‘In electricity is the secret force that animates the universe,’ Franklin told me. ‘In Freemasonry is a code of rational behaviour and thought that, if followed by all, would do much to cure the world of its ills.’
Freemasonry, he explained, had emerged in England at the dawn of our eighteenth century, but traced its origins to the guild of masons who wandered Europe building the great cathedrals. They were ‘free’ because their skills allowed them to find employment wherever they wanted and demand a fair wage when doing so – no small thing in a world of serfs. Yet Freemasonry dated itself even older than that, finding its roots in the Knights Templar of the Crusades, who had their headquarters at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and later became the bankers and warlords of Europe. The medieval Templars became so powerful that their fraternity was crushed by the king of France and their leaders burnt at the stake. It was the survivors who reputedly were the seed of our own order. Like many groups, Masons took a certain pride in past persecution.
‘Even the martyred Templars are descendants of yet earlier groups,’ Franklin said. ‘Masonry traces its ancestry to the wise men of the ancient world, and to the stone workers and carpenters who built Solomon’s temple.’
Masonic symbols are the aprons and levelling tools of the stonemason, because the fraternity admires the logic and precision of engineering and architecture. While membership requires belief in a supreme being, no creed is specified, and in fact its fellows are forbidden to discuss religion or politics in the lodge. It is a philosophical organisation of rationality and scientific enquiry, founded in freethinking reaction to the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in earlier centuries. Yet it also plays with ancient mysticism and arcane mathematical precepts. Its emphasis on moral probity and charity, instead of dogma and superstition, make its commonsense teachings suspect to religious conservatives. Its exclusivity makes it a subject of jealousy and rumour.
‘Why don’t all men follow it?’ I asked Franklin.
‘Too many humans would gladly trade a rational world for a superstitious one if it calms their fears, gives them status, or gains them an advantage over their fellows,’ the American philosopher told me. ‘People are always afraid to think. And alas, Ethan, integrity is always a prisoner of vanity, and common sense is easily eclipsed by greed.’
While I appreciated my mentor’s enthusiasm, I was not a notable success as a Mason. Ritual tires me, and Masonic ceremony seemed obscure and interminable. There were a good deal of long-winded speeches, memorisation of tedious ceremonies, and vague promises of clarity that would come only when one advanced in Masonic degree. In short, Freemasonry was a bore, and took more effort than I was willing to give. It was with some relief that I left with Franklin to the United States the following year, and his letter of recommendation and my proficiency in French caught the attention of a rising New York fur trader named John Jacob Astor. Since I was advised to keep some distance from the Gaswick family – Annabelle had been married to a silversmith in hurried circumstances – I leapt at the chance to experience the fur business in Canada. I rode with French voyageurs to the Great Lakes, learning to shoot and hunt, and at first thought I might find my future in the great West. Yet the farther we got from civilisation the more I missed it, and not just that of America, but Europe. A salon was a refuge from swallowing vastness. Ben said the New World was conducive to plain truth, and the Old to half-forgotten wisdom just waiting to be rediscovered. He was torn his whole life between the two, and so was I.
So I descended the Mississippi to New Orleans. Here was a miniature Paris, but hot, exotic, and newly decadent, a crossroads of African, Creole, Mexican, and Cherokee, of whores, slave markets, Yankee land speculators, and missionary priests. Its energy whetted my appetite for a return to urbanised comforts. I took ship to the French sugar isles, built on the back of restive slave labour, and had my first real introduction to the horrid inequity of life and the soothing blindness of societies built atop it. What sets our species apart is not just what men will do to other men, but how tirelessly they justify it.
Then I rode a sugar ship to Le Havre in time to hear of the storming of the Bastille. What a contrast were the Revolution’s ideals to the horrors I’d just seen! Yet the growing chaos forced me out of France for years, while I made a living as a trade representative between London, America, and Spain. My goal was uncertain, my purpose suspended. I’d become rootless.
I finally returned to Paris when the Terror subsided, hoping to find opportunity in its chaotic, feverish society. France boiled with an intellectual sophistication unavailable at home. All of Paris was a Leyden jar, a battery of stored-up sparks. Perhaps the lost wisdom that Franklin longed for could be rediscovered! Paris also had women with considerably more charm than Annabelle Gaswick. If I lingered, fortune might find me.
Now the police might instead.
What to do? I remembered something Franklin had written: that Freemasonry ‘made men of the most hostile feelings, the most distant regions, and diversified conditions, rush to the aid of each other.’ I was still an occasional participant because of its social connections. France had thirty-five thousand members in six hundred lodges, a fraternity of the able so powerful that the organisation had been accused of both fomenting the Revolution and conspiring to reverse it. Washington, Lafayette, Bacon, and Casanova had all been Masons. So had Joseph Guillotin, who invented the guillotine as a way to alleviate the suffering of hanging. In my country the order was a pantheon of patriots: Hancock, Madison, Monroe, even John Paul Jones and Paul Revere, which is why some suspect my nation is a Masonic invention. I needed advice, and would turn to my fellow Masons, or to one Mason in particular, the journalist Antoine Talma, who had befriended me during my irregular lodge visits because of his bizarre interest in America.
‘Your red Indians are descendants of ancient civilisations now lost, who found serenity that escapes us today,’ Talma liked to theorise. ‘If we could prove they are a tribe of Israel, or refugees from Troy, it would show the path to harmony.’
Obviously he hadn’t seen the same Indians I had, who’d seemed cold, hungry, and cruel as often as they were harmonious, but I could never slow his speculations.
A bachelor who didn’t share my interest in women, Antoine was a writer and pamphleteer with lodgings near the Sorbonne. I found him not at his desk but at one of the new ice-cream cafes near the Pont Saint-Michel, nursing a lemonade he claimed had curative powers. Talma was always faintly ill, and continuously experimenting with purgatives and diets to achieve elusive health. He was one of the few Frenchmen I knew who would eat the American potato, which most Parisians regarded as fit only for pigs. At the same time, he was always lamenting that he’d not lived life fully enough and longed to be the adventurer he imagined me to be, if only he didn’t have to risk a cold. (I’d somewhat exaggerated my own exploits and secretly enjoyed his flattery.) He greeted me warmly as always, his young features innocent, his hair unruly even after being cut short in the new Republican fashion, his day coat rose-coloured with silver buttons. He had a broad forehead, wide, excited eyes, and a complexion as pale as cheese.
I nodded politely at his latest remedy and asked instead for a wickeder drink, coffee, and pastry. The black brew’s addictive powers were periodically denounced by the government to obscure the fact that war made the beans hard to come by. ‘Could you pay?’ I asked Talma. ‘I’ve had something of a mishap.’