When Adams or Franklin went to France for extended periods of time,what did they do for money. ? Did they carry a chest of gold.? What if they ran out?
Good question and I expect someone will be along with the answer.
But my guess would be that since they were there to drum up support for America and part of that was financial support, they probably took their subsistence from some of the funds they were raising. Franklin wasn’t exactly poor and was a major celebrity in his era, so I don’t think he’d have much of a problem.
They had what were called letters of credit. You could take them to a bank and establish an account or receive cash. Think of it as an early form of checks. The same principle was used for international commerce.
They also submitted expense reports to the Congress, the problem being that it could take months for the ships to crisscross the Atlantic. Adams was fairly frugal in his lifestyle (in spite of the famous “two mistresses” slander about him [totally false]) but Jefferson, an infamous spendthrift who renovated and redecorated a rented house [!] while in Paris, was always running out of money, having to use his own and to borrow from wealthy friends (mainly the Marquis de laFayette) until he could be reimbursed, and having to justify all manner of expenses to an often rightfully dubious Congress (“You spent HOW MUCH on wine!?”).
Another source of money for Jefferson when he was in need was New Yorker Gouverneur Morris, one of the richest men in America who had business agents in Paris (and was later a diplomat there himself). Morris was one of many men who served as ambassador largely because their huge private fortunes allowed them to do so when removed from extra means of support and also made them immune from (at least the pettier) attempts at bribery. (Morris is believed to have used his influence and a part of his fortune to save the Marquis de la Fayette’s wife, Adrienne de Noailles du Motier, from being guillotined along with her sister, mother, aunts, and grandmother during the Revolution [her husband being imprisoned in Austria at the time].)
*Morris was one of the richest men in America. His father had been probably the richest man in America, but as a younger son Gouverneur didn’t inherit nearly as much as his half-brothers, but he was a reckless and very clever business man who became far wealthier than his relatives and even bought the family mansion when his half-brother went belly up. He also had one of the most notorious private lives in the country and was infamous as a one-legged/one-armed aging bachelor and womanizer- he kept several mistresses at a time. When he settled down in his fifties it didn’t help matters much as his bride was a much younger relative of Jefferson’s who had been accused [probably correctly] of murdering her lover and her illegitimate infant; as a wedding gift he allowed her to dismiss all but one of his mistresses.