Rue de Varennes.
Monsieur John Bigelow,
Ancien Ministre des États-Unis.
Les manuscrits de mémoires de Franklin est un in-folio de 220 pages écrit à uni-marge, sur papier dont tous les cahiers ne sont pas uniformes.
M. le Veillard, gentilhomme ordinaire du Roi, Maire de Passy, était intime ami du Docteur Franklin. Il avait vécu avec lui à Passy (près Paris) dans une société de tous les jours, pendant le temps de Franklin en France à l’époque de la guerre de l’indépendance américaine, et c’est de sa patrie que le docteur lui envoya, comme gage d’amitié, la copie de ses mémoires échangé depuis contre l’original.
Le manuscrit original est unique.
M. William Temple Franklin, petit-fils de Benjamin Franklin, l’a recueilli au décès de son aïeul qui lui avait légué tous ses écrits. Lorsque M. Temple vient en France pour y faire l’édition qu’il a publié, il demanda à M. le Veillard sa copie pour la faire imprimer, parcequ’elle lui parut plus commode pour le travail typographique, à cause de sa netteté. Il donna à M. Veillard en échange de sa copie le manuscrit original entièrement écrit de la main de Franklin.
L’original était cependant plus complet que la copie, ce que M. Temple n’avait pas vérifié. On en trouve la preuve au 2e volume de la petite édition des Mémoires en 2 volumes, en 18mo, donnée par Jules Renouard, à Paris, en 1828. On y lit, en tête d’une suite qu’il fait paraître pour la première fois, une note (page 21), où il déclare devoir cette suite à la communication que la famille Le Veillard lui a donné du manuscrit.
L’inspection seule en démontre l’authenticité à l’appui de laquelle viennent d’ailleurs des preuves positives tirées de différentes pièces; telles que: 3 lettres du Dr. Franklin à, M. le Veillard, 11 lettres de M. William Temple Franklin et diverses lettres de Benjamin Franklin Bache, de Sarah Bache, sa femme, d’un libraire qui voulait acquérir le manuscrit de M. le Veillard en 1791, etc.
M. le Veillard, qui est l’auteur de la traduction française des Mémoires de Franklin, a conservé le manuscrit autographe avec le même sentiment qui déterminé son ami à lui envoyer ses mémoires encore inédits.
Après la mort de M. le Veillard, qui périt sur l’échafaud révolutionnaire en 1794, le manuscrit a passé à sa fille: an décès de celle-ci, en 1834, il est devenu la propriété de son cousin M. de Senarmont, dont le petit-fils a cédé le 26 Janvier, 1867, à Mr. John Bigelow, ancien Ministre des États-Unis à Paris.
Le manuscrit est accompagné d’un beau portrait au pastel par Duplessis. Franklin avait posé pour ce portrait pendant son séjour à Passy et en avait fait cadeau à M. le Veillard.
P. de Senarmont.
Paris, le 26 Janvier, 1867.
Early on Monday the 28th of January, I drove to Charing Cross Station, where I expected to find the precious and costly parcel of which Huntington had advised me the consignment. There I was told that the Continental parcels were usually delivered at the Cannon Street Station. To the Cannon Street Station I then made my way as fast as I could be transported, but was greatly vexed to be told on arriving there that nothing had been heard of my parcel. While leaving the station, uncertain what to do next, but feeling certain that something needed to be done and at once, it occurred to me that the person to whom the parcel had been entrusted in Paris had assured Mr. Huntington that it should be sent from Cannon Street directly upon its arrival, to Cleveland Square. I immediately returned to the station, repeated the paragraph to this effect in Huntington’s letter to the person in charge, and insisted that the parcel must be there. He asked what it consisted of. I told him generally. ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘there is a portrait here, but it is consigned to one of our clerks who is away at this moment and not expected back until four o’clock.’ He then showed me a bill of lading for a portrait. I felt greatly relieved and now at liberty to be indignant that I should have been compelled to wait for a parcel booked at Paris at 5 p.m. on Saturday, until 4 p.m. of the following Monday. I disregarded the assurances that were now showered upon me that the parcel should be promptly sent to me on the clerk’s return. I said I would wait till the hour appointed, to insure the minimum of risk of further delays and anxiety.
While loitering about the station a man in railway uniform approached and requested me to call again at the office. There I was informed that the parcel had just come in. Where precisely the lying began and where it ended I never knew nor cared to inquire, so absorbed was I in getting the treasure into my possession. I immediately took it, heavy as it was; put it into the cab myself—I would allow no one else to touch it,—and drove off triumphantly to Cleveland Square.
Several months elapsed after my return to the United States before a propitious occasion presented itself for me to verify the correctness of the statement in M. de Senarmont’s note, that my manuscript was more complete than the copy which had been used in preparing the edition published by William Temple Franklin and copied by Dr. Sparks. It had not occurred to me that the text had been tampered with in England after it had left the writer’s hand. A very cursory examination of it, however, awakened my suspicions, and I availed myself of my earliest leisure to subject the Memoirs to a careful collation with the edition which appeared in London in 1817, and which was the first and only edition that ever purported to have been printed from the manuscript. The results of this collation revealed the curious fact that more than twelve hundred separate and distinct changes had been made in the text, and, what is more remarkable, that the last eight pages of the manuscript were omitted entirely.
Many of these changes are mere modernizations of style; such as would measure some of the modifications which English prose had undergone between the days of Goldsmith and Southey. Some, Franklin might have approved of; others he might have tolerated; but it is safe to presume that very many he would have rejected without ceremony.
I immediately prepared a correct edition of the autobiography for the press, and it was published by Messrs. J. B. Lippincott & Co., of Philadelphia, in 1867, when this autobiography, after an interval of more than seventy years since its author’s death, was for the first time given to the public as it was written. It is with the assent and by the courtesy of the Messrs. Lippincott & Co. that we are now permitted to reproduce in this collection the only correct version of, with a single exception, the most widely popular production of Franklin’s genius. Ref. 017
The following translation of a letter from William Temple Franklin to M. le Veillard, written a few days after his grandfather’s death, will conclude all that need be recited here of the history of this famous manuscript: Ref. 018
Philadelphia, 22 May, 1790.
You have already learned, my dear friend, the loss which you and I, and the world, have experienced, in the death of this good and amiable papa. Although we have long expected it, we were none the less shocked by it when it arrived. He loved you very tenderly, as he did all your family, and I do not doubt you will share my just sorrow. I intended writing you the details of his death by M. de Chaumont, but the duty of arranging his affairs, and especially his papers, prevents my answering your last, as well as the one which your daughter was pleased to write me, accompanying her work. I have been touched with this mark of her condescension and friendship, and I beg you to testify to her my gratitude until I have an opportunity of writing to her, which will certainly
