Read Online QI The Book of the Dead by John Mitchinson, John Lloyd - Free Book Online

of Highly Effective People with jokes.
    Here’s a good story from the book. Franklin had been asked to publish a ‘scurrilous and defamatory’ article in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, but he strongly disagreed with both the tone and the content:
    To determine whether I should publish it or not, I went home in the evening, purchased a twopenny loaf at the baker’s, and with the water from the pump made my supper; I then wrapped myself up in my great-coat, and laid down on the floor and slept till morning, when, on another loaf and a mug of water, I made my breakfast. From this regimen I feel no inconvenience whatever. Finding I can live in this manner, I have formed a determination never to prostitute my press to the purposes of corruption and abuse of this kind .
     
    It was typical of the man: at once morally admirable, rigorously original and faintly absurd. And, in realising that he could survive perfectly well living on bread and water and sleeping on the floor, he was a true Epicurean.

    But there was to be no ‘hidden life’ for Franklin. In his seventies, as US ambassador to France, though he dressed like a simple backwoodsman in a fur hat and a plain brown suit, there was no escaping the fact he was one of the world’s most famous men. As he wrote to his daughter:
    My picture is everywhere, on the lids of snuff boxes, on rings, busts. The numbers sold are incredible. My portrait is a best seller, you have prints, and copies of prints and copies of copies spread everywhere. Your father’s face is now as well known as the man in the moon .
     
    He was also – despite being old, bald and fat – very popular with the ladies. Although, as a younger man, he did admit to at least one illegitimate child (his son William), he probably wasn’t as much of an old goat as some have painted him. He certainly liked women – and had an uncanny ability to write as though he were one (as his many female pseudonyms show) – though most of his amorous liaisons seem to have been intimate but not sexual friendships, usually with him in the role of mentor. Which isn’t to say he didn’t get up to mischief. At one of the endless parties the French threw for him, a young woman patted his portly belly and remarked, ‘Dr Franklin, if this were on a woman, we’d know what to think.’ To which he replied, ‘Half an hour ago, mademoiselle, it was on a woman and now what do you think?’ In this vein, when asked by a young male friend for advice in choosing a mistress, Franklin wrote back extolling the virtues of older women. He listed eight good reasons, including:
    5. Because… The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement .
     
    His final reason was even more to the point: ‘They are so grateful! ’ As always with Franklin, it’s difficult to tell just how serious he was being, but the letter, first discovered in 1881, has done him no harm. In 2003 Time magazine published an article on him entitled ‘Why he was a babe magnet’. Franklin’s more selfdeprecating name for himself was ‘Dr Fatsides’.
    Benjamin Franklin – scientist, diplomat, philosopher, inventor, businessman, civic leader, patriot, humorist, revolutionary and ladies’ man – died in 1790, aged eighty-four. Sixty years earlier he’d written his own immortal epitaph:
    The Body of B. Franklin Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new &