A Great Improvisation (2005) (edit title/settings)

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Benjamin Franklin: Add a description of this character.

Quotes edit see section history

• ““History belongs to the eloquent, all the more to the prolifically so.””

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• ““With his first spoonful, one of the guests fished up a full-grown, billliantly green Massachusetts frog. “Mon Dieu! Une grenouille!” He exclaimed, holding up his catch and passing it by a hind leg, to the gentlemen at his side, who did the same, until the well-inspected creature reached d’Estaing. An examination of the bowls before them revealed that each officer had been similarly favored; the Frenchmen could not contain their mirth. “Why don’t they eat them?” wondered their crestfallen host. He had dispatched emissaries to every swamp in Cambridge.””

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• “Is it you, Sir, who replaces Dr. Franklin?” Jefferson took to answering: “No one can replace him, Sir; I am only his successor.”

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• The divide between the two worlds seemed unfordable. The women of America labored under the illusion that they were to be flirtatious until they landed a husband and paragons of virtue thereafter, when every self-respecting Frenchwoman subscribed to the opposite approach; what passed for gallantry in one country was commonly known as adultery in the other. (Lafayette’s great friend the duc de Lauzun had the time of his life explaining to one colonial beauty that he was indeed married, but only a little bit so, hardly enough to bear mention.)

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• “For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.”

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• Even when America’s linguistic isolationism gradually gave way—Harvard taught French after 1787, and Yale recognized it officially in 1825—there were those who reflexively felt it should be kept from the ladies. Where the French language went, depravity, frivolity, and indolence were sure to follow.

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• Fourteen years later Jefferson was to note of the newly elected president of the United States: “Mr. Adams is vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.”

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• There are people whose defects become them, and others who are ill served by their good qualities. —La Rochefoucauld

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• “Doing an injury puts you below your enemy; revenging one makes you but even with him; forgiving it sets you above him.”57

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• “Remember that in politics those who know the most say the least; fools alone talk and believe.”

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• In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

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• In the face of a major decision Franklin advocated an exercise he termed “moral algebra.” Make a list of pros and cons and allow it to marinate for a few days. Gradually jettison the entries that equal each other—canceling out multiple arguments that amount to a single one in weight—and endorse the column in which a balance remains.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• France
• Philadelphia

First Sentence edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

List the series to which this book belongs.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Stacy Schiff (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Ambassador Book Award (2006: American Studies)

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › History › Americas › United States › Revolution & Founding