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 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.