I love the story that a French building recently (2010s, I think) renovated and discovered back rooms wallpapered in very early American money and plenty more stuffed inside various walls as essentially insulation. There was no surprise as to why that might be because most of the bills had the obvious signature of Benjamin Franklin and there was one notorious French bordello in his diplomat days that he had been alleged to spend a lot of self-invented money at. It was mostly only good for wallpaper and insulation, but being a diplomat he certainly implied it was good American currency at the time. There's something to weirdly admire about Ben Franklin paying for apparently a lot of French services with money he just kind of made up himself, and they mostly accepted it because it did make interesting wallpaper and decent building insulation.
I would love a source for this if you could find one. I tried searching and will search more in depth later. Any more keywords or information you remember about the story?
