But the story of the verse is not yet finished. And here it mingles with the history of Franklin in Paris, constituting an episode of the American Revolution. The verse was written for a portrait. And now that the costly first step had been taken, the portrait of Franklin was seen everywhere,--in painting, in sculpture, and in engraving. I have counted in the superb collection of the Bibliothèque Impériale, at Paris, forty-seven engraved heads of him. At the royal exhibition of pictures the republican portrait found place, and the name of Franklin was printed at length in the catalogue,--a circumstance which did not pass unobserved at the time; for the “Espion Anglais,” in recording it, treats it as “announcing that he began to come out of his obscurity.”[261] The same curious authority, describing a festival at Marseilles, says, under date of March 20, 1779, “I was struck, on entering the hall, to observe a crowd of portraits representing the insurgents; but that of M. Franklin especially drew my attention, on account of the device, ‘_Eripuit cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis_.’ This was inscribed recently, and _every one admired the sublime truth_.”[262] Thus completely was France, not merely in its social centre, where fashion gives the law, but in its distant borders, pledged to the cause of which Franklin was the representative. As in halls of science and popular resorts, so was our Plenipotentiary even in the palace of princes. The biographer of the Prince de Condé dwells with admiration upon the illustrious character, who, during the great debate and the negotiations that ensued, had fixed the regards of Paris, of Versailles, of the whole kingdom indeed,--although in simple and farmer-like exterior, so unlike those gilded plenipotentiaries to whom France was accustomed,--and he recounts, most sympathetically, that the Prince, after an interview of two hours, declared that “Franklin appeared to him above even his reputation.”[263] And here we encounter again the unwilling testimony of Capefigue, who says that he was followed everywhere, taking possession of “hearts and minds,” and that “his picture, in his simple Quaker dress, was suspended at the hearth of the poor and in the boudoir of the fashionable,”[264]--all of which is in harmony with the more sympathetic record of Lacretelle, who says that “portraits of Franklin were to be seen everywhere, with this inscription, _which the Court itself found just and sublime_, ‘_Eripuit cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis_.’”[265]