Nearly every year he took a trip from London for his health and to refresh his mind. In the fall of 1767, he made his first visit to France, again in the company of his “steady, good friend,” Sir John Pringle. As a loyal subject of an England frequently at war with France, he was prejudiced in advance against “that intriguing nation,” as he called it. Even this first short visit led him to reverse his opinion. “It seems to be a point settled here universally that strangers are to be treated with respect,” he wrote Polly Stevenson. “Why don’t we practise this urbanity to Frenchmen? Why should they be allowed to outdo us in anything?” Already he was adopting French fashions. “I had not been here six days before my tailor and peruquier [wig maker] had transformed me into a Frenchman. Only think what a figure I make in a little bag-wig and naked ears! They told me I was become twenty years younger, and looked very _galant_.” In French scientific circles, his name was legendary. Scientists bragged that they were _Franklinistes_, a word they had coined. Thomas d’Alibard, the first to draw electricity from the skies, entertained him royally. At Versailles, he and Sir John were presented to Louis XV, whose praise of his electrical experiments Franklin could hardly have forgotten, and whom he found “a handsome man, has a very lively look, and appears younger than he is.” The King “talked a good deal to Sir John,” he wrote Polly, “asking many questions about our royal family; and did me too the honour of taking some notice of me. That’s saying enough, for I would not have you think me so much pleased with this king and queen as to have a whit less regard than I used to have for ours.” “Our king” to him was still George III. He thought Versailles badly kept up in spite of its splendor but was impressed with the way drinking water was kept pure by filtering it through cisterns filled with sand. It seemed as though every time he turned his back to London there were changes in the ministry. Townshend, who had done more than any man before him to turn the Americans into revolutionists, died in September 1767. He was succeeded by the Tory, Lord North, a pompous thick-lipped personage, who had neither the will nor the desire to improve colonial relations. William Pitt’s health was still poor. He collapsed in 1768 in the House of Lords, in the midst of a fiery attack on his government’s American policies. In the same year, the pleasant Lord Shelburne was succeeded by the Earl of Hillsborough, a master of hypocrisy in Franklin’s estimation, as Secretary of State for the Colonies.