Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia: Chapters 10–12

No American, with the exception of Charles Lindbergh, a century and a half later, ever received such an exciting and tumultuous welcome in Paris as seventy-year-old Ben.

"Why, he isn’t even a college graduate!" said some, and of course this was true. Ben had never been near a college except to accept some of the highest honorary degrees they could bestow.

But Ben was weak from confinement in his cabin and scarcely able to walk when he and the others went ashore.

"Bandits have a habit of murdering poverty- stricken travelers,” said Captain Wilkes.

"It is as old and infirm as I am, and probably of an age with me.”

Into the broken-down old coach they piled—Ben and his two grandchildren, and all the trunks and bags and bundles and boxes that go with such a tour. Little Benjamin Bache considered it a great lark.

He had been in France twice before and he loved the country and its people. Yet he did not suppose, in his modesty, that they had ever heard of him.

As the carriage lumbered on, the news ran ahead of it.

"Pray do not trouble yourselves unduly. I must push on to Paris with all speed.”

He carried a plain walking stick instead of the sword usually worn by gentlemen, and the French newspapers made a great point of his being unarmed. In that age of powdered and perfumed dandies, with their satin knee breeches, embroidered coats, and lace ruffles, Ben was a real curiosity.

Every shop window displayed pictures of Dr. Franklin, and Ben’s plain, good-humored face was soon looking down over every mantelpiece in town.

The king was in his twenties, a great, overgrown, fat boy, who loved to tinker with machinery—locks and clocks—and found a kindred spirit in the American scientist.

The king was in his twenties, a great, overgrown, fat boy, who loved to tinker with machinery—locks and clocks—and found a kindred spirit in the American scientist.

"If you are questioned regarding our opinion of Dr. Franklin,” Vergennes said, speaking for the King of France, "you may say without hesitation that we esteem him as much on account of his patriotism as the wisdom of his conduct, and it has been owing in great part to this cause, and to the confidence we put in the veracity of Dr. Franklin, that we have determined to relieve the pecuniary embarrassment in which he has been placed by Congress.”

"If you are questioned regarding our opinion of Dr. Franklin,” Vergennes said, speaking for the King of France, "you may say without hesitation that we esteem him as much on account of his patriotism as the wisdom of his conduct, and it has been owing in great part to this cause, and to the confidence we put in the veracity of Dr. Franklin, that we have determined to relieve the pecuniary embarrassment in which he has been placed by Congress.”

His face appeared on ladies’ brooches and bracelets, on medallions worn around the neck, on the tops of boxes and the sides of vases, on plaques to hang on the wall, in portraits, and in sculptured busts.

His face appeared on ladies’ brooches and bracelets, on medallions worn around the neck, on the tops of boxes and the sides of vases, on plaques to hang on the wall, in portraits, and in sculptured busts.

"This is my grandson, William Franklin,” Ben said humbly. “Will you give him your benediction?”
“God and Liberty," said Voltaire, “this is the only benediction that is fit for a grandson of Mr. Franklin.”

Franklin did not have either the money or the room to give parties and pay people back for the kindnesses they had shown him. Yet he was a hospitable soul, and as much as he could, he did have company.

Then, with a lack of ceremony unknown in diplomatic circles, the guests helped themselves and stood or sat around the flower gardens, eating. This was considered a quaint American custom by the French, and word of it appears in several letters of the times.

"I like to converse at large with such ingenious and worthy men as are pleased to honor me with their friendship," he said.

The squirrel, who was called Skugg, was finally killed by a dog, and at the request of the girls Franklin wrote for it his famous epitaph:
Here Skugg
Lies snug
As a bug
In a rug.

In France, Franklin’s friends numbered about the same as the population of the country, including everybody from the king and queen to the humblest workman.

When Louis XVI bade him farewell, he presented Ben with a medallion containing a small painting of the king surrounded by four hundred diamonds.

When Ben set out for home, the litter and the royal mules led a procession of carriages, in which dozens of his friends rode to the great North Gate of Paris.

He was reconciled with his son, whose desertion of the American cause had wounded him deeply, and he was at last honored at home as he had been abroad.

He was elected president of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and later re-elected three times.

Orations were written by all the great writers alive and spoken in public places by all the great orators.

Humble men stood around on street corners and in the taverns and spoke their own little eulogies. Women wept openly in the streets, and children felt suddenly lost and lonely. A friend of man had gone out of the world.

He advocated paper money in America and helped encourage business.

He advocated inoculation for smallpox many years before it came into general use.

During that time he was able to get the Stamp Act repealed.

He obtained a sizable loan for the American colonies from the French Government at a time when they needed it most.

He advocated the abolition of slavery and published pamphlets on the subject.

Ben Franklin said a great many things that are worth remembering, but perhaps he never said anything more important than this: "Where liberty dwells, there is my country.”