The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (111 page)

Franklin defends himself, saying that people know him as neither glutton nor tippler.

“People judge as they please,” the Gout replies. “But I know well that what is not too much to drink nor too much to eat for a man who takes a reasonable amount of exercise, is too much for a man who takes scarcely any.”

“I take—ow! ow!—as much exercise—ow!—as I can, Madame Gout. You are acquainted with my sedentary existence, and it seems to me that accordingly you could, Madame Gout, spare me a little, considering that it is not entirely my fault.”

“Not at all. Your rhetoric and your politeness are equally lost. Your excuse is worth nothing. If your position is sedentary, your amusements, your recreation, should be active. You should go promenading on foot or on horseback; or if you are pressed for time, play billiards.” The Gout upbraids Franklin in terms that sound surprisingly modern even two centuries later—yet at the same time characteristically Franklin.

Let us examine your course of life. While the mornings are long, and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast: four dishes of tea with cream, and one or two buttered toasts with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested.

Immediately afterwards you sit down to write at your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise….

What is your practice after dinner? Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have dined would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours! This is your perpetual recreation, which is the least eligible of any for a sedentary man.

One school of medical thought in Franklin’s day contended that attacks of gout signified the body’s efforts to cleanse itself of ill humors
built up through want of exercise and other unhealthy habits. The Gout subscribed to this view, and reprimanded Franklin for being not merely foolish but ungrateful. If not for the gout, Franklin would have been visited by palsy, dropsy, or apoplexy—“one or other of which would have done for you long ago.” She stabs him again.

“Pray, Madame, a truce with your corrections!” he cries in distress.

“No, sir, no—I will not abate a particle of what is so much for your good.”

He pleads that he
does
take exercise—in his carriage.

“That, of all imaginable exercises, is the most slight and insignificant.” Showing herself remarkably well versed in his theories, she throws back at him his argument about the efficiency of exercise being linked to the degree of heat produced. Why, even his female companions get more exercise than he. “Behold your fair friend at Auteuil, a lady who received from bounteous nature more really useful science than half a dozen such pretenders to philosophy as you have been able to extract from all your books.” (This was a reminder to Madame Brillon that she had a rival.) “When she honours you with a visit, it is on foot. She walks all hours of the day, and leaves indolence and its concomitant maladies to be endured by her horses. In this you see at once the preservative of her health and personal charms. But when you go to Auteuil you must have your carriage, though it is no farther from Passy to Auteuil than from Auteuil to Passy.”

Franklin complains that this reasoning grows tiresome to one so afflicted as he.

“I stand corrected,” says the Gout. “I will be silent and continue my office. Take that! And that!”

He writhes and moans again.

She scolds him for ignoring the repeated invitations of “the charming lady” of the Brillon household to walk at evening through the gardens, up the steps and down. “You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in your conduct.” She stings him once more.

What should I do with my carriage, if not ride in it?, he asks, flinching.

“Burn it if you choose.” Or better yet, send it to transport the poor old peasants of Passy home from the vineyards at night. “This is an act that will be good for your soul; and at the same time, after your visit to the Brillons, if you return on foot, that will be good for your body.” Another jab.

“Oh! Oh! For Heaven’s sake, leave me! And I promise faithfully
never more to play at chess, but to take exercise daily, and live temperately.”

“I know you too well. You promise fair, but after a few months of good health, you will return to your old habits. Your fine promises will be forgotten like the forms of the last year’s clouds. Let us then finish the account, and I will go. But I leave you with an assurance of visiting you again at a proper time and place, for my object is your good, and you are sensible now that I am your
real friend.”

Franklin’s
literary reputation had long preceded him to Paris—although in some cases the reality outreached the reputation. One such instance led to the discovery of the true identity of Polly Baker. Franklin and Silas Deane one day were remarking the numerous mistakes in Abbé Raynal’s
Histoire des deux Indes,
when the author himself happened in the door. Franklin was diplomatic enough to drop the subject, but Deane was not. “The Doctor and myself, Abbé, were just speaking of the errors of fact into which you have been led in your history.”

“Oh, no, sir,” the abbé replied. “That is impossible. I took the greatest care not to insert a single fact for which I had not the most unquestionable authority.”

“Why, there is the story of Polly Baker,” Deane said, “and the eloquent apology you have put into her mouth when brought before a court of Massachusetts to suffer punishment under a law which you cite, for having had a bastard. I know there never was such a law in Massachusetts.”

“Be assured you are mistaken, and that that is a true story. I do not immediately recollect indeed the particular information on which I quote it, but I am certain that I had for it unquestionable authority.”

Franklin’s diplomatic discretion failed him at this point. Laughing aloud, he said, “I will tell you, Abbé, the origin of that story. When I was a printer and editor of a newspaper, we were sometimes slack of news, and to amuse our customers I used to fill up our vacant columns with anecdotes and fables, and fancies of my own. This of Polly Baker is a story of my making on one of these occasions.”

The abbé listened with horror quickly hidden by aplomb. “Oh, very well, Doctor,” he declared. “I had rather relate your stories than other men’s truths.”

Raynal himself refuted his own certitude in another instance. Conventional philosophical wisdom in Europe held that the races of men and animals degenerated in the New World, becoming smaller and less fit. The abbé was convinced of this, and at a dinner party hosted by Franklin at Passy held forth at length on the subject. Franklin had designed his guest list to include as many Americans as French; while Raynal ran on, Franklin noticed something interesting about the seating arrangement and comparative statures of the two nationalities represented.

“Come, Monsieur l’Abbé,” he said, “let us try this question by the fact before us. We are here one half Americans and one half French, and it happens that the Americans have placed themselves on one side of the table, and our French friends are on the other. Let both parties rise, and we will see which side nature has degenerated.”

Thomas Jefferson, who heard this story from Franklin, and who knew several of the guests (and who, moreover, was as determined to refute this alleged New World degeneracy as Raynal was to confirm it), explained the rest. “It happened that his American guests were Carmichael, Harmer, Humphreys, and others of the finest stature and form; while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbé himself particularly was a mere shrimp.”

To the initial surprise of his French guests, Franklin typically deferred to others in conversation. This reticence reflected both his temperament and his incomplete mastery of the French language, acquired initially from books and self-study. “If you Frenchmen would only talk no more than four at a time, I might understand you, and would not come out of an interesting party without knowing what they were talking about,” he explained to a friend. Not surprisingly, the relative rarity of his spoken
mots
made them the more precious.

One that was long remembered came from a chess match between Franklin and the elderly Duchess of Bourbon. Inexpert, she illegally placed her king in check. Franklin, in the spirit of rule-breaking, captured it. She, knowing enough to realize that this was not permitted, declared that in France “we do not take kings.”

With a sly smile he responded, “We do in America.”

25
Minister plenipotentiary
1779–81

The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II was traveling incognito in France during this period, and frequented the same salons as Franklin. Watching Franklin’s chess game with the Duchess of Bourbon, he was asked why he did not share the general enthusiasm for America. “I am a king by trade,” he replied.

George III felt the same way, although most nights he had little more reason to lose sleep over the Americans’ activities than the Holy Roman emperor did. Even after the American victory at Saratoga the war went poorly for the rebels. An American defeat at Germantown left British forces in control of Philadelphia, and efforts to keep the British fleet from reaching and reinforcing the city failed after an imaginative scheme for sinking the British vessels misfired. David Bushnell had tinkered with an underwater boat—“Bushnell’s turtle,” it was called—that would torpedo the enemy below the waterline; when this encountered technical difficulties, Bushnell switched to floating bombs. He stuffed kegs with explosives and surreptitiously drifted them down the river toward the British fleet. Most missed, and the scheme was discovered when a bargeman lifted one of the kegs from the water, setting it off and killing himself and several companions. Although no British ships were destroyed, the very thought of bobbing ruin put the British on edge. Soldiers were arrayed along the riverbank to fire at suspicious objects in the water; by one account, just as the scare was abating, a farmer’s wife accidentally dropped a keg of cheese in the river, sparking a renewed alert and another outpouring of lead into the water.

As General Howe wintered in Philadelphia, warmed by his mistress and assisted in the governance of the city by Franklin’s old friend and ally Joseph Galloway, Washington and the American army froze on the windy hillsides of Valley Forge. They arrived worn from their failed campaign against Howe, and they grew wearier from the effort to construct winter quarters from the ground up. In dark huts fourteen feet by sixteen they shivered and went hungry. The entire commissary when the winter began consisted of twenty-five barrels of flour—this for 11,000 officers and men. “Firecake”—a leavenless pancake cooked over campfire—and water was the sole fare. “What have you for your dinner, boys?,” an army surgeon recalled the officers asking. “Nothing but firecake and water, sir.” “What is your supper, lads?” “Firecake and water, sir.” “What have you got for breakfast?” “Firecake and water, sir.” The surgeon, in charge of maintaining the army’s health on this meager regime, cursed those responsible. “The Lord send that our Commissary of Purchases may live on firecake and water till their glutted guts are turned to pasteboard.”

Feeding the army was far from the only challenge Washington faced. Clothing the men was just as hard. “We have, by a field return this day made,” he reported to Congress on December 23, “no less than 2898 men now in camp unfit for duty because they are bare foot and otherwise naked.” Lack of blankets forced the men to spend nights crowded
around fires “instead of taking comfortable rest in a natural way.” Washington normally bore hardship stoically, but the trials of his men forced him to speak his mind about those state legislatures that postured bravely but failed to provide what the troops needed. “It is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fire side than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets.” Unless some decided change took place, “this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things: Starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence.”