To Benjamin Franklin from Madame Brillon: Two Letters, [before June 1779]
From Madame Brillon: Two Letters7
(I) and (II) AL: American Philosophical Society
I.
ce mercredi a 3 h. [before June, 1779]
Mon chér papa, monsieur le Comte de Stroganoff vient de nous proposér d’allér voir le sérvice de l’impératrice de Russie a la manufacture de séve; s’il vous convient d’y venir avéc nous, nous vous donnerons le thé au retour: un mot de réponse a votre fille; nous partirons a 5 heures précises:
II.
ce mercredi 5 heures [before June, 1779]
La fille du papa ne pouvant se résoudre a passér une journée d’un mércredi sans le voir; lui demande le thé au retour de séve pour elle et pour ses amis.
Addressed: A Monsieur / Monsieur Franklin / A Passy
7. Presumably sent at a two-hour interval on an unspecified Wednesday, these two notes refer to a proposed visit to the Sèvres manufactory where a huge dinner service (seven hundred and forty-four pieces) was being readied for shipment to Catherine II. According to Kira Butler, “Sèvres for the Imperial Court,” Apollo, CI (1975), 454–6, the turquoise service, known as the Cameo, was completed in June, 1779—hence our dating—and shipped in a Dutch vessel to St. Petersburg, where it arrived in October. Some of the pieces can still be seen at the Musée de l’Histoire de la Porcelaine at Sèvres. For a somewhat different version of the transaction that dates the completion of the service in 1788 see William Burton, A General History of Porcelain (2 vols., New York, 1921), I, 178–9. Count Stroganoff was a fellow Mason of BF at the Nine Sisters; see XXVIII, 286n.