When the reader is told that this letter ended with the words, "to be shown to our Lady of Auteuil," his mind is not unprepared for the graphic description by Abigail Adams of a dinner at which Madame Helvétius was the central figure:
She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air; upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, "Ah, mon Dieu, where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?" You must suppose her speaking all this in French. "How I look!" said she, taking hold of a chemise made of tiffany, which she had on over a blue lutestring, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman; her hair was frizzled; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty gauze half-handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever my maids wore was bowed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders. She ran out of the room; when she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other; upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, "Hélas! Franklin;" then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief of the conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hands into the Doctor's, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both the gentlemen's chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor's neck.
I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from affectation or stiffness of behaviour, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor's word; but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although sixty years of age, and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast. After dinner, she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lapdog, who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the floor she wiped it up with her chemise. This is one of the Doctor's most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him. She is rich, and is my near neighbour; but I have not yet visited her. Thus you see, my dear, that manners differ exceedingly in different countries. I hope however, to find among the French ladies manners more consistent with my ideas of decency, or I shall be a mere recluse.
This, of course, in part, was but the New England snowdrop expressing its disapproval of the full-blown red rose of France, but it is impossible for all the pigments in the picture, painted by the skilful hand of Abigail Adams, to have been supplied by the moral austerity of Puritanism. Miss Adams, we might add, followed up her mother's impression with a prim ditto in her journal: "Dined at Mr. Franklin's by invitation; a number of gentlemen and Madame Helvétius, a French lady sixty years of age. Odious indeed do our sex appear when divested of those ornaments, with which modesty and delicacy adorn us." But we suspect that the Doctor was right in saying that Madame Helvétius, free and tawdry as she seemed to Abigail Adams and her daughter, was one of the best women in the world; that is to say her world. We are told that, when she was convalescing from an illness, four hundred persons assembled at Auteuil to express the pleasure they felt at the prospect of her recovery. Beneath the noisy, lax manners, which Mrs. Adams delineates so mercilessly, there must have been another and a very different Madame Helvétius to have won such a tribute as the following from a man who had known what it was to be tenderly beloved by more than one pure, thoroughly refined and accomplished woman:
And now I mention your friends, let me tell you, that I have in my way been trying to form some hypothesis to account for your having so many, and of such various kinds. I see that statesmen, philosophers, historians, poets, and men of learning of all sorts are drawn around you, and seem as willing to attach themselves to you as straws about a fine piece of amber. It is not that you make pretensions to any of their sciences; and if you did, similarity of studies does not always make people love one another. It is not that you take pains to engage them; artless simplicity is a striking part of your character. I would not attempt to explain it by the story of the ancient, who, being asked why philosophers sought the acquaintance of kings, and kings not that of philosophers, replied that philosophers knew what they wanted, which was not always the case with kings. Yet thus far the comparison may go, that we find in your sweet society that charming benevolence, that amiable attention to oblige, that disposition to please and be pleased, which we do not always find in the society of one another. It springs from you; it has its influence on us all, and in your company we are not only pleased with you, but better pleased with one another and ourselves.
There can be no doubt that the friendship between the two was a real, genuine sentiment. When Franklin was doubting whether he was not too old and decrepit to cross the Atlantic, she was one of the three friends who urged him to spend his last days in France, and live with them. It was hardly fair, therefore, when she exclaimed after the departure of Franklin from France, in the presence of Madame Brillon, "Ah, that great man, that dear man, we shall see him no more," for Madame Brillon to retort, "It is entirely your fault, Madame."
From Havre he sent back tender farewells to his "très chere amie." They were awaiting, he said, their baggage and fellow-voyager, Mr. Houdon, the sculptor. "When they come, we shall quit France, the country of the world that I love the best; and I shall leave there my dear Helvetia. She can be happy there. I am not sure of being happy in America; but it is necessary for me to go there. Things seem to me to be badly arranged here below, when I see beings so well constituted to be happy together compelled to separate." Then after a message of friendship to "the Abbés the good Abbés," the vale dies out in these fond words: "I do not tell you that I love you. I might be told that there was nothing strange or meritorious in that, because the whole world loves you. I only hope that you will always love me a little."
Nor did the separation worked by the Atlantic produce any change in these feelings. In the letters written by Franklin to Madame Helvétius, and the members of her circle, after his return to Philadelphia, there is the same spirit of affection for her and for them, as well as a wistful retrospect of his chats with her on her thousand sofas, his walks with her in her garden, and the repasts at her table, always seasoned by sound sense, sprightliness and friendship. One of his commissions seems to have been to obtain a cardinal red bird for the "good dame," as he calls her in a letter to the Abbé Morellet from Philadelphia. "The good Dame, whom we all love, and whose Memory I shall love and honour as long as I have any Existence," were his words. But the commission was difficult of execution. The Virginia cardinal, he wrote to the Abbé, was a tender bird that stood the sea but poorly. Several sent out to France for their dame by Mr. Alexander, in his tobacco ships, had never arrived, he understood, and, "unless a Friend was going in the Ship who would take more than common Care of them," he supposed, "one might send an hundred without landing one alive."
They would be very happy, I know [he said], if they were once under her Protection; but they cannot come to her, and she will not come to them. She may remember the Offer I made her of 1,000 Acres of Woodland, out of which she might cut a great Garden and have 1,000 Aviaries if she pleased. I have a large Tract on the Ohio where Cardinals are plenty. If I had been a Cardinal myself perhaps I might have prevail'd with her.
In his efforts to transport the Cardinal, Franklin even enlisted the services of Mr. Paradise, who, if contemporary gossip is reliable, might well have pleaded the preoccupation imposed upon him of protecting himself from the beak of his own termagant wife. Madame Helvétius, however, was not so eager for a cardinal as not to be willing to wait until one could be brought over by a proper escort. "I am in no hurry at all," she wrote to Franklin; "I will wait; for I am not willing to be the death of these pretty creatures. I will wait." In this same letter, there is an amusing mixture of tenderness and banter. Declining health and advancing years, she said, would but enable them the sooner to meet again as well as to meet again those whom they had loved, she a husband and he a wife; "but I believe," she wipes the moisture from her eyes long enough to say, "that you who have been a rogue (coquin) will be restored to more than one."