The Aviary of Madame Helvetius is a mawkishly sentimental little fable published in 1809 as part of a set of "Instructional narratives" for little girls, by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (1763-1842), who is remembered today chiefly as the librettist of Beethoven's Fidelio. In the story, a tame pigeon is sent to Madame bearing an anonymous begging letter; she trustingly obliges and has her money returned in due course, to outpourings of uplifting emotion, by a pretty member of the "deserving poor" . As far as I know Bouilly had no personal connection and is merely echoing Madame H's well-known kindness and fondness for birds.
Showing posts with label Madame Helvérius & her circle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Madame Helvérius & her circle. Show all posts
Sunday, 15 December 2013
Wednesday, 11 December 2013
Last glimpses of Madame Helvétius
The house in Auteuil
There are no surviving pictures of Madame Helvétius's house, then 24 Grande rue d’Auteuil, a country property nestling close to the Bois de Bologne between the royal Château of Coq (now demolished) and the village of Auteuil. The immense estate of the comtesse du Boufflers - now the exclusive Villa Montmorency compound, home to politicians and film stars - was just over the way.
The property was described in the deeds of sale as consisting of the house, which bordered the road, and a small pavilion, situated at the bottom of a park of two arpents in length.(An "arpent" was 78 yards, so, depending on width, we are envisaging an acre or two).
Built in about 1720, the main body of the house was flanked by two straight wings and included an elegant peristyle. A pretty iron gate led onto a courtyard containing a well and aviaries for Madame's many birds.
Antoine Guillois, writing in 1894, gives a detailed description of the interior culled from the memoirs of Ambroise Firmin-Didot and other local residents who were children at the time. Visitors entering by the coach entrance, found themselves on the ground floor where there was a kitchen, larder and greenhouse and a bathroom with a window onto the road. On the first floor, reached via a fine wrought iron staircase, was a spacious dining room with views onto both the road and courtyard, a grand salon which could accommodate up to fifty people, and two smaller reception rooms.
Guillois's youthful observers seemed to have been oddly preoccupied with details of furnishings - in the dining room: oak sideboard, table and side tables, five cane armchairs, chair covered with tapestry, gilded console and a marble basin mounted on the wall; in the mirrored salon: chiffonier with marble top, tables, settees with feather cushions and a whole assortment of other chairs and sofas upholstered in blue and white, plus a daybed with a blue damask cover; on the fireplace an enormous display of flowers in a blue porcelain bowl.
Across from the salon, the mistress's bedroom boasted more fine quality furniture and hangings of blue velvet and taffeta. French window gave out onto the terrace which commanded a view of the garden and which was shaded by a magnificent acacia with profuse blossom. It was here every morning that Madame would come to feed the birds. Rhododendrons, hortensias, roses and other plants flourished under the care of her chief gardener Richard. The pavilion in which La Roche and Cabanis lodged was approached by an avenue of lime trees and consisted of two bedrooms, a dining room and kitchen plus a salon with a central dome. There was also a small vegetable garden where the various children who frequented the house were given their own little plots to tend.
Madame Helvétius during the Revolution
In the dying years of the Ancien Régime, the void at Auteuil left by Franklin's departure was filled by a new generation of habitués, the poet Antoine Roucher, author of a vast and almost unreadable poem The Months, André Chenier, an intimate friend of Cabanis, Volney, the liberal nobles Destutt de Tracy and Eymar, and Condorcet, who in early 1789 brought his young wife to be presented to Madame. These men greeted the bright dawn of Revolution with uniform enthusiasm, with the exception only of the abbé Morellet, who, as a consequence, broke with Cabanis and La Roche and moved out with his furniture to a house in the valley of Montmorency at Cernay. Volney, Sieyès, Chamfort and La Chaise, the deputy for Brivé, now took up almost permanent residence. Cabanis, arriving from Paris on 15th July, was introduced to Mirabeau and became his close collaborator.
In the Revolution's first years of liberal promise, the gentle abbé La Roche, true to his antique exemplars, abandoned his leisured life of book collecting to enter the public arena. He was elected mayor of Auteuil ("the fat Mayor" quipped Cabanis) and later, though never having exercised ecclesiastical functions, took on the role of constitutional priest to protect the refractory incumbant and his flock. Both he and Cabanis featured prominently in a civic festival at Auteuil on 3 July 1791 in which a stone from the Bastille was installed in the Church (in which Madame's property entitled her to a private pew). It was La Roche who pronounced the opening discourse inviting the inhabitants of the village to "live as brothers and remain united to resist the chains of slavery."
A year later, on 5 August 1792, a second fête inaugurated, on a piece of ground next to Madame Helvétius's house, a new Town Hall in the style of a Grecian temple, containing busts of Rousseau, Voltaire, Franklin, Helvétius himself and Mirabeau. In the list of patriotic contributions Madame pledged 4,500 livres; Cabanis 1,200 and La Roche 900. André Chenier meanwhile saw his play Charles IX performed to acclaim before an audience which included Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins and Fabre d'Eglantine. Cabanis attended the dying Mirabeau as his physician but still returned faithfully to Madame Helvétius, herself ill and anxious if he was absent. He and La Roche now allied themselves closely with Condorcet, who in September 1792 established himself nearby at 2 Grande rue.
The Terror brought proscription and arrest. Roucher was imprisoned, as were Chamfort, Ginguené and Volney, and Condorcet was forced into hiding. In Auteuil itself Destutt de Tracy and the abbé La Roche were both detained, La Roche arrested in November 1793 and held first in the Abbaye, then in the Carmes prison and released only after the death of Robespierre. D'Andlau, Madame Helvétius's son-in-law, was briefly arrested and subsequently emigrated, although her daughters were protected, declared daughters of the Nation, in memory of their father.
Although personally safe, the elderly lady was deeply affected by events of the Terror and talked constantly of her friends that had disappeared and that she hoped to see again. On one occasion, obliged to go to Paris to visit her daughter who was sick, she fainted on the Place de la Revolution. Cabanis dedicated his Mélanges de littérature to her, composed, he said, to distract her from the mournful preoccupations left by the terrible experience of the Revolution.
At the height of the Terror, she had apparently hidden a considerable amount of money in the park, but forgotten its whereabouts. The sale deeds carried a clause stipulating what to do if it was ever recovered (which it never was).
After Thermidor the life of the salon recovered, and its surviving members - Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Volney, Garat, Ginguené, Daunou - formed the core of the so-called "Idéologues", leading lights in the reconstruction of intellectual institutions under the Directory and Empire. In May 1795 Cabanis married Charlotte-Felicité de Grouchy, sister of Madame Condorcet and the couple came to live in the pavillion. Bonaparte himself visited and commented on the smallness of the park, to which Madame Helvétius famously replied, "You cannot know General, how much happiness is to be found in three arpents of land".
Death and burial
"Notre Dame d'Auteuil" died on 13th August 1800 at the age of 81. She had retained her habit of rising early and had contracted a chest infection at the end of winter, which neither Cabanis nor his colleague Pierre de Roussel could cure. In her final days, she had with her Cabanis, his wife and two daughters, La Roche and Jean-Antoine-Cauvin Gallois, the Tribune and friend of Cabanis, who had lived with her since 1793. According to her wishes she was buried at the end of her park in a vault constructed on the right side of the pavillon. Helen Maria Williams recalled that "she always spoke with calmness of death, and pointed out to me the spot in her garden where her remains were to be deposited". Her burial, without formal religious ceremony, is described by her grandson Jean-Antoine-Claude-Adrien de Mun in a letter to Mme de Staël, dated 31st August 1800; he mentions neither the vault nor the the pavillion, but confirms that the coffin was placed in a tomb dug in her garden in accordance with her wishes.
Although she left the property to her granddaughters Madame willed enjoyment of the house to Cabanis and La Roche in the hope that they would continue to live there and watch over her ashes. This was not to be. The latter, a member of the corps législatif since 1799 retired to Orville in the Pas-de-Calais in 1803 where he died in 1806. Cabanis unexpectedly died in May 1808, his body transported to the Pantheon but his heart buried in the garden next to Madame Helvétius. In 1817, when the property left the family definitively, her remains were transferred to the nearby cemetery. After a first monument was destroyed in the bombardment of 1871, it was not until 1892 that a replacement tombstone was finally erected by public subscription.
In modern Paris, no trace survives of the house. An anonymous apartment block occupies the site, now 59 rue d'Auteuil
The property was rented from 1808 by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, the American-born physicist, who had married Lavoisier's widow. It then changed hands several times before being bought in 1854 by Prince Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte, whose father Lucien Bonaparte had once frequented Madame's salon; the "drama of 59 rue d'Auteuil" brought brief notoriety when Bonaparte was challenged to a duel and, refusing, short dead his opponent's emissary. During the Commune the Fédérés briefly established a headquarters in the house but, learning that it had belonged to Bonaparte, decided to burn it down instead. In July 1877 the small pavilion used by Morellet and Cabanis was also demolished. In latter times the site was occupied by the École Normale Israelite Orientale.
References
Antoine Guillois, Le salon de Mme Helvétius (1892)
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24820536M/Le_salon_de_Madame_Helv%C3%A9tius
M. Guillois was the great-grandson of Antoine Roucher and seems to be the main source of factual information on day-to-day life chez Madame Helvétius.
Helen Maria Williams, "Death of Madame Helvétius" in Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic, Vol. 2 (1801) [Available on Google Books]
.
Guy de la Prade, L'illustre société d'Auteuil 1772-1830, ou, La fascination de la liberté (1989)
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NNRwIR-h7ZMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[Free extracts on Google Books include a good chapter on the Revolution in Auteuil]
Details of 59 rue d'Auteuil in a website devoted to the 16th arrondissement :
http://mapage.noos.fr/hubert.demory/maison-helvetius.htm
 |
| Plaque on the site of the house |
The property was described in the deeds of sale as consisting of the house, which bordered the road, and a small pavilion, situated at the bottom of a park of two arpents in length.(An "arpent" was 78 yards, so, depending on width, we are envisaging an acre or two).
Built in about 1720, the main body of the house was flanked by two straight wings and included an elegant peristyle. A pretty iron gate led onto a courtyard containing a well and aviaries for Madame's many birds.
Antoine Guillois, writing in 1894, gives a detailed description of the interior culled from the memoirs of Ambroise Firmin-Didot and other local residents who were children at the time. Visitors entering by the coach entrance, found themselves on the ground floor where there was a kitchen, larder and greenhouse and a bathroom with a window onto the road. On the first floor, reached via a fine wrought iron staircase, was a spacious dining room with views onto both the road and courtyard, a grand salon which could accommodate up to fifty people, and two smaller reception rooms.
Guillois's youthful observers seemed to have been oddly preoccupied with details of furnishings - in the dining room: oak sideboard, table and side tables, five cane armchairs, chair covered with tapestry, gilded console and a marble basin mounted on the wall; in the mirrored salon: chiffonier with marble top, tables, settees with feather cushions and a whole assortment of other chairs and sofas upholstered in blue and white, plus a daybed with a blue damask cover; on the fireplace an enormous display of flowers in a blue porcelain bowl.
Across from the salon, the mistress's bedroom boasted more fine quality furniture and hangings of blue velvet and taffeta. French window gave out onto the terrace which commanded a view of the garden and which was shaded by a magnificent acacia with profuse blossom. It was here every morning that Madame would come to feed the birds. Rhododendrons, hortensias, roses and other plants flourished under the care of her chief gardener Richard. The pavilion in which La Roche and Cabanis lodged was approached by an avenue of lime trees and consisted of two bedrooms, a dining room and kitchen plus a salon with a central dome. There was also a small vegetable garden where the various children who frequented the house were given their own little plots to tend.
 |
| Franklin relics from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The Dresden china cups and saucers were a present from Madame Helvetius. According to Guillois, Madame's linen and tablewhere were those of a "modest bourgeoise" |
Madame Helvétius during the Revolution
In the dying years of the Ancien Régime, the void at Auteuil left by Franklin's departure was filled by a new generation of habitués, the poet Antoine Roucher, author of a vast and almost unreadable poem The Months, André Chenier, an intimate friend of Cabanis, Volney, the liberal nobles Destutt de Tracy and Eymar, and Condorcet, who in early 1789 brought his young wife to be presented to Madame. These men greeted the bright dawn of Revolution with uniform enthusiasm, with the exception only of the abbé Morellet, who, as a consequence, broke with Cabanis and La Roche and moved out with his furniture to a house in the valley of Montmorency at Cernay. Volney, Sieyès, Chamfort and La Chaise, the deputy for Brivé, now took up almost permanent residence. Cabanis, arriving from Paris on 15th July, was introduced to Mirabeau and became his close collaborator.
In the Revolution's first years of liberal promise, the gentle abbé La Roche, true to his antique exemplars, abandoned his leisured life of book collecting to enter the public arena. He was elected mayor of Auteuil ("the fat Mayor" quipped Cabanis) and later, though never having exercised ecclesiastical functions, took on the role of constitutional priest to protect the refractory incumbant and his flock. Both he and Cabanis featured prominently in a civic festival at Auteuil on 3 July 1791 in which a stone from the Bastille was installed in the Church (in which Madame's property entitled her to a private pew). It was La Roche who pronounced the opening discourse inviting the inhabitants of the village to "live as brothers and remain united to resist the chains of slavery."
 |
| The Church of Notre-Dame, Auteuil, rebuilt in the late 19th century |
 |
| Marc Louis Arlaud, Portrait of Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757-1808) |
Although personally safe, the elderly lady was deeply affected by events of the Terror and talked constantly of her friends that had disappeared and that she hoped to see again. On one occasion, obliged to go to Paris to visit her daughter who was sick, she fainted on the Place de la Revolution. Cabanis dedicated his Mélanges de littérature to her, composed, he said, to distract her from the mournful preoccupations left by the terrible experience of the Revolution.
At the height of the Terror, she had apparently hidden a considerable amount of money in the park, but forgotten its whereabouts. The sale deeds carried a clause stipulating what to do if it was ever recovered (which it never was).
After Thermidor the life of the salon recovered, and its surviving members - Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Volney, Garat, Ginguené, Daunou - formed the core of the so-called "Idéologues", leading lights in the reconstruction of intellectual institutions under the Directory and Empire. In May 1795 Cabanis married Charlotte-Felicité de Grouchy, sister of Madame Condorcet and the couple came to live in the pavillion. Bonaparte himself visited and commented on the smallness of the park, to which Madame Helvétius famously replied, "You cannot know General, how much happiness is to be found in three arpents of land".
Death and burial
"Notre Dame d'Auteuil" died on 13th August 1800 at the age of 81. She had retained her habit of rising early and had contracted a chest infection at the end of winter, which neither Cabanis nor his colleague Pierre de Roussel could cure. In her final days, she had with her Cabanis, his wife and two daughters, La Roche and Jean-Antoine-Cauvin Gallois, the Tribune and friend of Cabanis, who had lived with her since 1793. According to her wishes she was buried at the end of her park in a vault constructed on the right side of the pavillon. Helen Maria Williams recalled that "she always spoke with calmness of death, and pointed out to me the spot in her garden where her remains were to be deposited". Her burial, without formal religious ceremony, is described by her grandson Jean-Antoine-Claude-Adrien de Mun in a letter to Mme de Staël, dated 31st August 1800; he mentions neither the vault nor the the pavillion, but confirms that the coffin was placed in a tomb dug in her garden in accordance with her wishes.
 |
| Tomb of Madame Helvétius, who lies next to heart of Cabanis in the Auteuil cemetery |
In modern Paris, no trace survives of the house. An anonymous apartment block occupies the site, now 59 rue d'Auteuil
 |
| 59 rue d'Auteuil today |
 |
| "Drama of 59 rue d'Auteuil" |
 |
| École Normale Israelite Orientale. which occupied the site from the 1870s. |
The property was rented from 1808 by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, the American-born physicist, who had married Lavoisier's widow. It then changed hands several times before being bought in 1854 by Prince Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte, whose father Lucien Bonaparte had once frequented Madame's salon; the "drama of 59 rue d'Auteuil" brought brief notoriety when Bonaparte was challenged to a duel and, refusing, short dead his opponent's emissary. During the Commune the Fédérés briefly established a headquarters in the house but, learning that it had belonged to Bonaparte, decided to burn it down instead. In July 1877 the small pavilion used by Morellet and Cabanis was also demolished. In latter times the site was occupied by the École Normale Israelite Orientale.
References
Antoine Guillois, Le salon de Mme Helvétius (1892)
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24820536M/Le_salon_de_Madame_Helv%C3%A9tius
M. Guillois was the great-grandson of Antoine Roucher and seems to be the main source of factual information on day-to-day life chez Madame Helvétius.
Helen Maria Williams, "Death of Madame Helvétius" in Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic, Vol. 2 (1801) [Available on Google Books]
.
Guy de la Prade, L'illustre société d'Auteuil 1772-1830, ou, La fascination de la liberté (1989)
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NNRwIR-h7ZMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[Free extracts on Google Books include a good chapter on the Revolution in Auteuil]
Details of 59 rue d'Auteuil in a website devoted to the 16th arrondissement :
http://mapage.noos.fr/hubert.demory/maison-helvetius.htm
The cemetery at Auteuil:
http://www.landrucimetieres.fr/spip/spip.php?article1544
Note of 23/09/2015
I recently came across this anonymous terracotta bust of Mme Helvétius. It was Lot 48 in the sale of the Collection Paul Rousseau held in Toulon on 24 March 2012.
http://www.liveauctioneers.com/catalog/
28854_historical-souvenirs-about-french-revolution/page1?rows=20
http://www.landrucimetieres.fr/spip/spip.php?article1544
Note of 23/09/2015
I recently came across this anonymous terracotta bust of Mme Helvétius. It was Lot 48 in the sale of the Collection Paul Rousseau held in Toulon on 24 March 2012.
http://www.liveauctioneers.com/catalog/
28854_historical-souvenirs-about-french-revolution/page1?rows=20
Tuesday, 10 December 2013
Madame Helvétius's cats
 |
| Jean Jacques Bachelier, White angora cat chasing a butterfly Musée Lambinet. |
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Madame H. in "John Adams"
This is Madame Helvétius played by Judith Magre in the HBO TV mini-series John Adams, which was first broadcast in the States in 2008. The series was brilliant, but the portrait of Minette and her gathering is unkind, intended mainly as a dramatic device to highlight the discomfiture of the sober and Anglophone John Adams among the dissolute, sophisticated French. I'm not quite sure why Madame H., who was a well-preserved woman in her early sixties, is made to look eighty; nor why everyone, including the men, are caked in quite so much make-up.
Here is the miserable Adams doing his best to shine at small talk with foreigners:
In a memorably comic scene, Adams inadvertently bursts in on Franklin playing chess in the bath with his hostess.
This bizarre event is not entirely apocryphal, though it did not involve Madame Helvétius, nor did it quite include a shared bath. Franklin reports in one of his letters that he and another neighbour, Claude-Guillaume Le Veillard, played chess together in the bathroom of Madame de Brillon while she looked on from the tub (presumably decently covered).
Cynics would say that Franklin enjoyed this over-intimacy with a much younger woman (she was still in her thirties). This impression is reinforced by Madame de Brillon's somewhat naive complaint to him that gossips had criticised the "sweet habit I have of sitting on your lap". According Franklin's biographer, Anne-Claude Lopez , however, their relationship was spiritually intense but physically chaste, the cumulative impression of their correspondence being of an old philosopher enjoying the company of a romantic young woman. (And, after all, who are we to doubt the motivation of a Founding Father?!)
References
On John Adams, see http://thebehindthescenes.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/making-of-john-adams-hbo.html
For Franklin and Madame de Brillon: Anne-Claude Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (1990) p.29-35..[Relevant pages available on Google Books]
Sunday, 24 November 2013
Madame Helvétius and Ben Franklin
 |
| Madame Helvétius by Louis-Michel Van Loo The Granger Collection, NYC |
To their mutual pleasure, her guests often included Benjamin Franklin who, during his eight-and-a-half year sojourn in Paris from 1776 to 1785, lodged within walking distance in nearby Passy.
Often portrayed as a glittering society gathering, the "Académie d'Auteuil" comes across rather as a comfortable circle of mutually supportive and, for the most part aging, friends. Two of them, the archetypal "literary abbés", André Morellet and Martin Lefevbre de la Roche, Helvétius's literary executor, actually lived on the premises, as did the much younger Pierre-Georges Cabanis, a doctor and poet, who was something of an adopted son. La Roche and Cabanis shared a small pavilion in the extensive garden. The three lived together, wrote La Roche, "without the slightest altercation"; they shared the same friend and she treated them all impartially. The pleasures of the table, philosophical small talk and plain badinage mingled pleasantly. Franklin himself, who enjoyed easy and courteous relations with women, was much charmed, attributed Madame Helvétius's popularity to her good humour and lack of pretension rather than her intellect - it was said she could spell no better than her numerous cats. Although not considered conventionally beautiful, the vivacious sixty year old never lacked admirers. The serious and socially awkward Turgot, who was a frequent guest, proposed to her in vain both before her marriage and after Helvétius's death in 1771. On catching sight of her the ever gallant nonagenarian Fontenelle once commented simply, "Oh to be seventy again..!"
 |
| Portrait of Franklin by Charles-Amédée-Philippe Van Loo, owned by Madame Helvétius, and descended in the family of her daughter, the Marquise de Mun. Purchased by the American Philosophical Society in 1948. |
In early 1780 Franklin himself proposed marriage. The seventy-four year old widower was not in any way serious - his good-humoured pursuit was merely an excuse to take time out from the pressing affairs of the American colonies for series of witty literary compliments. The most well-known, the "Elysian Fields", generally dated to January 1780, was published in April as part of a collection of French Bagatelles produced on the private printing press at Passy. According to Morellet, Franklin composed the piece in jocular mood: Madame Helvétius received it one morning "after engaging him the whole previous day in a conversation full of mere foolishness". The existence of various versions suggests that it circulated initially as an essay in French composition. An English version was published in Volume III of Memoirs of the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin:
THE ELYSIAN FIELDS
Disappointed in his hopes of marriage, Franklin dreams of a visit to the Elysian Fields where where he finds to his surprise that Helvétius and Debbie Franklin have "formed a new Connexion":
Mortified at the barbarous resolution pronounced by you
so positively yesterday evening, that you would remain single
the rest of your life, as a compliment due to the memory of your hus-
band, I retired to my chamber. Throwing myself upon my bed, I dreamt
that I was dead and was transported to the Elysian Fields.
I was asked whether I wished to see any persons
in particular ; to which I replied, that I wished to see the
philosophers. " There are two who live here at hand in this
garden ; they are good neighbors, and very friendly towards
one another. " - Who are they?" " Socrates and
Helvetius." "I esteem them both highly ; but let me see
Helvetius first, because I understand a little French,
but not a word of Greek." I was conducted to him ; he
received me with much courtesy, having known me, he said,
by character, some time past. He asked me
a thousand questions relative to the war, to the
present state of religion, of liberty, of the government
in France. - "You do not inquire, then," said I, "after your dear friend,
Madame Helvetius ; yet she loves you
exceedingly ; I was in her company not more
than an hour ago." "Ah," said he, "you make me
recur to my past happiness, which ought to be
forgotten in order to be happy here. For many
years I could think of nothing but her, though
at length I am consoled. I have taken another
wife, the most like her that I could find ;
she is not indeed altogether so handsome, but
she has a great fund of wit and good sense,
and her whole study is to please me.
She is at this moment gone to fetch the best
nectar and ambrosia to regale me ; stay
here awhile and you will see her." " I
perceive," said I, " that your former friend
is more faithful to you than you are to her ; she
has had several good offers, but has refused them
all. I will confess to you that I loved her
extremely, but she was cruel to me, and
rejected me peremptorily for your sake." - "I
pity you sincerely," said he, "for she is
an excellent woman, handsome and amiable. But
do not the Abbe de la R**** and the Abbe M****
visit her?" "Certainly they do; not one of
your friends has dropped her acquaintance." - "If
you had gained the Abbe M*** with a bribe of
good coffee and cream, perhaps you would have succeeded ;
for he is as deep a reasoner as Duns Scotus or St. Thomas ; he
arranges and methodizes his arguments
in such a manner that they are almost irresistible. Or, if
by a fine edition of some old classic, you had
gained the Abbe de la R**** to speak against you,
that would have been still better ; as I always observed, that
when he recommended anything to her, she had a great
inclination to do directly the contrary." As he finished
these words the new Madame Helvetius entered with the nectar, and
I recognized her immediately as my former American friend,
Mrs. Franklin! I reclaimed her, but she answered me
coldly; " I was a good wife to you for forty-nine years and
four months - nearly half a century; let that
content you. I have formed a new connection here,
which will last to eternity."
Indignant at this refusal of my Eurydice, I immediately
resolved to quit those ungrateful shades,
and return to this good world again, to behold the sun
and you! Here I am - let us avenge ourselves!
The conceit is a little clumsy as is the final "let us avenge ourselves!", but Franklin depicts his cast with gentle humour: Helvétius absorbed in military, religious and political questions; Debbie Frankin bustling around to find the best nectar and ambrosia and the abbé Morellet relishing subtle arguments and large helpings of cream.
THE FLIES ("Les Mouches")
A second Bagatelle puts pay to any lingering doubts about Franklin's seriousness. It dates from end of 1780 when Franklin had been laid up for six weeks with gout and is, in effect, a thank you note for some housecleaning Madame Helvétius had organised. It features a jolly chorus of pirouetting houseflies and translates loosely as follows:
The "Flies of the Apartments of Mr. F[rankli]n" pay their respects to Madame Helvétius and thank her for the protection she has given them. They have long enjoyed the hospitality of the Good Franklin, eating at his expense and finding in his emptied punchbow "sufficient quantity to inebriate a hundred of us flies". They have merrily swirled around his rooms and consummated their little loves under his nose. Their happiness would have been perfect had he not allowed "our declared Enemies" the spiders, with their pitiless nets to remain at the top of his wainscoting. But under Madame's orders "all these assassins with their habitations and their snares" have been swept away, and the flies can now enjoy Franklin's beneficence without fear. They have only one wish left, that their two patrons henceforth form a single household.
The insects buzz merrily with a suitable French accent; "Bizz izzzz ouizz a ouizzzz izzzzzzzz, etc."
It says much about the state of Franklin's accommodation that Madame Helvétius, who was notoriously relaxed in such matters, was driven to offer him domestic assistance!
It says much about the state of Franklin's accommodation that Madame Helvétius, who was notoriously relaxed in such matters, was driven to offer him domestic assistance!
Madame Helvétius remained a constant friend and a faithful correspondent. In a final touching letter, written two years after Franklin's return to Philadelphia, Minette looked forward to their reunion in the Elysian Fields: "Very soon we will meet again,, with those whom we have loved, I husband and you a wife, but I believe that you, who have been a rascal, will find one more there, my dear Franklin....."
In lighter - but prescient - mood the abbé de la Roche reminisced on 27 July 1787 about a world soon to be lost forever: "We were so happy, were we not, when sitting all together around a good table; when we discussed ethics, politics, philosophy; when Notre Dame d'Auteuil led you on to flirt and the abbé Morellet, while fighting for the cream, set his arguments in magnificent sequence, so as to convince us of what we did not believe. In those days we would gladly have renounced that other Paradise to keep the one we had, and live, just as we were, for all eternity."
References
Dorothy Medlin (1980) "Benjamin's Franklin's Bagatelles for Madame Helvétius: some biographical and stylistic considerations", Early American Literature, Vol. 15(1), p.42-58.[JStor article]Stacey Schiff, A great improvisation: Franklin, France, and the birth of America (2005), p.229-236 [relevant extract available on Google Books]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
