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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.
    “In 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 they wanted 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.
    “Even 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 creed is specified, and in fact its fellows are forbidden to discuss religion or politics in the lodge. It is a philosophical organization of rationality and scientific inquiry, founded in freethinking reaction to the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in earlier centuries. Yet it also plays with ancient mysticism and arcane mathematical precepts. Its emphasis on moral probity and charity, instead of dogma and superstition, make its commonsense teachings suspect to religious conservatives. Its exclusivity makes it a subject of jealousy and rumor.
    “Why don’t all men follow it?” I asked Franklin.
    “Too many humans would gladly trade a rational world for a superstitious one if it calms their fears, gives them status, or gains them an advantage over their fellows,” the American philosopher told me. “People are always afraid to think. And alas, Ethan, integrity is always a prisoner of vanity, and common sense is easily eclipsed by greed.”
    While I appreciated my mentor’s enthusiasm, I was not a notable success as a Mason. Ritual tires me, and Masonic ceremony seemed obscure and interminable. There were a good deal of long-winded speeches, memorization of tedious ceremonies, and vague promises of clarity that would come only when one advanced in