The Road to Monticello

by Hayes, Kevin J. ;

  This initial, two-paragraph entry established a pattern for the entries to follow. In his first paragraph, Jefferson described the topography, soil, and agriculture of the region. In the second, he depicted its people. He found it strange that families should congregate in villages instead of living on farms of their own and blamed the Catholic Church for the situation: “Are they thus 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? Certain it is that they are less happy and less virtuous in villages than they would be insulated with their families on the grounds they cultivate.”10 Both his own rural ideal and his religious skepticism shaped Jefferson’s understanding of the French.

  Thinking about the local diet a few days later, he noticed that though French country folk generally lived on bread and vegetables, the type of bread differed from one place to the next: some people ate good wheat bread while those in a neighboring region ate coarse rye bread. Curious to learn the reason underlying this difference, he asked a local about it. Generally speaking, the people Jefferson approached were happy to respond. “The farmers were very civil, and answered my questions with great readiness,” he remembered.11

  In the rye-eating region, his informant told him, the stony soil prevents red wine grapes from growing. Consequently, the region produces only white wine. Since the production of white fails more often than that of red wine, people in these white-grape-growing regions are less prosperous than those living in the adjacent red-grape-growing regions. Basically, the quality of the bread is contingent on the stoniness of the soil.12

  “On such slight circumstances depends the condition of man!” Jefferson exclaimed.

  By Thursday, March 15, he had reached Lyons. He was having mixed feelings about the French countryside so far. The long, straight, tree-lined roads, which form such a quaint and characteristic aspect of rural France, induced feelings of ennui in him. On the other hand, he enjoyed watching the native plants begin to push forth the new growth of the season; his remarks in “Notes of a Tour” recall comments he made at home in his Garden Book. One day he noted, “The wild gooseberry is in leaf, the wild pear and sweet briar in bud.”13

  The weather was the only thing he really complained about, but this was nothing new. He had been complaining about the dreary weather ever since he arrived in France. From Lyons he wrote William Short: “So far all is well. No complaints; except against the weathermaker, who has pelted me with rain, hail, and snow, almost from the moment of my departure to my arrival here. Now and then a few gleamings of sunshine to chear me by the way. Such is this life: and such too will be the next, if there be another, and we may judge of the future by the past.”14 For most people, discussing the weather is a banal activity, but not for Jefferson, who could start talking about the weather and end up pondering the relationship between historiography and eschatology.

  Other letters to Short from this journey are peppered with similar reflections, but Jefferson was at his letter-writing best when addressing female friends. Lately, his circle had expanded to include Madame de Tessé and Madame de Tott.

  Jefferson’s friendship with Lafayette had brought him in contact with Madame de Tessé. Despite being Lafayette’s aunt, she was only two years older than Jefferson, and the two got along famously. Like the Comtesse d’Houdetot, Madame de Tessé’s wit, charm, and intelligence more than compensated for the defects in her physical appearance. As a contemporary described her, “Madame de Tessé was in every respect a remarkable person: small, piercing eyes, a pretty face marred at the age of twenty by small pox, which, it is said, was no worry to her thanks to her precocious mind; a fine mouth, but slightly misshapen by nervous tic which made her grimace when talking, and, in spite of all that, an imposing air, grace and dignity in all her movements, and above all, infinitely witty.”15 She shared Jefferson’s love of art, literature, and gardening. She had a passion for English novels and maintained a lavish garden decorated with all sorts of exotic flora. She and Jefferson often walked through her garden. He greatly admired it and promised to send her some unique American plants once he returned home.

  Through Madame de Tessé Jefferson met Madame de Tott or, properly, Mademoiselle de Tott, who had become a part of the Tessé household through a heady combination of intrigue, sympathy, and chance. Once Jefferson’s friendship with these two women blossomed, he began dining with them regularly. His correspondence suggests that he was closer to Madame de Tessé, but he was also quite fond of Madame de Tott.

  South of Lyons, he began to see remnants of the Roman Empire, or, as he told Madame de Tessé, he began to be “nourished with the remains of Roman grandeur.”16 Using a food metaphor to describe what ancient Rome meant to him, Jefferson revealed how essential contact with the Ancients was to his very being. This comment occurs in the letter he wrote her from Nimes, possibly the finest letter he wrote throughout this journey. He painted a vivid picture of himself at Nimes, where he enjoyed the Maison Quarrée, the Roman building that inspired his design for the Virginia State Capitol.

  Describing the pleasure this building gave him, Jefferson depicts himself as a love-struck melancholic:

  Here I am, Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison quarrée, like a lover at his mistress. The stocking-weavers and silk spinners around it consider me as an hypochondriac Englishman, about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Laye Epinaye in the Beaujolois, a delicious morsel of sculpture, by Michael Angelo Slodtz. This, you will say, was in rule, to fall in love with a fine woman: but, with a house! It is all out of precedent! No, madam, it is not without a precedent in my own history.17

  Jefferson sounds like he just stepped from the pages of an eighteenth-century English novel. Having given his heart to an object that cannot return his love, he has reached the brink of despair and is ready to end it all. He knew Madame de Tessé and her fondness for novels well enough to know she would enjoy this fanciful self-portrait—and recognize it as a literary pose.

  Like any good letter writer, Jefferson made his subject matter suit the person he addressed. To Madame de Tessé, he wrote that he had remembered her while seeing sights she would enjoy and imagined seeing them together. Often thinking about her, he had considered writing several times, but he hesitated. At Nimes, “where Roman taste, genius, and magnificence excite ideas analogous to yours at every step,” all hesitation disappeared.18

  The letter he wrote Madame de Tott is personal without being as intimate or affectionate as the one to Madame de Tessé. He told Madame de Tott that he had been thinking of her, too, but in less emphatic terms. Speaking of himself in the third person, his reflections have the quality of a fable: “A traveller, sais I, retired at night to his chamber in an Inn, all his effects contained in a single trunk, all his cares circumscribed by the walls of his apartment, unknown to all, unheeded, and undisturbed, writes, reads, thinks, sleeps, just in the moments when nature and the movements of his body and mind require. Charmed with the tranquillity of his little cell, he finds how few are our real wants, how cheap a thing is happiness, how expensive a one pride.”19

  He also indulged in some creative prose that starts as humorous, pseudoscientific discourse and ends up as a clever dialogue incorporating a charming play on words. Explaining how he was spending his time on the road, he wrote: “Sometimes I amuse myself with physical researches. Those enormous boots, for instance, in which the postillion is incased like an Egyptian mummy, have cost me more pondering than the laws of planetary motion did to Newton. I have searched their solution in his physical, and in his moral constitution. I fancied myself in conversation with one of Newton’s countrymen, and asked him what he thought could be the reason of their wearing those boots?”

  “Sir,” responds the imaginary English conversationalist, “it is because a Frenchman’s heels are so light, that, without
this ballast, he would turn keel up.”

  “If so, Sir,” Jefferson puns, “it proves at least that he has more gravity in his head than your nation is generally willing to allow him.”

  Jefferson varied the tone and content of his letters to suit different correspondents. Writing to Short from Aix-en-Provence, he not only dropped the melancholic pose, he completely abjured it: “The man who shoots himself in the climate of Aix must be a bloody minded fellow indeed.—I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine. What more can man ask of heaven? If I should happen to die at Paris I will beg of you to send me here, and have me exposed to the sun. I am sure it will bring me to life again.”20 The near-perpetual cloud cover of Paris depressed Jefferson, but the sunshine of Provence gave reason to cheer. In the letter to Short, he scoffs at the man who took suicide as a way out. With gobs of food, casks of wine, and plentiful sunshine, why would anyone want to write the last chapter of his life with a pistol?

  In a follow-up letter, Jefferson offered Short a fine appreciation of Provençale, a language Jefferson enjoyed hearing and one he could understand better than French. He observed:

  Provençale stands nearer to the Tuscan than it does to the French, and it is my Italian which enables me to understand the people here, more than my French. This language, in different shades occupies all the country south of the Loire. Formerly it took precedence of the French under the name of la langue Romans. The ballads of its Troubadours were the delight of the several courts of Europe, and it is from thence that the novels of the English are called Romances. Every letter is pronounced, the articulation is distinct, no nasal sounds disfigure it, and on the whole it stands close to the Italian and Spanish in point of beauty. I think it a general misfortune that historical circumstances gave a final prevalence to the French instead of the Provençale language. It loses its ground slowly, and will ultimately disappear because there are few books written in it, and because it is thought more polite to speak the language of the Capital. Yet those who learn that language here, pronounce it as the Italians do.21

  Jefferson was offering an impassioned plea for linguistic diversity. This letter also anticipates a comment made by another major figure in American literature, who characterized traditional Provençale verse as “the poetry of a democratic aristocracy, which swept into itself, or drew about it, every man with wit or a voice.”22

  As his journey progressed, Jefferson’s sense of purpose became more defined. Reaching Nice the second week of April, he wrote Lafayette a letter encapsulating his philosophy of travel. In its basic thrust, the letter contains similar ideas as those in “Hints,” but Jefferson polished his prose to a much higher sheen for Lafayette. On the road, he had developed a routine: “In the great cities, I go to see what travellers think alone worthy of being seen; but I make a job of it, and generally gulp it all down in a day. On the other hand, I am never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am.”23 Jefferson realized his method of sightseeing differed greatly from that of contemporary travelers, but he happily endured the stares of wide-eyed gawkers he passed along the road.

  As he told Lafayette, “You must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretense of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of this investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter when you shall be able to apply your knolege to the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into the kettle of vegetables.”24 Such comments account for the tremendous amount of practical detail in “Notes of a Tour.” Jefferson was not only recording how the French lived; he was also creating a document that would help improve the lives of Lafayette’s countrymen and his own.

  From Nice, he extended his journey to Milan. He was growing uneasy about being away from Paris for so long, but he really wanted to observe the rice-growing regions of northern Italy, which were much deeper in Italy’s interior than he realized. It was easy to justify the extra travel time: his observations on rice farming would benefit his countrymen, especially the rice farmers in the Carolina lowlands. The Nice-Milan-Nice round trip would take about three weeks. Writing Short before plunging into Italy, he said goodbye for the time being. There was no point in posting letters from Italy. He would arrive in France before his letters.

  The absence of personal letters from Jefferson’s time in Italy means that “Notes of a Tour” constitutes the main source of information for his Italian experience. The matter-of-fact nature of “Notes of a Tour,” however, detracts from a trip that, by all other indications, involved exciting adventure, culinary delight, aesthetic pleasure, and new information.

  Learning that the snowy pass through the Alps was still closed to wheeled traffic, he had to leave his carriage and much of his kit in Nice and hire mules and mule drivers to take him through the Alps. Though space for his gear was limited, he managed to find room in his panniers for some books, not just travel guides but also works on Italian history.

  In terms of visual pleasure, the Chateau of Saorge provided the most picturesque experience: “The castle and village seem hanging to a cloud in front. On the right is a mountain cloven through to let pass a gurgling stream; on the left a river over which is thrown a magnificent bridge. The whole forms a bason, the sides of which are shagged with rocks, olive trees, vines, herds etc.” Jefferson would characterize his all-too-brief time in Italy as a peep into Elysium.25

  While enjoying the sights, he also looked at the Alps with the eyes of an antiquarian and an agronomist. Describing his trip to George Wythe, he explained, “I took with me some of the writings in which endeavors have been made to investigate the passage of Annibal over the Alps, and was just able to satisfy myself, from a view of the country, that the descriptions given of his march are not sufficiently particular to enable us at this day even to guess at his tract across the Alps.”26

  He also made careful observations on the cultivation of olive trees and other plants, which he recorded in his trip journal and wrote up for the South-Carolina Society for Promoting and Improving Agriculture. “In passing the Alps at the Col de Tende, where they are mere masses of rock, wherever there happens to be a little soil, there are a number of olive trees, and a village supported by them. Take away these trees, and the same ground in corn would not support a single family.” Crossing the Alps, Jefferson carefully observed the plant life and formed a scale of plants arranged according to their different powers of resisting the cold.27

  From Turin he took a day trip to see the basilica of Superga. Located atop a lofty peak, Superga offered an excellent view of the surrounding countryside. He hired a carriage and horses to take him to the peak. The carriage ride down Superga was hair-raising: when his postillion encountered another, the two engaged in an impromptu downhill race, much to the chagrin of their passengers. When Jefferson could take the reins himself, he enjoyed driving fast. As Isaac Jefferson explained, “Traveling in the phaeton Mr. Jefferson used oftentimes to take the reins himself and drive. Whenever he wanted to travel fast he’d drive; would drive powerful hard himself.”28 Descending the treacherous switchbacks of Superga at breakneck speed as a passenger, he was not amused.

  “Notes of a Tour” mentions neither the fine view from atop Superga nor the nerve-racking downhill race that ended the day. Since neither experience pertained to agriculture or manufacture, he excluded them from his narrative. Sometimes the factual details in “Notes of a Tour” inadvertently convey the charms of travel. Recording the agricultural products and natural resources of Italy, Jefferson occasionally captured its culinary pleasures.

  After a few days in Milan, he turned south toward Genoa. Along the way, he passed through Rozzano, where he observed how to make parmesan cheese and recorded the process for posterity. He also sampled mascarpone, which he found del
icious.29 And he fell in love with pasta. When Short traveled through Italy later, Jefferson asked him to buy a mold for making spaghetti and macaroni. Frustrated with the difficulty and expense of importing pasta to Virginia, he eventually designed his own pasta maker. Beyond his importance as author, leader, and thinker, Thomas Jefferson deserves the gratitude of his fellow Americans for domestic reasons, too: he personally introduced macaroni and cheese to the United States.

  In Genoa, he spent time enjoying what sights there were to see and made arrangements to return to Nice, where he could retrieve his carriage and resume his roundabout journey through France. Without a proper road, he faced a tough choice between the alternatives: by sea or by a narrow, rocky mule path. Despite his dread of seasickness, the water route offered the most expeditious way to return—or so he thought: he quickly regretted his decision to travel by sea. Before the vessel left the Gulf of Genoa, the wind from the southwest picked up, and he became quite nauseous. The ship’s captain recognized that the sea was too rough to reach Nice, so he sought safe harbor at Noli, a sleepy fishing village where the only place Jefferson could find lodgings was at a broken-down tavern. The menu compensated for the tavern’s other shortcomings. This evening, he not only had good fish—sardines, fresh anchovies—he also had ortolans—tiny game birds with little meat but lots of flavor—and fresh strawberries, too.

  At Noli, he hired three mules and a mule driver to accompany him the rest of the way to Nice. The trip was quite fatiguing. He rode through some places, but more treacherous spots forced him to dismount and lead his mule along a path that barely clung to the side of a steep cliff. Describing this leg of his trip soon after its completion, he made it seem quite arduous. Upon further consideration, he grew nostalgic for that rocky mule track and recommended the same route to others. He told Rutledge and Shippen: “Do not be persuaded to go by water from Genoa to Nice. You will lose a great deal of pleasure which the journey by land will afford you. Take mules therefore at Genoa. Horses are not to be trusted on the precipices you will have to pass.”30