Franklin's "Our Lady of Auteuil"

— A house standing at one end of what was then the suburban village of Auteuil, with a long, narrow strip of two acres of ground behind it, and a small one-storied pavilion or annex at the extremity, became in 1773 the residence of Madame Helvetius, and the resort of some of the best thinkers in France. Blessed with twenty brothers and sisters, of good birth but without a dowry, and not expected to find a husband, Anne Catherine de Ligniville had hern saved from the otherwise inevitable cloister life by being adopted by her aunt, Madame de Graffigny, an amateur dramatist and novelist. But in 1751, at the mature age of thirty-two, “ Minette ” (“ Pussy ”), as she was called, had accepted the hand of Helvetius, the son and grandson of Dutch doctors, butler to Louis XV .’s queen, and enriched by taxfarming. After twenty years of happiness with a husband whose virtues, as Rousseau told him, belied his materialistic doctrines, the widowed lady, having seen her two daughters married, quitted Paris for this suburban retreat, to which her lively conversation, her simplicity and kindliness, attracted excellent company. Laroche, a secularized priest, ex-librarian to the Duke of Zweibrüeken, a collector of books and curiosities, was a permanent inmate, and another priest, Morellet, was installed in the pavilion, though he spent half the week at Paris. From 1778, moreover, there was an adoptive son, Cabanis, of whom Madame Helvetius was wont to say that, were transmigrationa fact, she should believe that the soul of her only son, who died at the age of fourteen months, had been reincarnated in Cabanis. Her friends forbore advancing the objection that for nearly a year the two infants were contemporaries, and would thus have had but one soul between them. The young medical student, the future physician of Mirabean, whose agony he refused to shorten by opiates, went to Auteuil on what was to be a short visit, but it lasted thirty years. The habitual callers included Chamfort, that “ ill-licked cub,” as Madame Necker styled him, whose misanthropic talk made the hostess melancholy for the rest of the day ; the poet Roucher, with his wife and daughter, little Eulalie, on whom Madame Helvetius conferred her own old pet name of “Pussy;” Turgot and Condorcet, inseparable friends, full of faith in the regeneration of mankind; Volncy, who had mused on the ruins of Palmyra ; and Sieyès whose pamphlet in 1789 was to electrify France. Last, not least, there was Franklin, who, introduced by Turgot and Malesherbes, walked over twice or thrice a week from the adjoining village of Pussy. He it was who styled the hostess “ Notre Dame d’Auteuil,” while he named her married daughters “les deux Étoiles.”

The lady took such a liking to the American philosopher as to relax her rule of seclusion, and, accompanied by Laroche, Morellet, or Cabanis, she paid a weekly visit to Passy. During one of these visits she insisted on the destruction of the cobwebs which had perhaps afforded Franklin matter for meditation ; whereupon, acting as amanuensis to the flies, he presented her with their address of thanks. It must, however, have been at Auteuil that Madame Helvetius, who had already, it is believed, refused Turgot, declined to become Mrs. Franklin No. 2, — a refusal so amiably expressed that Franklin sent her the next morning an account of his charming dream of the condolence on his rebuff offered him in the Elysian fields by Helvetius, who had there found a helpmeet in Mrs. Franklin No. 1. With good-humored irony Franklin professed to have been told by Helvetius that his suit might have prospered better had he got Morellet to plead for him, or Laroche against him. Across the street lived Madame de Boufflers, the lady whom Dr. Johnson, in the most negligent of toilets, escorted to her coach in Fleet Street, and visitors often went from one house to the other. Well might Franklin, from the other side of the Atlantic, sometimes wish himself back at these feasts of reason, of which no record, alas, remains, — feasts almost devoid of belief in theology, but full of belief in human progress. Turgot’s death in 1781 and Franklin’s departure four years later made serious gaps in the circle. Turgot had enjoyed a Pisgah view of the Revolution ; Franklin lived to see its brilliant dawn. Both were spared the spectacle of the atrocities of the Terror. As for the remaining “Academicians,” we may imagine their enthusiasm in 1789, Morellet being the only scoffer, and indeed turning traitor by a malicious pamphlet against Madame Helvetius and Cabanis. Alas ! the guillotine was destined to claim Roucher ; Condoreet escaped it only by poison ; and even the inoffensive Laroche, after his brief honors of the village mayoralty, suffered imprisonment. Sex, moreover, was no protection, for poor Madame de Boufflers underwent incarceration ; but Madame Helvetius was, happily, unmolested. Yet prepared at any moment for arrest, she is believed to have buried a large sum of money in her park, and to have been unable, the danger over, to recollect the spot. The story would seem to have better foundation than other traditions of hidden treasure, for her heirs, on selling the ground, reserved their right to any eventual discovery.

Auteuil enjoyed a kind of Indian summer after the fall of Robespierre, but its hostess never forgot its early luminaries. She fainted on having one day to pass through the Place de la Concorde, which recalled the fate of Roucher and Condorcet, and she especially liked, as Helen Williams testifies, to speak of Franklin, who seems to have stood second in her affections to her husband ; and him she counted on rejoining when the time should come for her ashes to be laid in a corner of the garden which she calmly pointed out to her visitors. She continued to feed troops of birds in winter on her balcony, and her eighteen cats were too well fed and lazy to interfere with them, or even with the mice which scampered about her drawing-room. The ideologists, as the surviving Girondists were now called, were deluded into applauding the eighteenth Brumaire, mistaking Bonaparte for a French Washington who was to restore liberty as well as order. He used them, as he did other parties, for his own ends, and then dismissed them with contempt, or muzzled them by public appointments. Yet on one of his three visits to Auteuil he partially unmasked himself by commenting on the smallness of the park, whereupon Madame Helvetius replied, “ You do not know, general, what happiness can be found in two acres.” That happiness had been heightened in 1796 by the marriage of Cabanis with Charlotte Grouchy, Madame Condorcet’s sister, and the children born to the pair gladdened the hostess’s last days.

When she peacefully expired with the expiring century, at the age of eighty-one, her daughters scrupulously respected her desire — for the law did not allow her to command — that Laroche and Cabanis should remain in their old home. Laroche, however, after being a deputy, retired to the country in 1803, but Cabanis retained possession till his death in 1808. Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, already separated from the wife who had insisted on still calling herself Madame Lavoisier, then hired part of the house. He occupied it till his decease in 1814, Cuvier and a few other friends keeping up with him the traditions of genial conversation. Three years later the property was sold by the descendants of Madame Helvetius. In 1871, the house, already stripped of most of the park, was burnt down, and a Jewish college now occupies the site. The pavilion was destroyed six years afterwards, and the spring in the street facing the house, where Louis XV. used to drink on his way to the hunting-box at La Muette, has also disappeared. Thus no material trace remains of this rendezvous of wit and enlightenment, except that two or three trees behind the Jewish college look as though they might have been saplings a century ago. But M. Antoine Guillois, with the aid of his ancestor Roucher’s documents, and with access to the papers of Cabanis and Condoreet, has revived the memories of Auteuil in his charming little volume Le Salon de Madame Helvetius, while the eloquence of the hostess’s great-grandson, M. de Mun, a French deputy and Catholic lay revivalist, shows that ancestral talent in the intermediate generations was not probably extinct, but merely dormant.