Poor Richard at Versailles
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
Poor Richard at Versailles Franklin and His French Contemporaries. By Alfred Owen Aldridge. New York University. 260 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Keats called Franklin "a...
...The Abbe Raynal translated Polly Baker as an authentic social document...
...The three were The Way to Wealth, The Speech of Polly Baker, and the Bagatelles...
...Finally, for those who were his friends and associates, there was the real Franklin as recorded in eulogies and memoirs...
...Leigh Hunt went further and called them "scoundrel maxims...
...readers and writers at large glorified The Way to Wealth as a sound treatise on economics...
...Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Keats called Franklin "a philosophical Quaker full of mean and thrifty maxims...
...Undoubtedly, though, Franklin's conduct as our Minister to France was one of the most brilliant impersonations in all history...
...at Versailles, he appeared in the plain garb of a Quaker patriarch...
...So clad, he embodied the Utopian dreams of a generation brought up on Rousseau...
...The first was a trifling prose anthology compiled to relieve the tedium of an ocean voyage, the second was a deliberate hoax, the third were written and printed to amuse himself and his friends at Passy...
...Of these three Franklins, two were French creations...
...From this developed a purely imaginary Franklin who figures in French fiction and drama as prophet, oracle or god from the machine...
...The French met at least three Franklins...
...the fluffy little Bagatelles were ennobled as moral tracts...
...Seldom has so much been bestowed on so little...
...He had put over his great impersonation in a really big way...
...In London, he had always dressed as a man of fashion...
...Aldridge demonstrates from exhaustive study of the Franklin legend in France...
...The French court was famous for its rich dress and elaborate etiquette...
...Franklin chose to make the French meet him on his ground instead of theirs...
...Which view Franklin himself held he preferred to leave in doubt...
...How successful the impersonation was Mr...
...any outsider was likely to commit gaffes at every turn...
...Only the French took him seriously as a moral philosopher, and they did so mainly on the basis of three works which neither Franklin himself nor most of his English-speaking readers took too seriously...
...The French literati, on the other hand, hailed him as a great moral philosopher on the basis of the very writings which Keats and Hunt condemned...
...At times it must have taken all Franklin's long training in politics and diplomacy to keep a straight face...
...Other nations, including his own...
...There was the legendary Franklin based on the delusion that The Way to Wealth represented his real character—a delusion powerfully encouraged by his patriarchal posings...
...At the same time, though, he must have patted himself on the back...
...For at least one self-drunken eulogist, they combined the finesse of LaFontaine, the profundity and elevation of Holy Scripture, and the irony of Socrates without the prolixity of Plato...
...In a life noted for shrewd decisions, this was one of the shrewdest...
...admired Franklin as inventor, as scientist, as statesman, and in various lesser roles...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 12
