The Ephemera

The answer came up from Brest in the second week of July, in a courier’s bag, a little over two months after the Congress had voted it; and Doctor Franklin, who had known what it would say since December, found that he was not ready for it after all.

He read it in the garden. He had taken to reading his letters there that summer, on a bench under the lime trees on M. de Chaumont’s upper terrace, where the air was better and nobody could come up behind him without being seen; and Temple brought the packet out to him there at eleven in the morning, with the seals unbroken, and stood waiting, which he did not usually do.

“Go and do something, my boy,” Franklin said. “I shall call you.”

Temple went. Franklin broke the seals.

It was the Congress’s resolution, in a fair copy attested by Mr Thomson, under a covering letter from the Committee for Foreign Affairs, and it was perfectly civil. The Congress had the highest sense of His Most Christian Majesty’s magnanimity and goodness. It could not, consistently with the declared sense of the people of the Colonies and its own resolution of the Fourth of July, 1776, accept treaties founded on a declaration it had not made. It relied with confidence on the continuance of His Majesty’s friendship. And the commissioners at Paris were to convey all this to the Comte de Vergennes, in such terms as might best preserve that friendship, and the supplies.

The supplies. Franklin read that twice. He thought he could see the committee that had drafted it, sitting round a table in a country courthouse with the windows open, putting in the last two words after a short discussion and feeling rather pleased with them.

There was a minute of the vote with it, in Thomson’s hand, because the Congress was a body of lawyers and would not send a man bad news without the figures. Four colonies for. Six against. Pennsylvania divided. New Hampshire and North Carolina not in the room. He looked at the line for Pennsylvania for some time. He had sat at that table. He knew, more or less, the men who sat at it now, and he could see them quite clearly, looking at each other, and dividing.

And there was a letter, folded small inside the rest, addressed to him in a hand he knew. It was short, for its author.

Sir, You will see by the enclosed what the Congress has done. I moved it myself, and lost it. You told us, by saying nothing, that we had been asked this before. We have now given the same answer twice, and I do not believe there is a power on earth that could make us give a different one, unless it were the King of England, who has not been asked. I am, Sir, with great respect, your most obedient servant, John Adams.

Franklin laughed out loud at that, alone on the bench, so that a gardener among the box hedges below looked up. It was the best thing in the packet. It was the only thing in it that was true all the way through.

---

He sent for the others after dinner, and they came, and they behaved, as they had in December, exactly as they were.

Mr Deane read the resolution standing at the window, and when he had finished he sat down rather suddenly, as if somebody had taken the chair away and then put it back. He had been in France for two years. He had bought the muskets that had won at Saratoga, on credit, from men who had been promised that the King of France would stand behind the Congress’s word; and he had been waiting since December for the treaty that would make it so, and his own name honest with it. He said nothing at all for a while. Then he said, in a low voice, that his brother had ridden five hundred miles to carry it.

Mr Lee came over from Chaillot at four and read it twice, the second time aloud, as if he suspected Franklin of having altered it on the way, and then said that it was what came of sending a letter with no opinion in it. A plain recommendation from the commissioners, signed by all three, would have carried the Congress. He had said so in December. He had been overruled.

“You signed it, Mr Lee,” Franklin said mildly.

“I signed it because you had written it already, and it was too late to do anything else.”

“Your brother seconded the motion, Mr Lee, and Mr Adams moved it. They knew my opinion; I gave it them in seventy-six. They had the King of France’s, in his own minister’s words. And they voted, and they lost.” Franklin folded the resolution along its creases. “A Congress is not a horse, Mr Lee. You cannot carry it by kicking it harder.”

Lee went very white, as he did, and said a good deal for some time about the conduct of the commission since it came to France. Franklin let him say it. He had found that Mr Lee was like weather: it was no use arguing with it, and it always stopped.

When it had stopped, Lee said that they must all three go to Versailles in the morning, in a body, to give the Count the Congress’s answer with the proper ceremony.

“No,” said Franklin.

They both looked at him.

“Three gentlemen in a carriage are an embassy,” he said. “An embassy that comes to say no is an insult, and the Count will be obliged to take it as one, whether he wishes to or not. One old man in a hired coach who comes to say that he is sorry is only an old man.” He put the paper in his pocket. “I shall go. I have been refused by kings before, a good many times. I have never yet had to refuse one, and I should like to do it properly.”

---

He went on the Thursday, in a hackney coach, as he had gone in December, and was taken not to the palace but to the minister’s offices in the town, where a great many gentlemen in good coats were waiting in an anteroom with papers in their hands, and were made to go on waiting while the American was shown straight through.

Vergennes received him standing, by a window that looked out on to a courtyard full of carriages, and Gérard was with him. Franklin gave him the paper. He had had Temple make a French copy, very carefully, in his best hand, so that the Count should not have to have it read to him; and the Count read it through once, without any expression at all, and gave it to Gérard, who had read it before Franklin was in the room. Franklin could see that from his face.

“So,” said Vergennes. “They will not.”

“They will not, Monsieur le Comte. I am sorry.”

“Are you, Doctor?”

“I am sorry for a great many things. I am seventy-two, and I find that I can be sorry for several of them at once.” Franklin sat down, because he had not been asked to and his foot was bad. “I am sorry that the Congress has refused a great kindness from His Majesty. I am sorry that it refused it four colonies to six, because I can count, and four was nearer than I expected and further than I hoped. And I am sorry for myself, a little, because I voted for this in a room in Philadelphia two years ago and lost, and I have now carried it across the sea and lost it again, which I think must be a distinction of some kind.”

Vergennes did not smile. He sat down himself, after a moment, across the table, and folded his hands on it.

“You will understand, Doctor,” he said, “that His Majesty cannot sign a treaty with men who will not say what they are.”

“They have said what they are. They have said it twice. They are the King of England’s subjects, in arms against his ministers, and they mean to remain so until he gives them a Parliament.” Franklin spread his hands. “I do not say it is a convenient thing to be. I say it is what they are. And I would ask you, Monsieur le Comte, to consider whether it is so very inconvenient for France.”

“Go on.”

“They will not sign your treaty. They have not signed the King of England’s either. They resolved in April that they would not so much as talk to his commissioners until his fleets and armies were withdrawn, and they will tell the commissioners the same, wherever the commissioners find them. They want the one thing the King of England will not give, and he will not give it, Monsieur le Comte. He would lose his Crown sooner. I lived in his capital for the best part of fifteen years, and I never once saw him change his mind. So the war in America will go on, for as long as he is King, or until somebody changes his mind for him, which nobody has yet managed.” Franklin leaned back. “Every regiment he sends to America is a regiment that is not in the Channel. Every ship that watches the coast of New England is a ship that is not off Brest. You do not need a treaty for that. You need the Americans to keep fighting, which they will, because they are obstinate and because they have nothing else to do; and you need them to have powder to fight with, which they will not have unless His Majesty is good enough to go on selling it to them on credit.” He paused. “I am telling you, sir, that the King of England is the best ally you have. He will keep the Americans in the field far better than any treaty of mine.”

Gérard made a small sound that might have been a laugh. Vergennes looked at Franklin for a long moment, with his careful, round, unreadable face.

“You argue very well for a man who has lost,” he said.

“I have had a great deal of practice at that too.”

---

Then the Count did a thing Franklin had not expected. He got up, and went to a table by the wall, and came back with a sheet in a clerk’s fair hand, and laid it in front of him.

“His Majesty will sign this tomorrow,” he said. “The King’s printer will have it in every port in France within the week. I tell you so that you will not read it first in a newspaper.”

It was a letter from the King to the Admiral of France, and it began, Mon cousin, and it spoke of the insult offered to the King’s flag by a frigate of the King of England against His Majesty’s frigate the Belle Poule, off Ushant, in June; and of other frigates taken, and a lugger; and it said that these things had obliged His Majesty to put an end to the moderation he had proposed to himself, and that the dignity of his Crown required him at last to use reprisals, and to act hostilely against England. His captains were to fall upon the King of England’s ships wherever they found them.

Franklin read it through his lower glasses, slowly, and then took them off.

“This is a war,” he said.

“It is His Majesty’s war. It was always going to be His Majesty’s war, Doctor. M. Gérard told you so in December, at your own house, in so many words, and you were good enough to write them down for your Congress: that His Majesty would consider his own interests, which were not so very different from yours.” Vergennes took the paper back. “M. d’Estaing sailed from Toulon in April with twelve ships of the line. He opened his orders at sea on the twentieth of May. They did not send him to America, Doctor. They sent him to the islands. If His Majesty is to fight the King of England, he will fight him for Martinique and Guadeloupe, and for the English islands beside them, and for the sugar, and not for a Parliament in Philadelphia that your Congress does not even have.”

“And the supplies?”

“Will continue, as they have continued. For as long as it is His Majesty’s interest that the King of England should be kept busy in America.” The Count almost smiled. “You have just told me, very eloquently, how long that is likely to be.”

He rose. Franklin rose with him, more slowly. At the door Vergennes stopped and said, in a different voice, as if it were a thing he had been saving:

“Opinion decides everything, Doctor, and in war above all. If we cease to fear the English, they will soon cease to be formidable. Your Saratoga taught Europe that they could be beaten. It does not much matter, for that purpose, what your Congress chooses to call itself afterwards.” He bowed. “I am sorry too. You may tell your Congress so, if you like. I do not think it will believe you.”

---

The King signed it on the Friday. It was printed by the King’s printer and sent to the ports, as the Count had said, and was in every café in Paris within the week, and the town went to war as it went to the Opera, in its best clothes, singing.

They named a hat after the Belle Poule. Franklin was told this by three different ladies in one week, and saw it on a fourth, a frigate in full sail on top of a head of powdered hair, and thought that it was the most sensible thing he had seen anybody do about the war. At the end of the month the fleets met off Ushant, M. d’Orvilliers and Admiral Keppel, and fought all one afternoon and parted, and both sides claimed it. Franklin read both accounts at breakfast with great attention and believed neither, and went on with his egg.

Paris remembered Saratoga and France’s declaration, with nothing awkward between them. The same ladies who had condoled with Franklin in December congratulated him in July. He accepted it, and saw that the muskets kept going to Nantes.

Mr Deane did not bear it so well. He took to staying in his room. Mr Lee wrote letters to Congress, Franklin had no doubt, about the conduct of the commission. Dr Bancroft was ill, and went to bed. And the supplies went on: the muskets and the powder and the cloth, from Nantes and Bordeaux and Le Havre, in ships that sailed under French colours now with nothing to hide, past the King of England’s cruisers, who were busy elsewhere.

---

He thought, that summer, more often than he wanted to, about the old man in the Academy, who had died in May. Franklin found himself, in July, the oldest famous man in Paris, a position he had not sought and did not enjoy.

It had been at the end of April, at a public sitting of the Academy of Sciences, in the Louvre: M. de Voltaire, eighty-three, back in Paris after nearly thirty years to be adored to death, and the American, seventy-two, and the hall full to the doors. They had been made to sit side by side, and then the whole room had begun to call out for something, and he and Voltaire had stood up and shaken hands, like two Englishmen at a funeral; and that had not been enough; and the clamour had gone on until somebody explained to them what was wanted. They were to embrace each other, in the French manner. So they had. Two old men, the one in his own thin grey hair and the other in his great wig, kissing each other on both cheeks in front of the Academy of Sciences, and the room in tears; and somebody had cried out how charming it was, to see Solon embrace Sophocles.

On the night he came home from Versailles he had gone upstairs with a candle and stopped before the clothes press. The velvet suit was still in its bag. He had not opened the door.

At the desk he drew out a clean sheet. On it he wrote William’s name, then laid the pen down. They are the King’s subjects, he had told Vergennes that afternoon, and had heard William in it. William had said exactly that to him across a table in the autumn of seventy-five, and he had not been able to answer.

He waited until the candle needed snuffing. Then he put the sheet in the desk drawer, under the letters for Congress, and went to bed.

---

In September Madame Brillon took a party out to the Moulin Joly.

It was M. Watelet’s garden, on an island in the Seine below Paris, a famous place, with a mill and willows and little bridges and the river going by on both sides; and they spent the whole of a fine day there, eating and walking and being shown things, while Madame Brillon’s daughters ran ahead and her husband talked to M. Watelet about the mill. At some point in the afternoon Franklin stopped by himself in one of the walks, and stayed behind the company. He had been shown, a little before, the skeletons of a kind of small fly that lived on the water there: the ephemera, which was born and grew old and died within a single day. And he found a living company of them on a leaf, and stood looking at them for some time, with his spectacles on, until Madame Brillon came back to find him and scolded him for being lost.

He wrote it out for her on a Sunday, at his table, in the evening. It was a bagatelle. He wrote bagatelles for her, and she read them aloud to her guests and laughed, and it pleased him more than anything that had happened to him in France.

He wrote that the young flies disputed the merits of two foreign musicians, a cousin and a moscheto, as if sure of living a month. Then he wrote the next sentence and stopped.

Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise, just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and imperfections of foreign music.

He let it stand. Then he wrote the old one, the grey-headed one who was single on another leaf, talking to himself. He had lived seven of the eighteen hours of the world, the old fly said, a great age, no less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time; he had seen generations born, flourish and expire; and he did not expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general!

Then he finished it, as he had known he would finish it from the moment he stood on the path by the leaf, in his own voice, for her: that to him, after all his eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remained, but the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good lady ephemerae, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante.

He sanded the bagatelle, folded it and wrote Madame Brillon’s name. When he opened the desk drawer to put away the pen, the sheet with William’s name on it was lying where he had left it, under the letters for Congress. He shut the drawer.