I found our friend Dr. Franklin in his bed--cheerful and free from pain, but still in his bed. He took a lively interest in the details I gave him of your revolution. I observed his face often flushed in the course of it. He is much emaciated. M. de Crevecœur is well, but a little apprehensive that the spirit of reforming and economizing may reach his office. A good man will suffer if it does. Permit me, Madame la Comtesse, to present here my sincere respects to Monsieur le Comte d'Houdetôt and to Monsieur de Sainte Lambert. The philosophy of the latter will have been greatly gratified to see a regeneration of the condition of man in Europe so happily begun in his own country. Repeating to you, Madame, my sincere sense of your goodness to me, and my wishes to prove it on every occasion, adding my sincere prayer that Heaven may bless you with many years of life and health, I pray you to accept here the homage of those sentiments of respect and attachment with which I have the honor to be, Madame la Comtesse, your most obedient and humble servant,
We find the following interesting passage in a letter from Jefferson to M. Grand, written on the 23d of April:
The good old Dr. Franklin, so long the ornament of our country, and I may say of the world, has at length closed his eminent career. He died on the 17th instant, of an imposthume of his lungs, which having suppurated and burst, he had not strength to throw off the matter, and was suffocated by it. His illness from this imposthume was of sixteen days. Congress wear mourning for him, by a resolve of their body.
Nearly a year later we find him writing to the President of the National Assembly of France as follows:
I have it in charge from the President of the United States of America, to communicate to the National Assembly of France the peculiar sensibility of Congress to the tribute paid to the memory of Benjamin Franklin by the enlightened and free representatives of a great nation, in their decree of the 11th of June, 1790.
That the loss of such a citizen should be lamented by us among whom he lived, whom he so long and eminently served, and who feel their country advanced and honored by his birth, life, and labors, was to be expected. But it remained for the National Assembly of France to set the first example of the representatives of one nation doing homage, by a public act, to the private citizen of another, and, by withdrawing arbitrary lines of separation, to reduce into one fraternity the good and the great, wherever they have lived or died.