Amid all the follies and splendors of life at Versailles appeared the sturdy American figure of Dr. Benjamin Franklin.  In the year 1767 he was presented at Court on the occasion of his first visit to Paris.

“You see,” said he, in a letter to Miss Stevenson, daughter of his landlady in London, “I speak of the Queen as if I had seen her; and so I have, for you must know I have been at Court.  We went to Versailles last Sunday, and had the honor of being presented to the King, Louis XV.  In the evening we were at the Grand Convert, where the family sup in public.  The table was half a hollow square, the service of gold. . . .  An officer of the Court brought us up through the crowd of spectators, and placed Sir John (Pringle) so as to stand between the Queen and Madame Victoire.  The King talked a good deal to Sir John, and did me, too, the honor of taking some notice of me.

“Versailles has had infinite sums laid out in building it and supplying it with water.  Some say the expenses exceeded eighty millions sterling ($400,000,000).  The range of buildings is immense; the garden-front most magnificent, all of hewn stone; the number of statues, figures, urns, etc., in marble and bronze of exquisite workmanship, is beyond conception.  But the water-works are out of repair, and so is a great part of the front next the town, looking, with its shabby, half-brick walls, and broken windows, not much better than the houses in Durham Yard.  There is, in short, both at Versailles and Paris, a prodigious mixture of magnificence and negligence with every kind of elegance except that of cleanliness, and what we call tidiness.”

Franklin next appeared at the Court of Versailles upon the momentous occasion of the ratification of the alliance signed in 1778 by France and America.  Dressed in a black velvet suit with ruffles of snowy white, white silk stockings and silver buckles, the emissary of the United States appeared in a gorgeous coach at the portals of Versailles.  It is related that the chamberlain hesitated a moment to admit him, for he was without the wig and sword Court etiquette demanded, “but it was only for a moment; and all the Court were captivated at the democratic effrontery of his conduct.”  Franklin and the four envoys that accompanied him were conducted to the dressing-room of Louis XVI, who, without ceremony, assured them of his friendship for the new-born country they represented.  In the evening the Americans were invited to watch the play of the royal family at the gaming-table, and Dr. Franklin, so Madame Campan relates, “was honored by the particular notice of the Queen, who courteously desired him to stand near to her, and as often as the game did not require her immediate attention, she took occasion to speak to him in very obliging terms.”

The New York Journal, under date of July 6, 1778, recounted another picturesque detail of this presentation of the American envoys at Versailles.  When they entered the inner part of the palace, so the dispatch ran, “they were received by les Cents Suisses (Swiss Guards), the major of which announced, ’Les Ambassadeurs des treize provinces unies,’ i.e., The Ambassadors from the Thirteen United Provinces.”