From what we have said, it is plain enough that the friendship felt by Madame Helvétius for the Abbés Morellet and de la Roche was shared by Franklin. When he touched at Southampton, after leaving Havre, on his return to America, he wafted another fond farewell to Madame Helvétius; "I will always love you," he said, "think of me sometimes, and write sometimes to your B. F." This letter, too, contained the usual waggish reference to the Abbés. "Adieu, my very, very, very dear amie. Wish us a good voyage, and tell the good Abbés to pray for us, since that is their profession." The Very Humble Petition to Madame Helvétius from her Cats was long ascribed to Franklin, but it was really written by the Abbé Morellet. After reading it, Franklin wrote to the Abbé that the rapidity, with which the good lady's eighteen cats were increasing, would, in time, make their cause insupportable, and that their friends should, therefore, advise them to submit voluntarily either to transportation or castration. How deeply the Abbé Morellet was attached to Franklin is feelingly revealed in the letters which he wrote to him after the latter had arrived safely in America; to say nothing of the Abbé's Memoirs.
May your days [he wrote in one of these letters] be prolonged and be free from pain; may your friends long taste the sweetness and the charm of your society, and may those whom the seas have separated from you be still happy in the thought that the end of your career will be, as our good La Fontaine says, "the evening of a fine day."
Then, after some political reflections, suggested by the liberal institutions of America, the Abbé indulges in a series of gay comments on the habit that their Lady of Auteuil had, in her excessive love of coffee, of robbing him of his share of the cream, on the vicious bulldog brought over by Temple to France from England and on the host of cats, that had multiplied in the woodhouse and woodyard at Auteuil, under the patronage of their mistress, and did nothing but keep their paws in their furred gowns, and warm themselves in the sun. Friends of liberty, these cats, the Abbé said, were entirely out of place under the governments of Europe. Nothing could be more suitable than to load a small vessel with them and ship them to America. Another letter from the Abbé concluded with these heartfelt words:
I shall never forget the happiness I have enjoyed in knowing you, and seeing you intimately. I write to you from Auteuil, seated in your arm-chair, on which I have engraved, Benjamin Franklin hic sedebat, and having by my side the little bureau, which you bequeathed to me at parting, with a drawer full of nails to gratify the love of nailing and hammering, which I possess in common with you. But believe me, I have no need of all these helps to cherish your endeared remembrance, and to love you,
"Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos reget artus."
During their jolly intercourse in France, the Abbé Morellet and Franklin touched glasses in two highly convivial productions. On one of the anniversaries of the birth of Franklin, or of American liberty, the Abbé could not remember which, the Abbé composed a drinking song in honor of Franklin, and among the letters written by Franklin when he was in France was one to the Abbé in which wine is lauded in terms of humorous exaggeration. One of the verses of the Abbé's production refers to the American War, and has been translated in these words by Parton:
"Never did mankind engage
In a war with views more sage;
They seek freedom with design,
To drink plenty of French wine;
Such has been
The intent of Benjamin."
The other verses are no better and no worse, and the whole poem is even more inferior in wit to Franklin's letter to the Abbé than the Very Humble Petition to Madame Helvétius from her Cats, clever though it be, is to Franklin's Journey to the Elysian Fields. If we had nothing but these bibulous productions to judge by, we might infer that love of wine, quite as much as love of Madame Helvétius was the tie of connection between the Abbé Morellet and Franklin. Indeed, in the letter to Franklin with respect to the cats, the Abbé was quite as candid about expressing his partiality for one form of spirits as Franklin was in his unblushing eulogy of wine. He did not know, he said, what duties his cats, in the unsettled condition of the commercial relations between France and the United States, would be made to pay on arriving at Philadelphia; "and then," he continued, "if my vessel should find nothing to load with among you but grain, it could not touch at our islands to take in sugar, or to bring me back good rum either, which I love much."
When the Abbé de la Roche made a gift to Franklin of a volume of Helvétius' poems, Franklin was quick to give him a recompense in the form of a little drinking song which he had composed some forty years before. The plan of this poem is for the chorus, whenever the singer dwells upon any other source of gratification, to insist so vociferously upon friends and a bottle as the highest as to finally, so to speak, drown the singer out.
Thus: