Chapter 8

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 c****d

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 Caesar 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.