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otherwise seem honorable would casually flop an arm around Franklin’s shoulder. It was outrageous, Adams complained, such “incessant dinners and dissipation.” Why couldn’t they just go to the king and ask for help and money?
    Franklin had already figured out that was premature. France had lost a war to England, and other nations were rising up. Russia under Catherine the Great had just recognized Poland and for all intents and purposes had declared itself a new and major player in continental affairs. The foreign minister of France at this time was Comte de Vergennes, a cunning militarist who desperately wanted to re-arm France and challenge England via the American conflict. (The scholar Jonathan Dull told me he considered Vergennes the Oliver North of the eighteenth century.) Vergennes had let Franklin know that building support in the town, sitting quietly, and waiting for the propitious moment were crucial.
    France was ruled by one of the most famous kings on the earth, Marie Antoinette’s husband, Louis XVI. But he was only twenty-four years old at the time, and straight talk would probably spook him. Sure, the French hated the Brits, and on that level, no problem, but here come some American bumpkins who want his support in overthrowing another … king? Might that not come back to haunt him?
    Franklin chose not to confide in Adams about his own strategybecause Franklin had long ago learned that secrecy in diplomacy is key. Before Adams, there had been a succession of co-diplomats who despised Franklin for the same, understandable reasons. When Franklin forgot to tell Arthur Lee that he’d changed messengers, Lee exploded that Franklin’s neglect was “one of the deepest injuries that can be offered to a gentleman, a direct and unjust judgment of his veracity.” Another, Ralph Izard, found Franklin equally despicable and told Adams when he got to town that “Dr. Franklin was one of the most unprincipled men upon earth: that he was a man of no veracity, no honor, no integrity, as great a villain as ever breathed.”
    Franklin simply ignored his partners, and he expressed his true thoughts in a letter to Izard that he never sent: “It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters. I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation.”
    He also realized that the Parisians’ interest in him as a Great Man drove his partners insane: “I am too much respected, complimented and caressed by the people in general,” he wrote, and so when it came to his diplomatic partners in Paris, he simply chose to dismiss “those unhappy gentlemen; unhappy indeed in their tempers, and in the dark uncomfortable passions of jealousy, anger, suspicion, envy, and malice.”
    Into this matrix of disinterested disregard came John Adams. What he saw when he observed Franklin’s behavior was a man sunk in immoral frivolity and Parisian decadence. This urbane love of Franklin was seen by Adams from the other end of the telescope, and he charged that Franklin had “a monopoly of reputation here, and an indecency in displaying it.” Or he was jealous of it: “When they spoke of him, they seem to think he was to restore the Golden Age.”
    To Adams, there
was
no strategy, but how would he know? Franklin mostly neglected him, too. Thus the letters of John Adams and his wife, Abigail, paint a portrait of a most despicable Ben Franklin. Adamsis enraged when he realizes he’s traveled all this way to do nothing of any importance. He’s reduced to the role of clerk to Franklin, figuring out the accounts and balancing the books. Franklin barely talks to him. And it was the hypocrisy that galled him. Here he was neglected by Poor Richard himself, who had lectured Americans like some Puritan saint that “a little neglect may breed great mischief.”
    Sunk in despair and self-pity, Adams in another letter said that he was simply “hated.” He