Ben Franklin, a complicated guy.......

 

For all his simplicity he loved the good life: In Paris alone he had 1,041 bottles of wine in his cellar, nine indoor servants, and he spent freely, on food, on women, on luxuries.  While his circle of friends was among the most fascinating in history—his acquaintances included David Hume, Bishop Berkeley, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Voltaire, Noah Webster, Sir Isaac Newton, Jeremy Bentham, Diderot, and Immanuel Kant, as well as the Enlightenment princess Ekaterina Dashkova of Russia, an intimate of Catherine the Great herself—his colleagues often couldn't stand him.  John Adams thought him "lazy," "insignificant," and devious, not to mention too accommodating to the French.  Arthur Lee, a fellow commissioner to France, despised him, and was convinced that their secretary was a British spy, a charge that Franklin abruptly dismissed (Lee was right). 

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800