Ethan Gage Collection # 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

had neither my money nor my medallion. And why would Minette implicate me with a bloody fingertip? I was as baffled as I was frightened.
    I felt especially vulnerable as an American in Paris. Yes, we’d depended on French aid to achieve our independence. Yes, the great Franklin had been a witty celebrity during his years as our nation’s diplomat, his likeness reproduced on so many cards, miniatures, and cups that the king, in a rare display of royal wit, had him painted inside one ardent female admirer’s chamber pot. And yes, my own connection to the scientist and diplomat had won me a few well-placed French friends. But relations had worsened as France interferedwith our neutral shipping. American politicians who welcomed the idealism of the French Revolution became disgusted by the Terror. If I had any usefulness in Paris, it was trying to explain each nation to the other.
    I’d first come to the city fourteen years before, age nineteen, as a means for my shipping merchant father to disentangle my emotions (and his fortune) from Annabelle Gaswick and her socially ambitious parents. I didn’t know for certain that Annabelle was with child, but I’ll allow it was theoretically possible. It was not a match my family desired. A similar dilemma had reportedly driven young Ben Franklin from Boston to Philadelphia, and my father gambled that the ancient statesman might sympathize with my plight. It helped that Josiah Gage had served in the Continental Army as a major and, more importantly, was a third-degree Mason. Franklin, a longtime Freemason in Philadelphia, had been elected to the Paris Lodge of the Nine Muses in 1777, and the following year was instrumental in getting Voltaire initiated into the same august gathering. Since I’d made early trading trips to Quebec, spoke passable French, and was reasonably gifted with letters (I was in my second year at Harvard, though I’d already grown impatient with musty classics, the scholarly self-absorbed, and debates over questions for which there is no answer), my father suggested in 1784 that I might be an assistant to the American ambassador. In truth Franklin was seventy-eight, declining in vigor, and had no need of my naïve counsel, but he was willing to help a fellow Mason. Once I was in Paris the old statesman took an odd liking to me, despite my lack of clear ambition. He introduced me to both Freemasonry and electricity.
    â€œIn electricity is the secret force that animates the universe” Franklin told me. “In Freemasonry is a code of rational behavior and thought that, if followed by all, would do much to cure the world of its ills.”
    Freemasonry, he explained, had emerged in England at the dawn of our eighteenth century, but traced its origins to the guild of masons who wandered Europe building the great cathedrals. They were “free” because their skills allowed them to find employment wherever theywanted and demand a fair wage when doing so—no small thing in a world of serfs. Yet Freemasonry dated itself even older than that, finding its roots in the Knights Templar of the Crusades, who had their headquarters at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and later became the bankers and warlords of Europe. The medieval Templars became so powerful that their fraternity was crushed by the king of France and their leaders burned at the stake. It was the survivors who reputedly were the seed of our own order. Like many groups, Masons took a certain pride in past persecution.
    â€œEven the martyred Templars are descendants of yet earlier groups,” Franklin said. “Masonry traces its ancestry to the wise men of the ancient world, and to the stone workers and carpenters who built Solomon’s temple.”
    Masonic symbols are the aprons and leveling tools of the stonemason, because the fraternity admires the logic and precision of engineering and architecture. While membership requires belief in a supreme being, no