On the way to Albenga, he enjoyed walking along the Mediterranean shore and letting his mind wander wherever it wished. The everchanging Mediterranean was beautiful, but he was not content to view it from a distance. Fascinated by the appearance of the water, he got a drinking glass from somewhere, went to the shore, scooped up a glass of water, and held it to the sunlight. When viewed in a drinking glass, the waters of the Mediterranean were remarkably clear and colorless, but on the whole the sea “assumes by reflection the colour of the sky or atmosphere, black, green, blue, according to the state of the weather.”31
Like others who have visited this coastal region, he imagined lingering here and putting behind him other earthly concerns. “If any person wished to retire from their acquaintance, to live absolutely unknown, and yet in the midst of physical enjoiments,” he noted, “it should be in some of the little villages of this coast, where air, earth and water concur to offer what each has most precious. Here are nightingales, beccaficas, ortolans, pheasants, partridges, quails, a superb climate, and the power of changing it from summer to winter at any moment, by ascending the mountains. The earth furnishes wine, oil, figs, oranges, and every production of the garden in every season. The sea yeilds lobsters, crabs, oysters, thunny, sardines, anchovies etc.”32
Reaching Nice was something like leaving the Middle Ages and reentering the eighteenth century. He checked into the Hotel de York, “a fine English tavern, very agreeably situated, and the mistress a friendly agreeable woman.”33 He also renewed communications in Nice, but fatigue from the journey made him more inclined to sleep than write.
Arriving in Marseilles later that week, he wrote Martha again. Having been her father’s riding companion after her mother’s death and having been his traveling companion from Philadelphia to Boston to Paris, she remained at Panthemont while he toured southern France and northern Italy. At the very least, she was hoping for some good letters describing the trip en route. The early ones she received contain little colorful detail. From Aix, her father admonished Martha to pursue her studies diligently regardless how difficult they may seem. She was having trouble with Latin, especially as she tried reading Livy’s History without her teacher’s help.
Her father encouraged her to persevere, transforming her study into a matter of national importance. His words are inspiring: “We are always equal to what we undertake with resolution. A little degree of this will enable you to decypher your Livy,” he wrote. “If you always lean on your master, you will never be able to proceed without him. It is a part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate; to surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance. In Europe there are shops for every want. Its inhabitants therefore have no idea that their wants can be furnished otherwise. Remote from all other aid, we are obliged to invent and to execute; to find means within ourselves, and not to lean on others.”34
Having learned that his other daughter would soon reach Paris, Jefferson wrote Martha another admonitory letter urging her to be good to Mary and encourage her studies, too. Along with a young slave named Sally—James Hemings’s little sister—Mary would reach London the last week of June. Jefferson planned for her to stay with John and Abigail Adams until he could arrange her passage to Paris.
Once Mary reached London, Abigail Adams wrote Jefferson to let him know. She had never met Mary before, but she quickly became fond of her. Mary’s face put Abigail Adams in mind of an old song:
What she thinks in her Heart
You may read in her Eyes
For knowing no art
She needs no disguise.
Recalling these lines in her letter to Jefferson, Abigail Adams indulged her sentimental streak. These same lines recur in novels of the day.35 Abigail Adams continued, “Her temper, her disposition, her sensibility are all formed to delight. Yet perhaps at your first interview you may find a little roughness but it all subsides in a very little time, and she is soon attached by kindness.”36
Writing Martha from Marseilles, Jefferson told her about the arduous mule trip to Nice but did little beyond name the places through which he had passed. In fact, the place names fill almost half the letter. Her father kept his comments brief because he wanted to spark her curiosity, not satiate it. He expected her to use his letter as the basis for a self-taught geography lesson. She should have been able to identify all of the places he visited, locate them on a map, and trace her father’s route.
From the Mediterranean coast, he headed inland via the Canal de Langueduc. This lazy journey gave him the chance to write Martha the kind of letter she wanted and deserved. He created a vivid picture of his canal passage, complete with image and sound: “cloudless skies above, limpid waters below, and on each hand a row of nightingales in full chorus.” The sound of nightingales gave him the opportunity to recall an earlier moment in his trip when he had visited Petrarch’s home and its environs. “This delightful bird had given me a rich treat before at the fountain of Vaucluse,” he explained. “After visiting the tomb of Laura at Avignon, I went to see this fountain, a noble one of itself, and rendered for ever famous by the songs of Petrarch who lived near it. I arrived there somewhat fatigued, and sat down by the fountain to repose myself. It gushes, of the size of a river, from a secluded valley of the mountain, the ruins of Petrarch’s chateau being perched on a rock 200 feet perpendicular above. To add to the enchantment of the scene, every tree and bush was filled with nightingales in full song.”37
Jefferson mingled the sound of the nightingale with the music of Petrarch’s verse to accompany his idyllic canal journey. Long an aficionado of Italian literature, he knew Petrarch well. Earlier he had acquired a precious copy of Il Petrarca with other valuable editions from the library of his friend Samuel Henley. The book does not survive, and the exact edition has escaped identity, but its format belongs to early sixteenth-century Italy. Henley’s luxurious binding—red morocco—and the fact that Jefferson made note of the binding confirm its special quality.
Even while capturing the beautiful sound of the nightingales in this letter, Jefferson turned it into a lesson for his daughter. He urged Martha to familiarize herself with the nightingale’s song while in Europe, so she could compare it with the song of the mockingbird once she returned home to Virginia. Writing his daughter while traveling down the Canal de Languedoc, Jefferson’s heart was in Virginia. Celebrations of the mockingbird’s song were already an important literary tradition in the American South. Expressing his preference for the mockingbird over the nightingale, he was perpetuating an American tradition.
Though Jefferson conveyed his ideas in many different ways over the course of his trip, similar patterns run through his various forms of travel writing. In “Hints,” he told Rutledge and Shippen to make their observations useful for their countrymen. With “Notes of a Tour,” he personally exemplified what he recommended to them. He may have depicted himself as a lovesick melancholic gazing at the Maison Quarrée in his letter to Madame de Tessé, but his gazing had a practical intent: he was using the ancient building to inspire ideas for developing the architecture of a new nation. His travel letters to Martha may seem overly didactic, but he held himself to a similar standard: he, too, was using his travels as a way of learning. He never lost sight of what he saw as the main purpose of traveling: to learn new ideas that could help improve mankind.
CHAPTER 25
A Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley
During his first year in Paris, one of Jefferson’s greatest pleasures was spending time with John Adams and his family. Sometimes he would travel to their fine suburban home at Auteuil for an evening of pleasant conversation; other times they would venture to the heart of the city to dine with him and attend the theater. Once Adams became minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain and relocated the family to London, Jefferson missed them very much. “The departure of your family has left me in the dumps,” he wrote Adams.1 Their presence in London, however, did offer him the opportunity of developing a c
orrespondence with Abigail Adams, which both enjoyed immensely.
Dated June 6, 1785—just two weeks after they left Paris—her first letter to Jefferson gave him great pleasure. He replied: “I have received duly the honor of your letter, and am now to return you thanks for your condescension in having taken the first step for settling a correspondence which I so much desired; for I now consider it as settled and proceed accordingly.”2 For Jefferson, a literary correspondence was almost like a living, breathing thing. Once established, a correspondence between two friends took on a life of its own, and his correspondence with Abigail Adams was no exception. Their letters are filled with memorable comments. Toward the end of one, Jefferson apologized for its length: “When writing to you, I fancy myself at Auteuil, and chatter on till the last page of my paper awakes me from my reverie.”3 A good correspondence has the quality of an intimate conversation between close friends.
When several months passed without any letters from her, Jefferson wrote, “It is an age since I have had the honor of a letter from you, and an age and a half since I presumed to address one to you. I think my last was dated in the reign of king Amri, but under which of his successors you wrote, I cannot recollect. Ochosias, Joachar, Manahem or some such hard name.”4 Harking back to biblical times to emphasize how long it had been since hearing from her, Jefferson was indulging in the kind of exaggeration characteristic of both his personal correspondence and his personal conversation.
Reporting table talk, Jefferson uses a similarly breezy tone. In another letter, he related a dinner conversation he had had with their friend Guy Claude, Comte de Sarsfield: “Count Sarsfield sets out for London four days hence. At dinner the other day at M. de Malesherbe’s he was sadly abusing an English dish called Gooseberry tart. I asked him if he had ever tasted the cranberry. He said, no. So I invited him to go and eat cranberries with you. He said that on his arrival in London he would send to you and demander á diner.”5
Learning that Adams had written Congress requesting to resign his position and return to Massachusetts, Jefferson entered the doldrums. Or so he told Abigail Adams: “I have considered you while in London as my neighbor, and look forward to the moment of your departure from thence as to an epoch of much regret and concern for me. Insulated and friendless on this side the globe, with such an ocean between me and every thing to which I am attached the days will seem long which are to be counted over before I too am to rejoin my native country. Young poets complain often that life is fleeting and transient. We find in it seasons and situations however which move heavily enough. It will lighten them to me if you will continue to honour me with your correspondence.”6
Much as the Adamses were growing homesick for Massachusetts, Jefferson was growing homesick for Virginia, as his recent behavior suggested. He told Abigail that he sometimes stayed at Mont Calvaire, a little mountain nearby where a community of lay brothers known as the Hermites kept a boarding house. The place offered a magnificent view, clean air, and quiet. Here Jefferson could concentrate on pressing paperwork without distraction.7 Mont Calvaire was as close as he could come to Monticello without leaving Paris.
The last letter Abigail Adams wrote Jefferson from London differed greatly from the chatty ones preceding it. This letter contained urgent information regarding her husband’s movements. When John Adams had joined Jefferson and Franklin in the summer of 1784 as one of the commissioners appointed to arrange treaties of amity and commerce between the United States and other nations, he was serving at The Hague as American minister to Holland. Appointed minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain while in Paris, Adams assumed this responsibility without officially relinquishing his post at The Hague. Since Adams had taken the new position in London, no one had been appointed to fill the place he had vacated. Consequently, he remained the American minister to Holland, in name if not in actuality. As a condition of his return to the United States, Adams needed to revisit The Hague to take official leave of his former position.
Jefferson received Abigail Adams’s letter with much anxiety. To stay afloat, fiscally speaking, the United States had been relying on loans from Holland, which John Adams had been instrumental in securing. Interest payments on the loans would soon come due. Should the nation default on these payments, its credit would disintegrate and so, too, would the prospect of obtaining additional funds from Amsterdam. On Sunday, March 2, 1788, the day he received the news from Abigail Adams, Jefferson dashed off a letter to her husband explaining how precarious were the financial relations between the United States and Holland and how much the situation was affecting him: “Our affairs at Amsterdam press on my mind like a mountain.”8
He quickly made plans to meet Adams at The Hague and proceed with him to Amsterdam, where they could see the bankers. After some quick repairs to his cabriolet, he left Paris Tuesday morning accompanied by his servant Espagnol. Together they rode in the carriage and hired a series of postillions and horses to bring them to The Hague. Taking the most direct route, they did not do much sightseeing during this first segment of their journey. “A country of corn and pasture affords little interesting to an American who has seen in his own country so much of that, and who travels to see the country and not its towns,” he informed William Short.9 The two made good time the first two days, so good that they hoped to reach The Hague Thursday evening.
But their hopes were soon dashed. By nightfall Thursday, they had only reached Antwerp. Under normal conditions, just one day’s travel separated them from The Hague, but it took them three frustrating days to complete the remaining distance. Jefferson wrote, “This remnant employed me three days and nothing less than the omnipotence of god could have shortened this time of torture. I saw the Saturday passing over, and, in imagination, the packet sailing and Mr. Adams on board.” Saturday night they spent at Rotterdam, where compensation came in the form of a visual extravaganza. That evening the citizens of Rotterdam celebrated the birthnight of William V, Prince of Orange, with a grand display of fireworks. “The illuminations were the most splendid I had ever seen,” Jefferson told Short, “and the roar of joy the most universal I had ever heard.”10
Happily, Adams had not left The Hague on Saturday as Jefferson had feared, so the two friends were reunited on Sunday. As planned, they continued to Amsterdam, where they initiated the procedures necessary to secure their nation’s credit and obtain an additional loan to tide it over for the next few years. Adams, who had negotiated previous loans from the Dutch bankers, was more experienced in these matters. He introduced Jefferson to his contacts in Amsterdam. Together they accomplished what they had set out to accomplish, but the financial business took much longer than Jefferson had imagined. He had been hoping to leave the city less than ten days after his arrival, but as March neared its end, he found himself in Amsterdam still. Despite the delays, the successful completion of their undertaking pleased him greatly. Recalling the experience many years later, he said, “I had the satisfaction to reflect that by this journey our credit was secured, the new government was placed at ease for two years to come.”11
His fine accommodations helped make the unexpected delays tolerable. He stayed at the Amsterdam Arms, a hotel he subsequently recommended to others, mainly because of its excellent service. “I liked the Valet de place they furnished me,” he told John Rutledge, Jr., and Thomas Lee Shippen. “He spoke French, and was sensible and well informed.” Not surprisingly, during his spare time in Amsterdam, Jefferson went shopping for books. He familiarized himself with the bookshops, of course, but he also visited a number of other retailers, too. At one, he bought a set of waffle irons. Waffles became a frequent breakfast treat at Monticello in the coming years.12
Part of his time in Amsterdam Jefferson devoted to planning his return trip to Paris. He decided to take a circuitous route allowing him to see parts of Europe he had not seen, but he left his route open-ended to accommodate changes in the weather and uncertain road conditions. John Trumbull had toured the Rhine Valley two years ea
rlier, and his recommendations helped shape Jefferson’s itinerary. The day before leaving Amsterdam, Jefferson wrote Short to inform him of his intended route, telling him that he would set out for Utrecht and then “pursue the course of the Rhine as far as the roads will permit me, not exceeding Strasburg. Whenever they become impassable or too difficult, if they do become so, I shall turn off to Paris.”13
As he had the previous year during his travels through France and Italy, Jefferson kept a record of the journey. Read as travel literature, “Notes of a Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley” suffers from the same defects as “Notes of a Tour into the Southern Parts of France etc.”: it contains much useful information but few colorful episodes. “Hints to Americans Traveling in Europe” provides additional information regarding where Jefferson stayed and what he saw during his trip through Holland and the Rhine Valley.
Missing from the literary record of this journey are the kinds of delightful travel letters he had written to Paris friends from the South of France the previous year. By his own admission, Jefferson frequently felt too tired to write personal letters during this trip. Upon his return to Paris, he wrote Maria Cosway, “I often determined during my journey to write to you: but sometimes the fatigue of exercise, and sometimes a fatigued attention hindered me.”14 This letter to her, one to Trumbull from Amsterdam, and another to William Short from Frankfort constitute the entirety of what can be called the belletristic travel correspondence resulting from Jefferson’s excursions through Holland and the Rhine Valley.
The Road to Monticello Page 47