Revolutionary Brothers by Tom Chaffin

Author:Tom Chaffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

THIRTY-SIX

“To See What I Have Never Seen Before”

Amid the late-January chill of 1787, as the upcoming reconvening of the Assembly of Notables had dominated Parisian conversations, Thomas Jefferson was dreaming of a place in the sun. To Madison he confided: “I am now about setting out on a journey to the South of France, one object of which is to try the mineral waters there for the restoration of my hand, but another is to visit all the seaports where we have trade, and to hunt up all the inconveniencies under which it labours, in order to get them rectified. I shall visit and carefully examine too the Canal of Languedoc.”1

Jefferson had contemplated this trip for months. And on February 28, 1787, he finally left Paris. Hours before leaving, however, he found time to write to Lafayette; concerning his friend’s work with the Notables and their pondering of reformed governance for France, Jefferson, departing from his usual Anglophobia, counseled a moderate course, urging him to keep “the good model of your neighboring country before your eyes [so that] you may get on step by step towards a good constitution. Tho’ that model is not perfect, yet as it would unite more suffrages than any new one which could be proposed, it is better to make that the object. If every advance is to be purchased by filling the royal coffers with gold, it will be gold well employed.”

Jefferson’s letter also included a wistful request: “I flatter myself I shall hear from you sometimes,” he wrote. “Send your letters to my hotel as usual and they will be forwarded to me.” In asking Lafayette to write, Jefferson knew there would be many more lodgings to which letters would need to be forwarded than when he first conceived his trip. For, in the end, an itinerary originally confined to a few places over mere weeks had swollen into “a journey of three months.” Moreover, in planning the trip, he had tried as much as possible to create opportunities to travel and be alone—or at least without an entourage.

Such touring was unusual for a diplomat of Jefferson’s stature—and he had not arrived at his preferences causally: He savored the company of friends; he likewise cherished solitude; it was the region between the two that ill-suited him: “Between the society of real friends and the tranquility of solitude, the mind finds no middle ground.” To safeguard both solitude and privacy, Jefferson, paying all the trip’s costs himself, designated it a personal rather than an official excursion—in part to avoid the obligation of bringing along a servant and rider from the Hôtel de Langeac.

Rather than travel with a servant from his residence—one likely to fill idle moments with chitchat, and later gossip about the journey at the Hôtel de Langeac—he had decided to depart Paris alone. “I was quite determined to be master of my own secret, and therefore to take a servant who should not know me.” Upon reaching the first major city on

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