After the death of his wife in the early 1770s, Benjamin Franklin considered marrying the attractive widow of the famous philosopher Helvetius.

One day, after a long period during which his other commitments had prevented him from seeing her, she chided him for not having visited sooner. "Madam," Franklin wisely replied, "I am waiting until the nights are longer."

[Franklin -- a member of the notorious Hellfire sex club -- was once said to have had a mistress on every street in Paris. ("Now we know," Maxim magazine once declared, "why he's on the hundred-dollar bill!")]