In 1776 he left, as he wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "to procure those aids from European powers, for enabling us to defend our freedom and independence."[i-330] He who had "been a Servant to many publicks, thro' a long life" went to Passy, where from the Hôtel de Valentinois of M. Roy de Chaumont he was to direct financial efforts calculated, with Washington's generalship, and the assiduous loyalty of a minority group, to win the Revolution. Welcomed as the apotheosis of "les Insurgens,"[i-331] he was virtually deified; as Turgot expressed it, _Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis_. The universality of his vogue in France was primarily due to his deistic naturalism, his wily pleading and activities in behalf of colonial independence, the receptivity of the Gallic mind for any marten-capped child of the New World, and to his scientific thought and experimentation which had fortified Reason in purging the unknown of its terror, helping thus to make the _philosophe_ at home in his reasonable world. Three weeks after Franklin arrived in France, one Frenchman said that "it is the mode today for everybody to have an engraving of M. Franklin over the mantelpiece."[i-332] France overnight became Franklinist when the savant came to dwell at Passy. Even before the victory of Yorktown he became _la mode_. It was to be his success to convert France's unrecognized alliance with the colonies to an open and undisguised alliance, perhaps even to war with England.[i-333] But even for one who enjoyed, as John Adams wrote, a reputation "more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire,"[i-334] it was to be a difficult task to manipulate a Beaumarchais, a Vergennes, and others, in spite of the well-known and inveterate economic and political grievances which the French held for the English. The virtues he stressed in the _Morals of Chess_ he was able to translate into a diplomatic mien, uniting "perfect silence" with a "generous civility." As a result, his record as minister to France is marked by complete success; but for this "it is by no means certain that American independence would have been achieved until many years later."[i-335]