Why He Was A Babe Magnet

By Claude-Anne Lopez

More than two centuries after his death, people are still trying to figure out how a paunchy, balding, bifocaled septuagenarian managed to get French ladies in a flutter. From his days as an ambitious young printer in Philadelphia to his years as a diplomatic superstar in France, Ben Franklin surrounded himself with adoring women, often much younger, usually attractive and preferably intelligent. For the most part, his loyal wife Deborah tolerated these dalliances. As she probably knew, most were never consummated. In fact, Franklin was a master of what the French call amitie amoureuse, whose English translation, amorous friendship, gives only a hint of its true meaning: a delicious form of intimacy, expressed in exchanges of teasing kisses, tender embraces, intimate conversations and rhapsodic love letters, but not necessarily sexual congress. A peek inside Franklin's not-so-little black book:

DEBORAH FRANKLIN: THE AFFECTIONATE WIFE Deborah and Ben had a close marriage, except for the fact that for 18 of the 44 years of their union they lived apart. But even if their bond lacked grand passion, it had mutual respect. Plain and plump, Deborah, a carpenter's daughter, is first taken with the young printer when he begins lodging with her family shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia in 1723. They, as Benjamin put it, "interchang'd some promises"--an 18th century locution for engagement--a year later as he set off for England to buy printing equipment. But when his backer reneges and Franklin finds himself stranded in London, he tells Deborah to forget him. She marries a potter instead who may already have been married, a ne'er-do-well who squanders her dowry and runs off to the West Indies. When Franklin returns home after two years away, he professes guilt for having stranded Deborah, but that doesn't stop him from cavorting about town and, as he puts it, frequenting "low Women."

By 1730, Franklin decides he is ready for marriage. Though not his first choice, the stolidly middle-class Deborah seems a good "helpmate." When they hear rumors of her wayward husband's death, Deborah moves in with Ben, accepts his recently born illegitimate offspring William as her stepson and takes on the mantle of Mrs. Franklin. It is a common-law union never recorded in church for fear of bigamy charges, but it prospers. While her husband nurtures his publications, she runs their store, selling everything from writing materials to tea and coffee to a well-known homemade ointment for "the itch." They had two children, a boy who died of smallpox at age 5 and a girl Sarah, known as Sally, who outlived both her parents.

But there are strains. Despite Franklin's repeated entreaties, she refuses to join him overseas, perhaps as wary of hobnobbing with his highly placed friends as of ocean voyages. During his absences, she acts as postmistress, oversees the building of a larger house and turns a deaf ear to attacks by Franklin's political rivals. When Stamp Act rioters threaten her house, Deborah and her brother face them off.

But as the Franklins' separation lengthens, their estrangement grows. His letters become briefer and more infrequent. Learning she has suffered a stroke, he offers advice but remains in London, leaving her to die alone on Dec. 19, 1774, in her late 60s. To the last, she has signed her letters to him, "your A Feck SHONET Wife."

CATHARINE RAY: A WINTRY LOVE They first meet around Christmastime 1754 while he is inspecting New England's postal network. He is 48 and at the peak of his scientific glory; she is 23, vivacious, opinionated and uninhibited. Basking in his attentions on a visit to Boston from her home on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast, Catharine Ray chatters away. She makes him sugar plums, which he pronounces better than any he has ever tasted. A few days later, they set off for Rhode Island. It is a wintry journey marked by "a wrong road and a soaking shower" and an icy hill that has their horses stumbling so badly they are "no more able to stand than if they had been shod on skates," he later recalls. But they talk for hours on end, mutually smitten. Back in Philadelphia, he responds to her first letter with rhapsody and rue: the northeast wind "is the gaiest wind," he writes, because it brought her promised kisses mingled with snowflakes, as "pure as your virgin innocence, white as your lovely bosom..."

Catharine's ardor rises. "Absence rather increases than lessens my affections," she writes. But by now Franklin senses all this may be going too far, and he retreats to an avuncular tone, advising her to marry and surround herself with "clusters of plump, juicy, blushing, pretty little rogues like their Mama."

And that is just what Catharine does. By their next meeting, she is Mrs. William Greene Jr., wife of Rhode Island's future Governor and mother of the first two of their six children. She and Franklin will always remain friends, remembering their wintry interlude.

POLLY STEVENSON: A SECOND DAUGHTER When Franklin returns to Britain in 1757 as a political agent of the American colonies, he moves into a four-story town house near London's busy Strand. Its owner: a solicitous widow named Margaret Stevenson, with whom he may have had an affair during his 15 years under her roof. But Franklin's real interest is her brainy daughter Mary, who went by the nickname Polly. Only 18 years old when she first enters his life, she shows such an eagerness to learn that it stirs all his strong mentoring instincts.

When she leaves London to live with an aunt in the country, they begin an extraordinary correspondence. It covers the full breadth of moral and natural philosophy. Always prim but also refreshingly direct, Polly poses her questions--about barometers, insects, river tides, electrical storms--and he responds in the flattering style he inevitably uses with young women who catch his eye. He ends one dense six-page tract, for example, by musing how he might sign off to so receptive a mind as hers. "I had rather conclude abruptly with what pleases me more than any Compliment can please you, that I am allow'd to subscribe myself Your affectionate Friend."

He imagines, he tells her, a marriage between her and his son William, so she would "become his own in the tender relation of a child." But William is in love with another woman. Leaving London soon thereafter, Franklin laments how distressed he is at the thought of never seeing Polly again. But he returns two years later, in 1764--and before long gives her away in marriage to a physician, William Hewson. Sixteen years later, after her husband's death, Franklin finally gets her permanently at his side when she and her three children come to live near him in Philadelphia until he dies.

MESDAMES BRILLON AND HELVETIUS: PARISIAN SOUL MATES Music is her Cupid's arrow. The lovely and talented Anne-Louise d'Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy plays the harpsichord and piano like an angel. Eager to meet her new neighbor in the fashionable Paris suburb of Passy, the celebrated envoy from America, she inquires about his musical tastes and woos him with a recital of Scottish songs. She follows with invitations to tea, chess games and tete-a-tetes in which she pours out her troubled soul to him. The delighted Franklin, now in his 70s, soon presses her for more tangible evidence of her affection. She plays coy, however, and steers the relationship with "Cher Papa" (her endearing term for him that soon catches on widely) into a safer daughter-father pattern, over his useless protests.

The Franklin libido really stirs when he encounters the brilliant and beautiful Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d'Autricourt, a descendant of Austrian nobility known by her married name, Madame Helvetius. Outgoing, exuberant and earthy, she uses her late husband's fortune to operate a bohemian, animal-filled estate on the fringes of the Bois de Boulogne, where she reigns over a salon of Enlightenment philosophes. To Franklin, this is an intellectual heaven.

Franklin proposes marriage to Madame Helvetius but frames the offer so coyly that it can be seen either as serious or as a joke, a canny way of saving face for both parties. He tells her that her late husband and his late Deborah have tied the knot in heaven, so it would be fitting revenge if she accepted him on earth. Ah, mon cher ami, she tells him in effect, it cannot be. When he finally decides to return home to America, her friends chide her for not accepting his proposal and keeping the adored Franklin in France.

CLAUDE-ANNE LOPEZ is the author of Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris