And so quatrain preceded glass and chorus followed quatrain until every member of the eulogistic company had sung his or her song. The banqueters then rose from the table, and the Countess, followed by her relations, conducted Franklin to an arbor in her gardens, where he was presented with a Virginia locust by her gardener, which he was asked to honor the family by planting with his own hands. When he had done so, the Countess declaimed some additional lines, which were afterwards inscribed upon a marble pillar, erected near the tree:
"Sacred tree, lasting monument
Of the sojourn deigned to be made here by a sage,
Of these gardens henceforth the pride,
Receive here the just homage
Of our vows and of our incense;
And may you for all the ages,
Forever respected by time,
Live as long as his name, his laws and his deeds."
On their way back to the château, the concourse was met by a band which played an accompaniment, while the Countess and her kinsfolk sang this song:
"May this tree, planted by his benevolent hand,
Lifting up its new-born trunk,
Above the sterile elm,
By its odoriferous flower,
Make fragrant all this happy hamlet.
The lightning will lack power to strike it,
And will respect its summit and its branches,
'Twas Franklin who, by his prosperous labors,
Taught us to direct or to extinguish that,
While he was destroying other evils,
Still more for the earth's sake to be pitied."
This over, all returned to the château where they were engaged for some time in agreeable conversation. In the late afternoon, Franklin was conducted by the Countess and the rest to his carriage, and, when he was seated, they gathered about the open door of the vehicle, and the Countess addressed her departing guest in these words:
"Legislator of one world, and benefactor of two!
For all time mankind will owe thee its tribute,
And it is but my part that I here discharge
Of the debt that is thy due from all the ages."
The door of the carriage was then closed, and Franklin returned to Paris duly deified but as invincibly sensible as ever.
Another French woman with whom Franklin was on terms of familiar affection was the wife of his friend, Jean Baptiste Le Roy. His endearing term for her was petite femme de poche (little pocket wife), and, in a letter after his return to Philadelphia, she assured him that, as long as his petite femme de poche had the breath of life, she would love him.
On one occasion, when he was in France, she wrote to him, asking him to dine with her on Wednesday, and saying that she would experience great pleasure in seeing and embracing him. Assuredly, he replied, he would not fail her. He found too much pleasure in seeing her, and in hearing her speak, and too much happiness, when he held her in his arms, to forget an invitation so precious.
In another letter to her, after his return to America—the letter which drew forth her declaration that her love for him would last as long as her breath—he told her that she was very courageous to ascend so high in a balloon, and very good, when she was so near heaven, not to think of quitting her friends, and remaining with the angels. Competition might well have shunned an effort to answer such a flourish as that in kind, but a lady, who had been up in a balloon among the angels, was not the person to lack courage for any experiment. She only regretted, she said, that the balloon could not go very far, for, if it had been but able to carry her to him, she would have been among the angels, and would have given him proofs of the respect and esteem for him, ineffaceably engraved upon her heart. Sad to relate, in the same letter she tells Franklin that her husband had proved hopelessly recreant to every principle of honor and good feeling. We say, "sad to relate," not for general reasons only, but because Franklin, when he had heard in 1772 that Le Roy was well and happily married, had felicitated him on the event, and repeated his oft-asserted statement that matrimony is the natural condition of man; though he omitted this time his usual comparison of celibacy with the odd half of a pair of scissors. The estrangement between his little pocket wife and her husband, however, did not affect his feeling of devoted friendship for Jean Baptiste Le Roy. Some two years and five months later, when the wild Walpurgis night of the French Revolution was setting in, he wrote to Le Roy to find out why he had been so long silent. "It is now more than a year," he said, "since I have heard from my dear friend Le Roy. What can be the reason? Are you still living? Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge, for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?" The fact that Le Roy, who was a physicist of great reputation, was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society, led Franklin in one of his letters to address him as his "Dear double Confrère." Le Roy's three brothers, Pierre, Charles and David were also friends of Franklin. Indeed, in a letter to Jean Baptiste, Franklin spoke of David, to whom he addressed his valuable paper entitled Maritime Observations, as "our common Brother."