The frustration of their relationship evoked from Franklin one of his most wistful and self-revealing little tales, The Ephemera, written to her after a stroll in the garden. (The theme came from an article he had printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette fifty years earlier.) He called these stories bagatelles, the French term for a sprightly musical piece. He had happened to overhear, he wrote, a lament by one of the tiny short-lived flies who realized that his seven hours on this planet were nearing an end. He ends with a pun on her name.
TO MADAME BRILLON, SEPTEMBER 20, 1778
You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin-Joli, I stopped a little in one of our walks, and staid some time behind the company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an ephemere, all whose successive generations we were told were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues: my too great application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened thro curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures, but as they in their national vivacity spoke three or four together, I could make but little of their discourse. I found however, by some broken expressions that I caught now and then, they were disputing warmly the merit of two foreign musicians, one a cousin, the other a mosquito; in which dispute they spent their time seemingly as regardless of the shortness of life, as if they had been sure of living a month. Happy people! Thought I, you live certainly under a wise, just and mild government, since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections or imperfections of foreign music. I turned from them to an old greyheaded one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I have put it down in writing, in hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company, and her heavenly harmony.
It was, says he, the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin-Joli, could not itself subsist more than 18 hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of those hours; a great age, being no less than 420 minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above 7 or 8 minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriots, inhabitants of this bush; or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! For in politics, what can laws do without morals! Our present race of ephemeres will in a course of minutes, become corrupt like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress! Alas, art is long, and life short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough, to nature and to glory: but what will fame be to an ephemere who no longer exists? And what will become of all history, in the 18th hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin-Joli, shall come to its end, and be buried in universal ruin? To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good lady-ephemeres, and now and then a kind smile, and a tune from the everamiable Brillante.