MICHAEL ZUCKERMAN

      Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. In their time, our two great players on the world stage, very nearly our only players of any international reputation or consequence. Ever since, our avatars of the American dream. The Philadelphian fully thirty-seven years older than the Virginian, yet the two of them twinned in our national imagination as they were twined in the crafting the Declaration of Independence and the American Philosophical Society, and in finding the passionate love of their lives in Paris.

      Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Cultivating correspondences and keeping company with the finest minds of the Old World: artists and aristocrats, scientists and philosophers, rulers and revolutionaries. Attracting the statesmen and seers of the great courts of Europe, who found their conversation fascinating, and not just in the patronizing way that worldly sophisticates indulge earnest provincials. Proving themselves—discovering themselves—as informed, ingenious, and inventive as anyone they encountered in the coffeehouses of London or the salons of Paris.

      Franklin an impossible act to follow. The most celebrated scientist of the eighteenth century. The greatest diplomat, on the most urgent of diplomatic missions, in all of American history. Literally, the most famous man in the world. His image everywhere: in paintings, prints, statuettes, and busts, on cup and saucer sets, snuffboxes, ashtrays, andirons, wallpaper, elaborate models we might now call action figures, even an equivocally handsome Chevres chamber-pot. His face, he said, almost as well known as that of the moon.

      Jefferson appointed to the embassy to France in Franklin’s stead. Able to succeed Dr. Franklin, he liked to say, but not to replace him. Mistaken. Exactly like Franklin, America’s minister to France and the New World’s ambassador to the Old. Both of them embodiments of Europe’s fondest fantasies of a universal enlightenment, reaching even the savage shores of other continents. Each of them savant and scientist, connoisseur of culture and fine wines, a man with a way with words.

      In Paris and at Versailles, Jefferson too became a confidant of great men of state. He attended daily on the fateful debates of the States General in the year of the French Revolution. He was “much acquainted with the leading patriots of the assembly.” As he put it, he “had [their] confidence.” After the fall of the Bastille, the chairman of the National Assembly’s committee to form a constitution invited him to join in the committee’s deliberations. At a critical juncture in those deliberations, the Marquis de Lafayette asked him to host a private meeting of the leaders of the assembly. It was at Jefferson’s house, in a meeting that lasted far into the evening, that those men hammered out the principles that shaped the constitution of the first French republic.

      No one replaced Jefferson, then or ever after. He and Franklin remain, to this day, our incomparable inspirations, our incarnations of our best ideals. They are what we would wish to be in what Jefferson called our pursuit of happiness.

      On just that account, we recur to them over and over again. Franklin’s (too-) witty compaction of Poor Richardisms, The Way to Wealth, is even now the most widely reprinted work in the annals of American authorship. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is still our secular scripture, and his writings on church and state and freedom of speech and press are still central if not canonical for politicians, pundits, and Supreme Court justices. We take for granted that we might still learn from them.

      If we would learn, it would seem that we could not hope for better texts than their own autobiographies. There, surely, they would gather for us the harvest of their insatiable curiosity. There, surely, they would distill for us the lessons of their long, eventful lives.

      Franklin’s autobiography fulfills its promise and exceeds it. Though put together in patches over two decades, its coherences irradiate its odd disjointedness. Acclaimed from its first appearance, it remains to this day our classic American confession, and easily our most influential and widely read.

      Still, it disappoints. It is, or at least it appears to be, preoccupied with the paltry. It is resolute in its confinement to the quotidian. It seems on its surface little more than a succession of trifling incidents. Franklin’s petty disputes with his brother. His floundering faux pas on his first arrival in Philadelphia. His intrigues with friends and fellow workers. His little club of ambitious young men. On and on. Episode after episode, on matters about which we would know nothing and care nothing if he had not included them in his reminiscences.

      The memoir keeps its counsel on the great deeds that defined the nation. It is silent on the Stamp Act and the Continental Congress. It does not speak of declaring independence, winning the French alliance, or negotiating the treaty that established a new nation. It reveals nothing of the work of the constitutional convention of 1787.

      Franklin could have told us of his part in those stirring scenes if he had wanted to do so. Though he wrote the first portion of his memoir in 1771, when he still considered himself very much a Briton, he wrote the last three