about going to heaven and discussing the matter
with her late husband and his late wife, who had themselves married. Praising Madame Helvétius’s
looks over those of his departed wife, he suggested they take revenge:

Vexed by your barbarous resolution, announced so positively last evening, to remain
single all your life in respect to your dear husband, I went home, fell on my bed, and,
believing myself dead, found myself in the Elysian Fields…[M. Helvétius] received me
with great courtesy, having known me for some time, he said, by the reputation I had there.
He asked me a thousand things about the war, and about the present state of religion, liberty,
and the government in France. You ask nothing then of your dear friend Madame H——;
nevertheless she still loves you excessively and I was at her place but an hour ago.

Ah! said he, you make me remember my former felicity.—But it is necessary to forget
it in order to be happy here. During several of the early years, I thought only of her. Finally
I am consoled. I have taken another wife. The most like her that I could find. She is not, it is
true, so completely beautiful, but she has as much good sense, a little more of Spirit, and
she loves me infinitely. Her continual study is to please me; and she has actually gone to
hunt the best Nectar and the best Ambrosia in order to regale me this evening; remain with
me and you will see her.

…At these words the new Madame H——entered with the Nectar: at which instant I
recognized her to be Madame F——, my old American friend. I reclaimed to her. But she
told me coldly, “I have been your good wife forty-nine years and four months, nearly a half
century; be content with that. Here I have formed a new connection, which will endure to
eternity.”

Offended by this refusal of my Eurydice, I suddenly decided to leave these ungrateful
spirits, to return to the good earth, to see again the sunshine and you. Here I am! Let us
revenge ourselves.25

Beneath the frivolity lurked a sincere desire—his friends thought so, as did his friendly rival
Turgot—yet it was expressed with a flair that made it seem safe and clever. Always uncomfortable
with deep emotional bonds, Franklin performed the perfect distancing trick. Instead of conducting his
suit in secret, which would have given it a dangerous seriousness, he took it public by publishing the
story on his private press a few months later. By doing so, he put his heart out for all to see, and there