Gilbert Chinard

The Ceres reached Portsmouth nineteen days after leaving Boston, a remarkably swift passage, without incident, except for three days spent in fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland, while the ship was becalmed. Jefferson and his companions were delayed a week in Portsmouth by Martha's slight illness, and then went directly to Paris, where he arrived on August 6, 1784. Jefferson was to remain in France till the fall of 1789—five years crowded with pleasures, social duties, political duties, and hard work. His activities were so varied and his interests so diversified that it is no longer possible to follow any chronological order; we must establish arbitrary divisions, though Jefferson passed at all times from one subject to another and was incessantly busy with undertakings and plans truly encyclopedic.

First of all, he had to find quarters. He had put up at the HÔtel d'OrlÉans, Rue des Petits Augustins, then he had rented "HÔtel TÊte-Bout, cul-de-sac TÊte-Bout", and a year later moved to a house belonging to M. le Comte de L'Avongeac "at the corner of the Grande Route des Champs ElysÉes and Rue Neuve de Berry", where he continued to live as long as he remained in Paris. His secretary Short and Colonel Humphreys, secretary to the legation, lived with him. It was "a very elegant house, even for Paris, with an extensive garden, court and outbuildings, in the handsomest style."

Of Jefferson's first impressions after landing in France we unfortunately know nothing. Not until a full year had elapsed did he express his personal views in writing. Although he deplored the wretched condition of the larger mass of the people, he had already come to the conclusion, probably correct, that life in Paris was more pleasant than anywhere else on earth: "The roughnesses of the human mind are so thoroughly rubbed off with them, that it seems as if one might glide through a whole life without a jostle."[103] It was some time, however, before he felt entirely at home in Parisian society. He was somewhat handicapped and humiliated at first because of lack of means at the disposal of the Minister of the United States for maintaining his rank. In his report on the reduction of the civil list (March 5, 1784), Jefferson, animated with a fine republican zeal, had fixed the compensation of American representatives abroad at ten thousand dollars. Now that he was in Paris he found the allowance very inadequate. A proud Virginian, accustomed to entertain generously, he considered hospitality an imperious duty as well as a pleasure, and his letters to Congress are filled with complaints on the niggardliness of his resources. However, he procured a good French cook in the person of the worthy Petit, who became quite attached to him, and wrote for him recipes for "poulet en casserole" and "cafÉ À la franÇaise." He informed himself concerning the best French wines, some of which he already knew, and made a thorough and scientific study of the different vintages, recording the result of his observations in unpublished notes. Nor was he so selfish as to keep all his knowledge to himself. Adams and Washington used his good offices to keep their cellars well stocked in champagne and sauternes. For them and for Madison he subscribed to "L'EncyclopÉdie MÉthodique", he bought new French books, engravings, plaster casts, and medals, and his willingness to oblige his friends and to go shopping for them was so well known that Mrs. Adams asked him to buy for her daughter "two pairs of corsets", much to his distress, since she had omitted to send him the measure. For Mrs. Bingham he filled boxes with "caps and bonnets"; for Madison he bought a pocket telescope, a walking stick, a chemical box, for poor little Polly who had remained with her aunt at Eppington "sashes" and Parisian dolls.

Through Franklin, Jefferson was introduced to Madame d'Houdetot, who had unlimited admiration for a man who not only was an American and a philosopher, but who also knew the names of American plants and trees much more thoroughly than her dear Doctor. He obtained for her seeds, bulbs, and trees to be planted in the park of Sannois.[104] Through Franklin also he met Madame HelvÉtius and her two abbÉs, who always wrote jointly to Jefferson.[105] At her house, he saw Cabanis, then a very young man, Destutt de Tracy and abbÉ Morellet. He attended concerts at Madame d'Houdetot's brother's house, but above all he was attracted by Lafayette's family and friends. It was large enough for a man of more leisure and more worldly tendencies. There was the Marquis himself and his charming wife, who befriended Martha and wrote Jefferson several notes filled with that delightful eighteenth-century "sensibilitÉ" and amiability of which we have lost the secret. There was also Madame de TessÉ, Lafayette's cousin, who was, however, considerably older than the Marquis and whom he called "aunt." Jefferson saw her in Paris and visited her often at Chaville, where Short stayed for weeks at a time, perfecting himself in the French language and the ways of French society. She loved trees, good paintings, fine buildings, statues, and music, and did much to educate Jefferson's taste in these matters. Not mentioned by his biographers, Madame de Corny played a not inconsiderable part in Jefferson's sentimental life. Young, pretty, witty, and married to a husband much older than herself, she enjoyed Jefferson's company, took with him many walks in the Bois de Boulogne and perhaps, secretly, found him too scrupulously polite and too respectful.[106] There were also several other women, Madame de Tott, a distinguished painter, the vivacious and charming Lucy Paradise, Comtesse Barziza, a real "enfant terrible", irresponsible, outspoken, who in her letters to Jefferson listed all the scandals of the days.[107] And one must not forget among Jefferson's feminine acquaintances the old Comtesse de la Rochefoucauld, dignified, sarcastic, a terrible bore at times, whom on many occasions he vainly tried to avoid.

But when all is told, it does not appear that the circle of Jefferson's friends was ever very large. During his first year in Paris he did his best to keep in the background. To Franklin he owed deference, because of his age and the position of the Doctor as the only accredited representative to the Court of Versailles. Adams, the other plenipotentiary, was older than Jefferson, who on every occasion insisted that his colleagues should have precedence over him. A good listener, he was much more reserved than Franklin and always remained somewhat self-conscious when he spoke or wrote French. If the Doctor spoke French as badly as he wrote it, his conversation must have been an extraordinary jargon; but Jefferson was too sensitive and had too much amour-propre to venture upon long discussions and conversations with people he did not know intimately. Most of his French letters were written by Short, who became rapidly a master of the language, and we may presume that Jefferson never really felt at home in a purely French circle.

This was true at least of his first year in Paris. He had many fits of despondency and wondered at times whether he was not too old to accustom himself to strange people and to strange manners. He often experienced the usual longing of the traveler for his native land: "I am now of an age which does not easily accommodate itself to new modes of living and new manners," he wrote to Baron Geismer, the former prisoner of Charlottesville; "and I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds and independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital. I shall therefore, rejoin myself to my native country with new attachments and exaggerated esteem for its advantages."[108] It was probably on these occasions that he took refuge in the most silent of all places, a Carthusian monastery, a very strange abode for one who has been accused of being a fierce anti-clerical:

He also had rooms in the Carthusian Monastery on Mount Calvary; the boarders, of whom I think there were forty, carried their own servants, and took their breakfasts in their own rooms. They assembled to dinner only. They had the privilege of walking in the gardens, but as it was a hermitage, it was against the rules of the house for any voices to be heard outside of their own rooms, hence the most profound silence. The author of "Anarcharsis" was a boarder at the time, and many others who had reasons for a temporary retirement from the world. Whenever he had a press of business, he was in the habit of taking his papers and going to the hermitage, where he spent sometimes a week or more till he had finished his work. The hermits visited him occasionally in Paris, and the Superior made him a present of an ivory broom that was turned by one of the brothers.[109]

From time to time this same mood recurred:

Not foreign to this despondency was the bad news that came from America. His youngest daughter Lucy died in the fall of 1784 and he was not satisfied until he had his remaining daughter near him in Paris, and Mary, familiarly called Polly, had joined her sister in the best convent of the French capital.

Between social duties and pleasures, dinners at the house of Lafayette, meetings of the Committees of Commerce, interviews with Vergennes, preparation of long letters to be sent home to keep his Government informed of the situation in Europe, correction of the proofs of the "Notes on Virginia", interviews with former French volunteers clamoring for their back pay, visits to shops and factories, Jefferson was a very busy man indeed. But exacting as his occupations were, he found time to escape from Paris on three different occasions to see something of France and Europe. In 1786 he journeyed to England, traveled in France and Italy in the spring of the following year, and visited Holland and the Rhine shortly before leaving for home. The diaries he kept during these trips are both revealing and disappointing. They demonstrate how little of European culture had penetrated his American mind, how carefully he preserved himself from the contamination of European manners and ways of thinking. In some respects it must be confessed that Jefferson remained very narrow and provincial, and almost a Philistine in his outlook.

The most damning document is the outline he made for Rutledge and Shippen on June 3, 1788, though in some respects it shows good judgment, as when Jefferson recommends "not to judge of the manners of the people from the people you will naturally see the most of: tavern keepers, valets de place, and postillions."—"These are the hackneyed rascals of every country. Of course they must never be considered when we calculate the national character." He manifested the same good sense in recommending always to ask for the vin du pays when traveling. But the worst comes in his enumeration of the "Objects of Attention for an American." It has to be read to be believed and should be transcribed here almost in full:

The man who wrote these lines was certainly not denationalized; the emancipated Virginian had unconsciously retained a puritanical distrust of purely Æsthetic enjoyments. He seems to have taken a sort of wicked pleasure in denying himself the disinterested joys of the artist and philosopher and his travels in Europe were no "sentimental journey." It cannot even be maintained that the views expressed in the letter to Shippen were a paradox and that he felt free to enjoy the pleasures from which he strove to protect his fellow countrymen. Most revealing in this respect is the following passage from a letter written to Lafayette, when he was traveling along the Riviera:

He seems to have been dominated by the same utilitarian preoccupations during his English journey. There he noted carefully all the peculiarities of English gardens, visiting all the show places with Whateley's book on gardening in his pocket: "My inquiries," he himself said, "were directed chiefly to such practical things as might enable me to estimate the expense of making and maintaining a garden in that style." This is why the only thing worth noticing at Kew was an Archimedes screw for raising water, of which he made a sketch. His conclusions were summed up in a letter to John Page after he came back to Paris. England had totally disappointed him. The "pleasure gardens", to be sure, went far beyond his ideas, but the city of London, though handsomer than Paris, was not so handsome as Philadelphia: "Their architecture is in the most wretched style I ever saw, not meaning to except America, where it is bad, not even Virginia, where it is worse than in any other part of America which I have seen." On the other hand, the mechanical arts were carried to a wonderful perfection, but he took no joy in visiting manufactures and shops, since the view reminded him that the frivolity of his fellow countrymen made them import many articles from London and thus pay tribute to a foreign nation.[112]

When he left Paris for the South of France he was in no more amiable mood. It was his first real contact with the French countryside and he was shocked beyond words at the sight of the first villages he passed through from Sens to Vermanton. He could not understand why the French peasants insisted on living close together in villages instead of building their houses on the grounds they cultivated. He racked his brains for an explanation and could find no better one than to suppose that they were "collected by that dogma of their religion which makes them believe, that to keep the Creator in good humor with His own works, they must mumble a mass every day." The people were illy clothed; the sight of women and children carrying heavy burdens and laboring with the hoe made the Virginian slave-owner conclude that "in a civilized country, men never expose their wives and children to labor above their force and sex, as long as their own labor can protect them from it." But he nowhere expressed any emotional distress nor heartfelt sympathy for these poor wretches and concluded that if there were no beggars it was probably an effect of the police.[113]

On the other hand, he noted every detail of the fabrication of Burgundy wine, enumerated the different vintages, the cost of casks, bottles, methods of transportation and marketing, the price of "vin ordinaire", of oil, butter, cattle, the cultivation of olive trees and fig trees and capers. Monuments are described with a mathematical eye, many small points noted, columns described, ornaments studied, but the only personal impression elicited by Arles is that "The principal monument here, is an amphitheatre, the external portico of which is tolerably complete."

What is true of France is even more true of Italy. At Milan the cathedral is not even mentioned, but "the salon of the Casa Belgiosa is superior to anything I have ever seen." And he adds immediately, "The mixture called Scaiola, of which they make their walls and floors, is so like the finest marble as to be scarcely distinguishable from it." Pages are given to the fabrication of Parmesan cheese. Once, however, in walking along the shore from Louano to Alberga, he could not resist the enchantment of the landscape. There he noted the remarkable coloration of the Mediterranean and was puzzled by it, but he also added, let it be marked to his credit:

A queer mixture of suppressed artistic emotions and avowed culinary preoccupations. Shades of Rousseau and Wordsworth, to mention the nightingale and the ortolans in one breath! But one thing at least we must be thankful for is his lack of pretence and conventional admiration. It is, after all, refreshing to find a traveler who does not copy from his guidebook and does not fall into raptures and worked-up ecstasies. He came back through "Luc, Brignolles, Avignon, Vaucluse", simply noting that "there are fine trout in the stream of Vaucluse and the valley abounds particularly with nightingales." He saw NÎmes, Montpellier, Frontignan, where he discussed the manufacture and price of wine; he passed through Carcassonne and was much interested in the canal and "the carp caught there", but did not mention the walls; he stayed several days at Bordeaux, measured the remains of a Roman amphitheater and made a thorough study of the wines; "Chateau Margau, La Tour de SÉgur, Hautbrion, Chateau de la Fite, Pontac, Sauternes, Barsac." He visited Nantes, Rennes, Angers, Tours, and ascertained the truth of the allegations of the famous "growth of shells unconnected with animal bodies" mentioned by Voltaire and discussed in the "Notes on Virginia." He saw Chanteloup and heard a nightingale there, but was far more interested in "an ingenious contrivance to hide the projecting steps of a stair-case."

The same utilitarian preoccupation reappears most conspicuously in his "Memorandums on a Tour from Paris to Amsterdam, Strasburg, and back to Paris" (March, 1788). At Amsterdam he studied the Dutch wheelbarrow, the canal to raise ships over the Pampus, joists of houses, the aviary of Mr. Ameshoff near Harlem; he made a sketch of the Hope's House "of a capricious appearance yet a pleasant one"—an architectural atrocity if ever there was one. At DÜsseldorf "the gallery of paintings is sublime", but equally interesting is the hog of this country (Westphalia) "of which the celebrated ham is made which sells at eight and a half pence sterling the pound." If he saw the cathedral at Cologne he forbore to mention it, but at Coblenz he had his first taste of the Moselle wine. It would be cruel to reproduce his description of the "clever ruin at Hanau, with the hermitage in which is a good figure of a hermit in plaster, colored to the life, with a table and a book before him, in the attitude of contemplation."

And yet, when the worst is told, one may wonder whether there would not be some unfairness in judging Jefferson merely from these memoranda. There he noted information for which he foresaw some further use, interesting knowledge which could be utilized at Monticello or for the benefit of his fellow countrymen. How to plant and prune the vines and the olive trees; how to make cheese and oil; how to introduce the "St. Foin", new vegetables, new crops such as rice, new industries such as the silkworm and mulberry tree; how to build a house; all this required exactness and precision and could scarcely be trusted to memory. Pleasant impressions of travel, on the contrary, could always be evoked through the imagination and would lose very little of their charm and value with time. Furthermore to put down these impressions in black and white would have required a certain process of analysis entirely foreign to Puritan consciousness, and a Puritan Jefferson had remained in his speech and manners far more than he himself believed. There was in these purely Æsthetic pleasures something really too personal to be indulged in, at least in writing. Once, however, he did away with all the restraint imposed upon him by education and the "habits of his country"; it is in the well-known letter written from NÎmes to Madame de TessÉ. Parts of it at least, in all fairness to Jefferson, have to be quoted here as a contrast to the dryness and objectiveness of the notes on travel....

This is indeed a charming letter; but why did he not write more often in this vein? Why did he send to Martha moralizing and edifying letters when he was traveling in Southern France and Italy? His latent puritanism, as already shown, may partly account for this reticence, but this came from a deeper feeling. He had already protested in his "Notes on Virginia" against the claim made by Europe to intellectual supremacy. He realized, however, how powerful was the attraction of the great centers of European culture on young America, and was afraid that the introduction of foreign arts, foreign literature, foreign customs, and "mode" might corrupt the very springs of American life. This blind admiration of everything European constituted one of the greatest dangers if America wished to develop on her own soil a civilization of her own. Friends in Virginia had to be convinced that an American youth, brought up on a strictly American diet, would in nowise be inferior to most Europeans. If one insisted upon sending a young man to Europe, the chances were that he would learn nothing essential, that on the contrary he would lose many of his native qualities and at any rate his native innocence and purity of mind. This appears most conspicuously in a letter written to J. B. Bannister, Junior, who had manifested the intention of sending his son to Europe. There Jefferson proceeded to denounce the features of European civilization as vehemently as any Puritan preacher and with the same frankness of expression. To enumerate the disadvantages of sending a youth to Europe "would require a volume", so he had to select a few. England is shortly disposed of: "If he goes to England, he learns drinking, horse racing, and boxing," for those are the peculiarities of English education. If he goes to the continent he will acquire a fondness for luxury and dissipation, he will contract a partiality for aristocracy and monarchy; he will soon be led to consider "fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice." He will become denationalized and recollecting "the voluptuary dress and arts of the European women, will pity and despise the chaste affections and simplicity of those of his own country." He will return to America "a foreigner", speaking and writing his own tongue "like a foreigner", and therefore unqualified to obtain those distinctions, which eloquence of the pen and tongue ensures in a free country. There can be only one conclusion after such a fierce denunciation of Europe:

Very bold indeed would have been the American father who, with such a frightful picture before his eyes, would have sent his son to Europe.

Thus we are led to a very unexpected conclusion. There is little doubt that Jefferson's democratic theories were confirmed and clarified by his prolonged stay in Europe. But this was not due to the lessons he received from the French philosophers. He had gone to France under the misapprehension that he would be considered there as a "savage from the mountains of America"; he had been dazzled at first by the splendor of the old world, but he had soon overcome his admiration and arrived at the conclusion that the game was not worth the candle. Life in Paris was very pleasant, but some one had to foot the bill, and the general fate of humanity was most deplorable in Europe. Such are the general impressions he sent to his friend Bellini one year after arriving in Paris:

Much, very much inferior, this, to the tranquil, permanent felicity with which domestic society in America blesses most of its inhabitants; leaving them to follow steadily those pursuits which health and reason approve, and rendering truly delicious the intervals of those pursuits!

If one looks to another field, the situation is very similar. "In science, the mass of the people are two centuries behind ours; their literature half a dozen years before us." But that is no serious inconvenience; books which are really good acquire a reputation in that lapse of time and then pass over to America, while poor books, controversial and uncertain knowledge are naturally weeded out, so that America is not bothered with that "swarm of nonsensical publications which issue daily from a thousand presses, and perishes almost in issuing."

On some points, however, Europeans have a decided superiority over the Americans: they have more amiable manners, they are more polite, more temperate, "they do not terminate the most sociable meals by transforming themselves into brutes. I have never seen a man drunk in France, even among the lowest of the people."

Finally in the arts there is no possible comparison:

Nor are we to believe that in Jefferson's opinion this was a small achievement. Had he been more poetically inclined he might have repeated the apostrophe of the old poet: "France mother of all the arts." But when all is told, the fact remained that Europe had more to learn from America than she could possibly give to the new nation, and thereupon Jefferson started to "boost" his own country. Protesting against a pseudo-discovery of an English wheelwright, he declared that the idea had been stolen from Doctor Franklin who had observed it in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Jersey, and the Jersey farmers might have borrowed it from Homer, "for ours are the only farmers who can read Homer."[117] Against the architectural feats of the Europeans it is not unfair to claim the superiority of American scenery, particularly of the Virginia marvels, such as the Natural Bridge, for "that kind of pleasure surpasses much in my estimation, whatever I find on this side of the Atlantic."[118]

At the end of his journey in France and Italy he conceded that there are indeed in these countries "things worth our imitation." But he immediately added, "the accounts from our country give me to believe that we are not in a condition to hope of the imitation of anything good."[119] In the meantime it is better for the Americans to stay at home, for "travelling makes men wiser, but less happy"; and he wrote to Peter Carr, whose education he had undertaken to direct: "There is no place where your pursuit of knowledge will be so little obstructed by foreign objects, as your own country, nor any, wherein the virtues of the heart will be less exposed to be weakened."[120]

CHAPTER II