Chapter 8

WHICH HAS SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT DR. FRANKLIN AND THE LATIN QUARTER.

The first, both in point of time and merit, of American envoys was
famous not less for the pastoral simplicity of his manners than for the
politic grace of his mind. Viewed from a certain point, there was a
touch of primeval orientalness in Benjamin Franklin. Neither is there
wanting something like his Scriptural parallel. The history of the
patriarch Jacob is interesting not less from the unselfish devotion
which we are bound to ascribe to him, than from the deep worldly wisdom
and polished Italian tact, gleaming under an air of Arcadian
unaffectedness. The diplomatist and the shepherd are blended; a union
not without warrant; the apostolic serpent and dove. A tanned
Machiavelli in tents.

Doubtless, too, notwithstanding his eminence as lord of the moving
manor, Jacob's raiment was of homespun; the economic envoy's plain coat
and hose, who has not heard of?

Franklin all over is of a piece. He dressed his person as his periods;
neat, trim, nothing superfluous, nothing deficient. In some of his works
his style is only surpassed by the unimprovable sentences of Hobbes of
Malmsbury, the paragon of perspicuity. The mental habits of Hobbes and
Franklin in several points, especially in one of some moment,
assimilated. Indeed, making due allowance for soil and era, history
presents few trios more akin, upon the whole, than Jacob, Hobbes, and
Franklin; three labyrinth-minded, but plain-spoken Broadbrims, at once
politicians and philosophers; keen observers of the main chance; prudent
courtiers; practical magians in linsey-woolsey.

In keeping with his general habitudes, Doctor Franklin while at the
French Court did not reside in the aristocratical faubourgs. He deemed
his worsted hose and scientific tastes more adapted in a domestic way to
the other side of the Seine, where the Latin Quarter, at once the haunt
of erudition and economy, seemed peculiarly to invite the philosophical
Poor Richard to its venerable retreats. Here, of gray, chilly, drizzly
November mornings, in the dark-stoned quadrangle of the time-honored
Sorbonne, walked the lean and slippered metaphysician,--oblivious for
the moment that his sublime thoughts and tattered wardrobe were famous
throughout Europe,--meditating on the theme of his next lecture; at the
same time, in the well-worn chambers overhead, some clayey-visaged
chemist in ragged robe-de-chambre, and with a soiled green flap over his
left eye, was hard at work stooping over retorts and crucibles,
discovering new antipathies in acids, again risking strange explosions
similar to that whereby he had already lost the use of one optic; while
in the lofty lodging-houses of the neighboring streets, indigent