Quote:
Originally Posted by Taltarzac725
In the abacus of determining friend from foe, Benjamin Franklin had a very hard time with one of his compatriots. This was with Arthur Lee who-- to put it in terms of 2013-- often acted like a troll to the people around him. He was a dunce with many of the social affairs going on in Paris and caused an abrupt end to some of Ben Franklin's plans with respect to getting the backing of various members of Parisian high society towards supporting the American Revolution. Arthur Lee Biography, from the Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography |
Arthur Lee went out of Paris in a
blaze of glory at least when viewed from the hindsight of history.
http://www.newrepublic.com/book/revi...omas-schaeper# He had complained about many people he came in contact with and seemed quite paranoid to Ben Franklin and his companions. It did turn out the one of the people he was most anxious about Edward Bancroft was actually a double agent working for the British Secret Service.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...1a07p_0001.htm He used invisible ink in some of his letters, hid messages at a dead drop, and managed to allude the scores of French spies that had been placed by the authorities on Americans in Paris. You wonder how Ian Fleming would have written about Edward Bancroft and what kind of weapons Q might have supplied him? It seemed though like Franklin was the man getting all the female attention in Paris, however, so the James Bond
simile does not work that well for Bancroft in that respect. Bancroft also seems like someone who would fit in more with the local
rotary club than someone placing
pouches of explosives under enemy bridges.