He read the despatches and then the Doctor and the young man set out in a coach for the palace of Vergennes, the Prime Minister.  Colonel Irons was filled with astonishment at the tokens of veneration for the white-haired man which he witnessed in the streets of Paris.

“The person of the King could not have attracted more respectful attention,” he writes.  “A crowd gathered about the coach when we were leaving it and every man stood with uncovered head as we passed on our way to the palace door.  In the crowd there was much whispered praise of ‘Le grand savant.’  I did not understand this until I met, in the office of the Compte de Vergennes, the eloquent Senator Gabriel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau.  What an impressive name!  Yet I think he deserves it.  He has the eye of Mars and the hair of Samson and the tongue of an angel, I am told.  In our talk, I assured him that in Philadelphia Franklin came and went and was less observed than the town crier.

“‘But your people seem to adore him,’ I said.

“‘As if he were a god,’ Mirabeau answered.  ’Yes, it is true and it is right.  Has he not, like Jove, hurled the lightning of heaven in his right hand?  Is he not an unpunished Prometheus?  Is he not breaking the scepter of a tyrant?’

“Going back to his home where in the kindness of his heart he had asked me to live, he endeavored, modestly, to explain the evidences of high regard which were being showered upon him.

“’It happens that my understanding and small control of a mysterious and violent force of nature has appealed to the imagination of these people,’ he said, ’I am the only man who has used thunderbolts for his playthings.  Then, too, I am speaking for a new world to an old one.  Just at present I am the voice of Human Liberty.  I represent the hunger of the spirit of man.  It is very strong here.  You have not traveled so far in France without seeing thousands of beggars.  They are everywhere.  But you do not know that when a child comes in a poor family, the father and mother go to prison pour mois de nourrice.  It is a pity that the poor can not keep their children at home.  This old kingdom is a muttering Vesuvius, growing hotter, year by year, with discontent.  You will presently hear its voices.’”

[Illustration:  Ben Franklin]

There was a dinner that evening at Franklin’s house, at which the Marquis de Mirabeau, M. Turgot, the Madame de Brillon, the Abbe Raynal and the Compte and Comptesse d’ Haudetot, Colonel Irons and three other American gentlemen were present.  The Madame de Brillon was first to arrive.  She entered with a careless, jaunty air and ran to meet Franklin and caught his hand and gave him a double kiss on each cheek and one on his forehead and called him “papa.”