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perfect creation of the New World. He had not only bottled lightning, he had cranked out hundreds of inventions. With his stringy hair and Buddhist paunch and sly grin (the puckish sense of humor seems to be the common denominator of genius), he looked the part as it was conceived then.
    Given the generational difference and his insurmountable greatness, no one quite knew what to make of Franklin’s conversion to the Revolution. Especially John Adams. So how perverse was it that destiny would throw these two opposites together at so many crucial moments—they both were chosen to edit Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration, they parleyed with the French about wartime alliances, and later they went to Paris to negotiate the end of the war.
    The two men had a history, long before they ever got to Paris on this trip, and they would have a history long afterward. Think of them as the twin poles of the American psyche. They show up at nearly every crucial event of our founding, two cartoon figures standing on Lady Liberty’s shoulders, whispering in her ear.
    John Adams was a man who believed in civic virtue, that the core measure of a man was his essential goodness (or absence of it). Adams believed you said what you meant. He fervently believed that you gotsmart decisions by promoting good people to make them. Franklin believed in civic action and that words could (and maybe should) be deceptive. As Franklin put it to Adams on this trip: success in Paris would “depend more on what we do than what we say.” Good people were never a suitable replacement for good deeds.
    Or to put it another way, Franklin thought Adams was an officious prick. Adams thought Franklin was a decadent blowhard. Their relationship is key to the creation of the mythic American tinkerer of the Old World’s imagination.
    Adams came to his disgust with Franklin slowly. When he and Franklin were sent to New York during the earliest days of the fighting, in the hopes of negotiating some resolution with Admiral Howe after the Battle of Long Island, the two of them had to bunk together at the various inns as they traveled. One night, in New Jersey, Franklin threw open the window to ventilate the room even though many people thought that illness came from “out there.” Adams explained to Franklin that he was “afraid of the evening air.” But Franklin had long ago noticed that “nobody ever got a cold by going into a cold church, or any other cold air.” Adams knew of Franklin’s theory because he’d read it, but he’d written that “the theory was so little consistent with my experience that I thought it a paradox.”
    “Come!” Franklin shouted to Adams. “Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you.” Then he added a line in which, despite the intervening centuries, one can hear the insufferable preamble of the pompous know-it-all. “I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.”
    Of course, Franklin’s theory is right, but in Adams’s writings you can sense his—for now, friendly—weariness: “The Doctor then began a harangue, upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together.”
    By the time Adams arrived in Paris, Franklin had long beenworking the salons and parlors trying to win over the locals. His strategy was to go slow and grasp the lay of the land before deciding how best to make the approach. To do this, he spent a lot of time socializing and indulging in French life of that time. Literally, he just partied.
    To a man like Adams, Franklin was sunk in debauchery and doing unspeakable things with the ladies. Franklin was known to have played chess with a notorious lady named Madame Anne-Louise d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy while she bathed in her tub. He had attended dinners where women just plopped into Franklin’s lap, showered him in kisses, and purred,
“mon cher papa.”
Women who might