Jefferson

by Albert Jay Nock

  The permanent interest of this journal is probably in its testimony to the amount of actual labour that a human being is capable of packing into a period of three months. One reads with great respect, for example, the record of two days’ work in a wine-growing region:

  March 7 & 8. From la Barque to Chagny. On the left are plains which extend to the Saone, on the right the ridge of mountains called the Cote. The plains are of a reddish-brown rich loam, mixed with much small stone. The Cote has for its basis a solid rock, on which is about a foot of soil and small stone, in equal quantities, the soil red and of middling quality. The plains are in corn; the Cote in vines. The former have no inclosures, the latter is in small ones of dry stone wall. There is a good deal of forest. Some small herds of small cattle and sheep. Fine mules, which come from Provence and cost twenty louis. They break them at two years old, and they last to thirty.

  The corn lands here rent for about fifteen livres the arpent. They are now planting, pruning and sticking their vines. When a new vineyard is made, they plant the vines in gutters about four feet apart. As the vines advance, they lay them down. They put out new shoots and fill all the intermediate space, till all trace of order is lost. They have ultimately about one foot square to each vine. They begin to yield good profit at five or six years old, and last one hundred or one hundred and fifty years. A vigneron at Voulenay carried me into his vineyard, which was of ten arpents. He told me that some years it produced him sixty pieces of wine, and some not more than three pieces. The latter is the most advantageous produce, because the wine is better in quality and higher in price in proportion as less is made, and the expenses at the same time diminish in the same proportion. Whereas, when much is made, the expenses are increased, while the price and quality become less. In very plentiful years they often give one half the wine for casks to contain the other half. The cask for two hundred and fifty bottles costs six livres in scarce years and ten in plentiful. The Feuillette is of one hundred and twenty-five bottles, the Piece of two hundred and fifty, and the Queue or Botte of five hundred. An Arpent rents at from twenty to sixty livres. A farmer of ten arpents has about three labourers engaged by the year. He pays four louis to a man, and half as much to a woman, and feeds them. He kills one hog and salts it, which is all the meat used in the family during the year. Their ordinary food is bread and vegetables. At Pommard and Voulenay I observed them eating good wheat bread; at Meursault, rye. I asked the reason of this difference. They told me that the white wines fail in quality much oftener than the red, and remain on hand. The farmer therefore cannot afford to feed his labourers so well. At Meursault only white wines are made, because there is too much stone for the red. On such slight circumstances depends the condition of man! The wines which have given such celebrity to Burgundy grow only on the Cote, an extent of about five leagues long and half a league wide. They begin at Chambertin, and go through Vougeau, Romanie, Veaune, Nuys, Beaune, Pommard, Voulenay, Meursault, and end at Monrachet. Those of the two last are white, the others red. Chambertin, Vougeau and Veaune are strongest, and will bear transportation and keeping. They sell therefore on the spot for twelve hundred livres the queue, which is forty-eight sous the bottle. Voulenay is the best of the other reds, equal in flavour to Chambertin, etc., but being lighter, will not keep, and therefore sells for not more than three hundred livres the queue, which is twelve sous the bottle. It ripens sooner than they do, and consequently is better for those who wish to broach at a year old. In like manner of the white wines, and for the same reason, Monrachet sells for twelve hundred livres the queue (forty-eight sous the bottle). It is remarkable that the best of each kind, that is, of the red and white, is made at the extremities of the line, to wit, at Chambertin and Monrachet. It is pretended that the adjoining vineyards produce the same qualities, but that belonging to obscure individuals, they have not obtained a name, and therefore sell as other wines. The aspect of the Cote is a little south of east. The western side is also covered with vines, and is apparently of the same soil, yet the wines are of the coarsest kinds. Such too are those which are produced in the plains; but there the soil is richer and less strong. Vougeau is the property of the monks of Citeaux, and produces about two hundred pieces. Monrachet contains about fifty arpents, and produces, one year with another, about one hundred and twenty pieces. It belongs to two proprietors only, Monsieur de Clarmont, who leases to some wine merchants, and the Marquis de Sarsnet of Dijon, whose part is farmed to a Monsieur de la Tour, whose family for many generations have had the farm. The best wines are carried to Paris by land. The transportation costs thirty-six livres the piece. The more indifferent go by water. Bottles cost four and a half sous each.

  The amount of actual hard work represented by this review of a local industry, is probably no more than most well-trained minds could get through in two days, but to keep up that pace for ninety consecutive days, like leaping hurdles, is another matter. It is nothing to leap two hurdles or three—any one can do it—but few can leap ninety hurdles at a stretch.

  His journal takes account of many novelties and curiosities. At Pontac he is told of a seedless grape “which I did not formerly suppose to exist; but I saw at Marseilles dried raisins from Smyrna without seeds.” He finds strawberries and peas on the table at Castres, “so that the country on the canal of Languedoc seems to have later seasons than that east and west of it. What can be the cause?” After giving this the benefit of some speculations, with which he is apparently dissatisfied, he remarks that there are ortolans at Agen, but none at Bordeaux. He devotes two pages to a study of the phenomenon of alluvial formation in the rivers running into the Mediterranean. “Has this peculiarity of the Mediterranean any connexion with the scantiness of its tides, which even at the equinoxes are of two or three feet only?” He speculates on the origin of marine shells discovered on high ground, away from the ocean, deciding finally that it was not possible to accept any of the current hypotheses, although his own guess that “some throe of nature has forced up parts which had been the bed of the ocean,” turned out to be a fairly good one. He describes in detail the processes of butter-making and cheese-making at Rozzano, of rice-husking at Vercelli, two methods of vine-planting which were new to him, and one of planting corn. Noli was remarkable for a great growth of aloes which never flower; moreover, “a curious cruet for oil and vinegar in one piece, I saw here. A bishop resides here, whose revenue is two thousand livres, equal to sixty-six guineas. I heard a nightingale here.” The income of bishops seemed to interest him; he found a bishop residing at Albenga who got as much as forty thousand livres. He looked for plums at Brignolles, but found none, “which makes me conjecture that the celebrated plum of that name is not derived from this place.” At Marseilles, “I measured a mule, not the largest, five feet and two inches high.” In examining the locks of the canal of Languedoc, he calculated that five minutes were lost at every basin on account of the archaic mechanism in use for opening the gates; which in the aggregate came to one-eighth of the time spent in navigating the canal. He suggested a quadrantal gate, turning in a pivot and lifted by a lever, which “would reduce the passage from eight to seven days, and the freight equally.” An interesting anticipation occurs in his suggestion of a water-level highway from Spezia to Nice, whereby “travellers would enter Italy without crossing the Alps, and all the little insulated villages of the Genoese would communicate together, and in time form one continued village along that road.”

  In the course of his excursion Mr. Jefferson remarks many matters that are reminiscent of distant days on the Virginia countryside. In Beaujolais, after mentioning “a very superior morsel of sculpture done by Slodtz in 1740,” a Diana and Endymion, in possession of a certain local amateur, he adds, “The wild gooseberry is in leaf; the white pear and sweet briar in bud.” On the ninth of April, near Nice, he writes, “The first frogs I have heard are of this day,” and nine days later, near Turin, “The first nightingale I have heard this year is today.” At Lyons he takes note that th
e nine arches of the Pont d’Ainay measure forty feet from centre to centre, and that “the almond is in bloom.” On looking at the Italian Riviera he writes with a slight accent of wistfulness that “if any person wished to retire from his acquaintance, to live absolutely unknown, and yet in the midst of physical enjoyments, it should be in some of the little villages of this coast, where air, water and earth concur to offer what each has most precious.”

  IV

  While in England, cooling his heels at the pleasure of the Marquis of Caermarthen, Mr. Jefferson employed his time in a methodical study of sixteen typical English gardens. He has some good things to say of the English technique of landscape-gardening, but is highly critical of the architecture that goes with it. The Corinthian arch at Stowe “has a very useless appearance, inasmuch as it has no pretension to any destination.” The architecture of the new house at Paynshill is “incorrect,” but the Doric temple on the premises is beautiful. “Architecture has contributed nothing” to the sightliness of the Leasowes in Shropshire. Aside from this record, which carries a curious air of perf unctoriness and enervation, there is little to show for his occupations of two months in England. He remarks in a letter to Madame de Corny that “the splendour of the shops is all that is worth looking at in London.” His account-book carries an entry of the customary shilling for seeing Shakespeare’s tombstone, and another shilling for seeing the house where Shakespeare was born; but nothing more of consequence.

  In the spring of 1788, when he set forth in haste to the Hague to overhaul John Adams and hold his nose to the grindstone of American national finance at Amsterdam, he took the occasion for a tour of nearly two months in the agricultural districts of the Rhine and the border provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. Here his journal comes back to the spirited and energetic tone of his French journal, and it is in great part a similar record of observations upon agricultural matters. This tour, however, carried him through several Dutch and German cities, where he noticed a whole world of minor novelties, some of which he illustrated by drawings sketched into the text of his descriptive notes. Thus the first thing in Amsterdam that caught his eye was the “joists of houses placed not with their sides horizontally and perpendicularly, but diamond-wise, thus: first, for greater strength; second, to arch between with brick, thus: .” He also observed a new method of fixing a flagstaff to the mast of a ship; dining tables with folding leaves; “windows opening so that they admit air but not rain”—the upper sash swinging on a horizontal axis like a transom window, and the lower sash sliding up and down in the usual way. He made a minute description of the arrangement of a large private aviary kept by a rich merchant in the city, and he got detailed plans of a saw-mill driven by wind-power. He saw a lantern over a street door, so arranged as to throw light both outdoors and indoors equally. “It is a hexagon, and occupies the place of the middle pane of glass in the circular top of the street door.”

  The only European art gallery ever singled out for special mention by Mr. Jefferson was the one at Düsseldorf, which he calls “sublime, particularly the room of Vanderwerff.” Why this collection of pictures should have so impressed him as to gain notice over those to which he undoubtedly had access in Paris and the Dutch cities—especially in a journal devoted almost exclusively to practical affairs—is not clear. At Coblenz he saw a device that was immensely to his heart; it was a central-heating system in the Elector’s palace, where “are large rooms very well warmed by warm air conveyed from an oven below, through tubes which open into the rooms.” In the village of Bergen, between Frankfort and Hanau, the “things worth noting here are: 1. A folding ladder. 2. Manner of packing china cups and saucers, the former in a circle within the latter. 3. The marks of different manufactures of china. . . . 4. The top rail of a wagon supported by the washers on the ends of the axle-trees.” At Mannheim, he took note of “an economical curtain bedstead,” with an arrangement of bent iron rods to support the curtains. He saw with extreme disfavour the bird of household legend at Frankfort. “The stork, or crane, is very commonly tame here. It is a miserable, dirty, ill-looking bird.” In Lorraine, as in Germany, he saw women doing all kinds of manual work, and their persistent love of ornament bore him eloquent testimony to the better way that things were managed in Virginia, where women did their duty in that station of life unto which it had pleased God to call them. He remarks this with a detachment so profound as to give his observations a patronizing air—one may charitably hope that they never fell under the eye of contemporary feminism, as represented by Mary Wollstonecraft, for example. “While one considers them as useful and rational companions, one can not forget that they are also objects of our pleasures; nor can they ever forget it. While employed in dirt and drudgery, some tag of a ribbon, some ring or bit of bracelet, earbob or necklace, or something of that kind, will show that the desire of pleasing is never suspended in them.” This “barbarous perversion of the natural destination of the two sexes” was due to the swollen military establishment which kept so many men out of industry. It was a sorry sight, which one could never get out of one’s memory. “Women are formed by nature for attentions, not for hard labour. A woman never forgets one of the numerous train of little offices which belong to her. A man forgets often.”

  V

  In the course of five years, Mr. Jefferson may be said to have examined every useful tree and plant in Western Europe, and studied its cultivation. He sends William Drayton “by Colonel Franks in the month of February last a parcel of acorns of the cork oak,” for the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, and some seeds of the sulla-grass, which, he explains, “is called by the names of Sulla and Spanish St. Foin, and is the Hedysarum coronarium of Linnæus.” To another correspondent he sends “some of the seeds of the Dionœa Muscipula, or Venus fly-trap, called also with you, I believe, the Sensitive Plant.” To another he writes, “I am making a collection of vines for wine and for the table.” He sends over to Monticello “a packet of the seeds of trees which I would wish Anthony to sow in a large nursery, noting well their names.” He had great hopes for culture of the olive. “The olive tree is assuredly the richest gift of heaven,” he wrote to his old preceptor, George Wythe, “I can scarcely except bread.” He sent over two shipments of about five hundred olive plants, to South Carolina, urging Drayton not to let unfamiliarity stand in their way. “The oil of the olive is an article the consumption of which will always keep pace with the production. Raise it, and it begets its own demand. Little is carried to America because Europe has it not to spare. We therefore have not learned the use of it. But cover the Southern States with it, and every man will become a consumer of oil within whose reach it can be brought in point of price.” The South Carolinians did not share his faith, however; for in 1813 he wrote to James Ronaldson that “it is now twenty-five years since I sent my southern fellow-citizens two shipments . . . of the olive tree of Aix, the finest olives in the world. If any of them still exist, it is merely as a curiosity in their gardens; not a single orchard of them has been planted.” He even tried to raise olives himself in Monticello, in company with a forlorn hope of Italian cherries, apricots and four varieties of almonds! Nothing ever came of his efforts in the matter of olive-culture; and nothing seems to have come of a consignment of caper plants which he sent over to South Carolina at about the same time that he sent the five hundred olive plants.

  The fearful sacrifice of human life entailed upon Georgia and the Carolinas in the production of wet rice, “a plant which sows life and death with almost equal hand,” caused Mr. Jefferson to take great interest in the culture of dry rice. In the last year of his foreign service he managed somehow to get hold of a cask of upland rice from Africa, which he promptly “dispersed into many hands, having sent the mass of it to South Carolina,” where nothing came of the experiment; but being carried into the upper hilly parts of Georgia, “it succeeded there perfectly, has spread over the country and is now commonly cultivated.” He also contrived to get his hands on a few pounds of Egyptian
rice and sent it over. He got interested in Chinese rice, through reading a book by a French official who had travelled there, and he expresses “considerable hopes of receiving some dry rice from Cochin-China, the young prince of that country, lately gone hence, having undertaken that it shall come to me.” The polite young Oriental’s undertaking was probably perfunctory, for nothing was heard of the rice. Twenty years later Mr. Jefferson sent out a tracer in the person of a Dr. de Carro who was going that way, but with no results. Inquiry among Parisian dealers brought the Piedmont rice to his attention. He could not be quite sure whether the difference between this and the Carolina rice was a difference in the grain or in the method of cleaning, and he made a note of the matter as something to be looked into when he went down into the South of France. “I had expected to satisfy myself at Marseilles,” but there seemed to be no one there who knew any more than the Parisians about the way of cleaning rice in Lombardy, or the style of machinery used. “I therefore determined to sift the matter to the bottom” by making “an excursion of three weeks into the rice country beyond the Alps, going through it from Cercelli to Pavia, about sixty miles.” Here he found that the process and the machinery were nothing new, and hence “there was but one conclusion, then, to be drawn, to wit, that the rice was of a different species.” He found moreover that the government of Turin was so well aware of this difference that “they prohibit the exportation of rough rice on pain of death.” Nevertheless he reports to his superior in the Department of Foreign Affairs, who was then the exemplary John Jay, that “I have taken measures, however, which I think will not fail for obtaining a quantity of it, and I bought on the spot a small parcel.”