Biography, by definition, puts its subject at the center of the world. This centripetal portrayal of personality presents a problem: No individual, historians will tell you, is that important in the larger scheme of things. It would seem impossible, then, to construct a centrifugal biography with the subject serving as a spoke in the wheel of events. Biography requires a hub.

Out of this clash between biography and history Stacy Schiff has honed a hybrid: History as seen through a prism of multifaceted personalities (she prefaces her narrative with a “Cast of Characters”), playing off her principal performer, the shape-shifting Benjamin Franklin. Ms. Schiff is abetted by a French setting that is never far from becoming a farce – at one point a French adviser asks the conspicuous Franklin to show up at Versailles in disguise, so as not to nettle Stormont, the hotheaded English ambassador.

By restricting her narrative to Franklin’s period in Paris, Ms. Schiff, a brilliant stylist, has intensified the scope of her story as deftly as any dramatist – and without cheating! This is a scrupulously documented account based on impressive work in French archives. Indeed, the biographer’s acknowledgments suggest that, like Franklin, Ms. Schiff brought her best game to Paris: arriving well prepared to inveigle her way into the hearts of the haughty, recalcitrant French, who like to be courted.

Franklin beguiled the French into bankrolling the American Revolution – often with under-the-table payments. Ms. Schiff, too, seems to have found her way to the back door when other approaches failed: “Lena Auerbach, Cecile Pozzo di Borgo, Jean-Paul Cluzel, Raymonde d’Italien, Ambassador Olivier de La Baume, and the Honorable A. Anne McLellan intervened to make available original copies of documents at the Quai d’Orsay, a collection presided over by Monique Constant, who resisted all entreaties.” I hereby nominate Stacy Schiff as the next ambassador to France.

Like Franklin, Ms. Schiff not only relishes French duplicity, she honors it as a way of doing business. Here, early on in her sparkling and amusing history, is a scene set as if for “Masterpiece Theatre”: With the tacit permission of the Comte de Vergennes, minister of foreign affairs, the playwright Beaumarchais has been finagling illegal deals sending French firearms and clothing to the rebellious American colonists. Viscount Stormont shows up at Versailles to deliver a protest to Vergennes:

The official line … was simple: agitated English hand wringing was met with expert French hand washing. What was the government to do? France was full of adventurers. Merchants sold their goods to whomever they chose. But that material may end up in North America, insisted the British ambassador, hotly. “Wait now, they’re not there yet,” came the soothing reply. Stormont met only with nonchalance at Versailles. So someone had trusted money to Beaumarchais. What could be expected of people like that?

I am tempted just to go on quoting Ms. Schiff, because I know that my own words cannot possibly be better than hers. I detest those reviewers who pretend to know more about a subject than the biographer, when what they know is just what they have reviewed. No, in this review, we are all in the audience applauding Ms. Schiff, whose supple style is the perfect accompaniment to Franklin’s agile flirtation with the French.

What is astonishing about Franklin’s French duet is that he had virtually nothing to offer his partner. Who believed that this new American republic would last? It was essentially bankrupt. If American failed after receiving French funding, a victorious Britain would no doubt come after its Gallic rivals, humiliating the ancien regime, which had yet to recover from its devastating defeat in the “French and Indian” (or Seven Years’) War a decade or so earlier.

Like Herman Melville’s confidence man, all Franklin really had was himself. He was like a fan dancer appearing in the buff yet never quite exposed, waving his feathers in mesmerizing fashion. What one hand seemed to give, the other took away. But the dance itself was what counted in fashionable France. Franklin created an air of expectation. What would be his next move?

His energy and elasticity (he was already 70 years old) made the French wonder if he knew something about America’s staying power that they could not see but very much wanted to believe in. If it were true, then the Brits – all appearances to the contrary – would go bust. Perhaps by just hanging on, the Americans, like Franklin, would triumph. Long before Josephine Baker arrived, Franklin was an American exotic who was always worth another look.

Indeed, Franklin became a French discovery. Ms. Schiff makes the point by quoting Horace Walpole: “If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there.” It is no wonder that John Adams, who wanted principles and politics to coincide, found the Frenchified Franklin – the man of many positions – so disconcerting. Franklin was like a character in a Beaumarchais play, “The Marriage of Figaro,” which Ms. Schiff quotes:

It’s easy. Pretend to know what you don’t, and pretend not to know what you do. Hear what you don’t understand and don’t hear what you do. Promise what you cannot deliver, what you have no intention of delivering. Make a great secret of hiding what isn’t there. Plead you’re busy as you spend your time sharpening pencils. Speak profoundly to cover up your emptiness, encourage spies, reward traitors, tamper with seals, intercept letters, hide the ineptitude of your goals by speaking of them glowingly – that’s all there is to politics. I swear.

Not since Melville’s “Israel Potter” has there been such a robust and risible portrayal of Franklin and his period.