Dr. Franklin and Mr. Jay

Conversations in Paris

RICHARD B. IMORRIS

. NCE again an extremely choice John Jay item has been
acquired by Special Collections, and once again through
the generosity of the Class of '23. This is an account of
a series of conversations between Benjamin Franklin and John
Jay, which the latter recorded while in Paris during the years
1783-84.

It is not perhaps extraordinary for the United States to dispatch
abroad on peace missions a variety of characters with sharply con¬
trasting personalities. One has only to recall the prim John Quincy
Adams at Ghent horrified by the antics of the less inhibited Henry
Clay. Despite their differences in character and styles, that coin-
mission agreed upon settling the issues of the Second War with
England, just as the Americans in Paris, including Franklin, Jay,
John Adams, and, at the very last moment, Henry Laurens,
achieved a triumphant peace with Great Britain a generation
earlier.

Franklin and Jay were indeed an odd couple. The former was
a genial, tolerant, humorous, and racy cosmopolite, with a pench¬
ant for indolence and an immense untidiness in handling office
affairs. Jay was a stern, vain, conscientious, tidy, and mostly un¬
bending lawyer, indefatigable in pursuit of his ends. Yet despite
their differences in style they quickly struck up a fast and lasting
friendship. What is more surprising is that the straight-laced Jay
not only relished the racy stories of the master raconteur, but took
the trouble of writing some of them down. Perhaps an analyst can
tell us why Jay, who combined virtue and monogamy in equal
amounts, delighted in putting down on paper the pecadilloes of