[33] The Diary of John Adams shows that shortly after he arrived in France Franklin took pains to lay before him the lamentable situation created by the impracticable tempers of the Lees and Izard. It would have been well for the reputation of Adams if this conversation had resulted in a thorough understanding between Franklin and himself, but the bias that he brought to France as a member of the Adams-Lee faction in Congress and the inability of his egotistical, jealous, suspicious and bustling, though honorable and fearless, nature, to reconcile itself to the overshadowing fame and influence of Franklin at the French Court drew him into working relations with Lee and Izard, which abundantly verified all that Franklin had said to him about them. "There are two men in the world," he declares in his Diary, "who are men of honor and integrity, I believe, but whose prejudices and violent tempers would raise quarrels in the Elysian fields, if not in Heaven." At times the vanity of Adams—easily mortified, easily elated as all vanity is—was humbled by some fresh proof of the dwarfing prominence of Franklin. "Neither Lee nor myself is looked upon of much consequence," he observes in his Diary. On another occasion, when Arthur Lee suggested that the papers of the mission should be kept in a room in his own house, Adams objected for the reason, among others, that nine tenths of the public letters would ever be carried where Dr. Franklin was. These were but temporary reactions. When down, the vanity of Adams was soon on its legs again. The reminder given by Vergennes to the officious, tactless reasonings and strictures, to which he was subjected by Adams, that Franklin was the sole American plenipotentiary in France, and the steps that the latter was compelled to take, both by the request of Vergennes and his own sense of the peril, that such injudicious conduct on the part of Adams signified to the American cause, to smooth over the rupture, sent Adams off to Holland in a resentful but subdued state of mind. But his success in negotiating a loan in Holland and the prospect of engaging in a matter of such supreme importance as the final negotiations for peace lifted him up to giddy heights of intoxicated self-importance again. Referring to the loan in his Diary, he says: "The compliment of Monsieur, Vous êtes le Washington de la négociation (Sir, you are the Washington of the negotiation) was repeated to me by more than one person.... A few of these compliments would kill Franklin if they should come to his ears." His observations in his Diary on Jay and Franklin, when he came over to France to participate with them in the final negotiations for peace, are equally characteristic. "Between two as subtle spirits as any in this world, the one malicious, the other, I think honest, I shall have a delicate, a nice, a critical part to act. Franklin's cunning will be to divide us; to this end he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will manœuvre. My curiosity will at least be employed in observing his invention and his artifice."
[34] "I think," said Franklin in a letter to Charles W. F. Dumas, in 1778, "that a young State like a young Virgin, should modestly stay at home, & wait the Application of Suitors for an Alliance with her; and not run about offering her Amity to all the World; and hazarding their Refusal." "Our Virgin," he added a line or so later, "is a jolly one; and tho. at present not very rich, Will in time be a great Fortune."
[35] Franklin was entirely cognizant of the motive by which Lee was influenced. Referring in a letter to Thomas Cushing, dated July 7, 1773, to censure with which he had been visited for supposed neglect in not sending earlier intelligence to Massachusetts of certain English measures affecting her welfare, he said, "This Censure, tho. grievous, does not so much surprize me, as I apprehended from the Beginning, that between the Friends of an old Agent, my Predecessor, who thought himself hardly us'd in his Dismission, and those of a young one impatient for the Succession, my situation was not likely to be a very comfortable one, as my Faults could scarce pass unobserved."
[36] On one occasion this expression gave rise to an incident that is worth recalling. We tell it as it is told by Parton. A large cake was sent to the apartment in which the envoys were assembled, bearing this inscription: Le digne Franklin—the worthy Franklin. Upon reading the inscription, Mr. Deane said: "As usual, Doctor, we have to thank you for our accommodation, and to appropriate your present to our joint use." "Not at all," said Franklin, "this must be intended for all the Commissioners; only these French people can not write English. They mean no doubt, Lee, Deane, Franklin." "That might answer," remarked the magnanimous Lee, "but we know that whenever they remember us at all they always put you first."
[37] "It must," Adams says in his letter to the Boston Patriot of Aug. 21, 1811, with the whiff of bombast that is wafted to us from so many of his vigorous and vivid utterances, "suffice to say that Mr. Izard, with a fund of honor, integrity, candor and benevolence in his character, which must render him eternally estimable in the sight of all moral and social beings, was, nevertheless, the most passionate, and in his passions the most violent and unbridled in his expressions, of any man I ever knew."
[38] In the latter part of his life, it must have severely taxed the memory of Franklin to recollect all the honors paid to him by educational institutions and learned societies of one kind or another. The honorary degree of Master of Arts was conferred on him in July, 1753, by Harvard College, and in September of the same year by Yale College. In April, 1756, the degree of Master of Arts was bestowed on him by William and Mary College. In 1759, he received the degree of Doctor in Laws from the University of St. Andrews, and in 1762, he was made a Doctor of Civil Laws by the University of Oxford. At various times in his life, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an Honorary Fellow of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, a member of the Royal Society of London, one of the eight foreign associates of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, an honorary member of the Medical Society of London, the first foreign associate of the Royal Society of Medicine at Paris, and a member of other learned societies or academies at Padua, Turin, Orleans, Madrid, Rotterdam, Göttingen and elsewhere.
[39] "It would be difficult," says Count Ségur, "to describe the eagerness and delight with which the American envoys, the agents of a people in a state of insurrection against their monarch, were received in France, in the bosom of an ancient monarchy. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the luxury of our capital, the elegance of our fashions, the magnificence of Versailles, the still brilliant remains of the monarchical pride of Louis XIV., and the polished and superb dignity of our nobility on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the almost rustic apparel, the plain but firm demeanor, the free and direct language of the envoys, whose antique simplicity of dress and appearance seemed to have introduced within our walls, in the midst of the effeminate and servile refinement of the eighteenth century, some sages contemporary with Plato, or republicans of the age of Cato and of Fabius. This unexpected apparition produced upon us a greater effect in consequence of its novelty, and of its occurring precisely at the period when literature and philosophy had circulated amongst us an unusual desire for reforms, a disposition to encourage innovations, and the seeds of an ardent attachment to liberty."
[40] Compassion, it must be confessed, was not the only motive that made Franklin so eager to secure the freedom of his imprisoned countrymen. "If we once had our Prisoners from England," he wrote to M. de Sartine on Feb. 13, 1780, "several other privateers would immediately be manned with them."
[41] A Commissioner, Thomas Barclay, was appointed by Congress to audit the accounts of all the servants of the United States who had been entrusted with the expenditure of money in Europe during the Revolutionary War. "I rendered to him," said Franklin in a letter to Cyrus Griffin, the President of Congress, dated Nov. 29, 1788, "all my accounts, which he examined, and stated methodically. By this statement he found a balance due me on the 4th of May, 1785, of 7,533 livres, 19 sols, 3 den., which I accordingly received of the Congress banker; the difference between my statement and his being only seven sols, which by mistake I had overcharged;—about three pence half penny sterling."
[42] The dogged steadfastness with which Vergennes pursued his task of humbling the pride and power of England through her rebellious colonies was in keeping with the main point of what Choiseul had said about him as the French Ambassador at Constantinople: "The Count de Vergennes has something to say against whatever is proposed to him, but he never finds any difficulty in carrying out his instructions. Were we to order him to send us the Vizier's head, he would write that it was dangerous, but the head would come." The levity of Maurepas, as President of the Council of State, and the grave diligence of Vergennes, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, led D'Aranda to say of them, "I chat with M. de Maurepas, I negotiate with M. de Vergennes."