University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
WHICH HAS SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT DR. FRANKLIN AND
THE LATIN QUARTER.

THE first, both in point of time and merit, of American
envoys was famous not less for the pastoral simplicity
of his manners than for the politic grace of his mind.
Viewed from a certain point, there was a touch of primeval
orientalness in Benjamin Franklin. Neither is there
wanting something like his Scriptural parallel. The history
of the patriarch Jacob is interesting not less from the
unselfish devotion which we are bound to ascribe to him,
than from the deep worldly wisdom and polished Italian
tact, gleaming under an air of Arcadian unaffectedness.
The diplomatist and the shepherd are blended; a union
not without warrant; the apostolic serpent and dove.
A tanned Machiavelli in tents.

Doubtless, too, notwithstanding his eminence as lord of
the moving manor, Jacob's raiment was of homespun;
the economic envoy's plain coat and hose, who has not
heard of?

Franklin all over is of a piece. He dressed his person

as his periods; neat, trim, nothing superfluous, nothing
deficient. In some of his works his style is only surpassed
by the unimprovable sentences of Hobbes of Malmsbury,
the paragon of perspicuity. The mental habits of Hobbes
and Franklin in several points, especially in one of some
moment, assimilated. Indeed, making due allowance for
soil and era, history presents few trios more akin, upon
the whole, than Jacob, Hobbes, and Franklin; three
labyrinth-minded, but plain-spoken Broadbrims, at once
politicians and philosophers; keen observers of the main
chance; prudent courtiers; practical magians in linsey-woolsey.

In keeping with his general habitudes, Doctor Franklin
while at the French Court did not reside in the aristocratical
faubourgs. He deemed his worsted hose and scientific
tastes more adapted in a domestic way to the other side
of the Seine, where the Latin Quarter, at once the haunt
of erudition and economy, seemed peculiarly to invite
the philosophical Poor Richard to its venerable retreats.
Here, of gray, chilly, drizzly November mornings, in
the dark-stoned quadrangle of the time-honored Sorbonne,
walked the lean and slippered metaphysician,—oblivious
for the moment that his sublime thoughts and tattered
wardrobe were famous throughout Europe,—meditating
on the theme of his next lecture; at the same time, in
the well-worn chambers overhead, some clayey-visaged
chemist in ragged robe-de-chambre, and with a soiled green
flap over his left eye, was hard at work stooping over
retorts and crucibles, discovering new antipathies in acids,
again risking strange explosions similar to that whereby

he had already lost the use of one optic; while in the
lofty lodging-houses of the neighboring streets, indigent
young students from all parts of France, were ironing
their shabby cocked hats, or inking the whity seams of
their small-clothes, prior to a promenade with their
pink-ribboned little grisettes in the Garden of the Luxembourg.

Long ago the haunt of rank, the Latin Quarter still
retains many old buildings whose imposing architecture
singularly contrasts with the unassuming habits of their
present occupants. In some parts its general air is dreary
and dim; monastic and theurgic. In those lonely narrow
ways—long-drawn prospectives of desertion—lined
with huge piles of silent, vaulted, old iron-grated buildings
of dark gray stone, one almost expects to encounter
Paracelsus or Friar Bacon turning the next corner, with
some awful vial of Black-Art elixir in his hand.

But all the lodging-houses are not so grim. Not to
speak of many of comparatively modern erection, the
others of the better class, however stern in exterior,
evince a feminine gayety of taste, more or less, in their
furnishings within. The embellishing, or softening, or
screening hand of woman is to be seen all over the interiors
of this metropolis. Like Augustus Cæsar with
respect to Rome, the Frenchwoman leaves her obvious
mark on Paris. Like the hand in nature, you know it
can be none else but hers. Yet sometimes she overdoes
it, as nature in the peony; or underdoes it, as nature in
the bramble; or—what is still more frequent—is a little
slatternly about it, as nature in the pig-weed.

In this congenial vicinity of the Latin Quarter, and in
an ancient building something like those alluded to, at
a point midway between the Palais des Beaux Arts and
the College of the Sorbonne, the venerable American
Envoy pitched his tent when not passing his time at his
country retreat at Passy. The frugality of his manner of
life did not lose him the good opinion even of the voluptuaries
of the showiest of capitals, whose very iron
railings are not free from gilt. Franklin was not less a
lady's man, than a man's man, a wise man, and an old man.
Not only did he enjoy the homage of the choicest Parisian
literati, but at the age of seventy-two he was the caressed
favorite of the highest born beauties of the Court; who
through blind fashion having been originally attracted to
him as a famous savan, were permanently retained as his
admirers by his Plato-like graciousness of good humor.
Having carefully weighed the world, Franklin could act
any part in it. By nature turned to knowledge, his mind
was often grave, but never serious. At times he had
seriousness—extreme seriousness—for others, but never
for himself. Tranquillity was to him instead of it. This
philosophical levity of tranquillity, so to speak, is shown
in his easy variety of pursuits. Printer, postmaster,
almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman,
humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist,
professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger,
herb-doctor, wit:—Jack of all trades, master
of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of
his land. Franklin was everything but a poet. But
since a soul with many qualities, forming of itself a sort

of handy index and pocket congress of all humanity, needs
the contact of just as many different men, or subjects, in
order to the exhibition of its totality; hence very little
indeed of the sage's multifariousness will be portrayed
in a simple narrative like the present. This casual private
intercourse with Israel, but served to manifest him in his
far lesser lights; thrifty, domestic, dietarian, and, it may
be, didactically waggish. There was much benevolent
irony, innocent mischievousness, in the wise man. Seeking
here to depict him in his less exalted habitudes, the
narrator feels more as if he were playing with one of
the sage's worsted hose, than reverentially handling the
honored hat which once oracularly sat upon his brow.

So, then, in the Latin Quarter lived Doctor Franklin.
And accordingly in the Latin Quarter tarried Israel for
the time. And it was into a room of a house in this
same Latin Quarter that Israel had been directed when
the sage had requested privacy for a while.