Regardless of the sexual innuendo, few passages in Jefferson’s writings offer as keen an understanding of his own place in literary history as his reference to Tristram Shandy in the letter to Maria Cosway. Though Jefferson loved reading Sterne, he understood that as an author he was cut from a different cloth. As much as he wrote and as much as he enjoyed writing, Jefferson knew he would never write in the manner of Sterne. His admission to Maria Cosway that he was no continuator of Sterne comes with recognition, not regret. Though possessing considerable virtuosity in terms of literary genre—biography, character sketch, flirtatious letter, informative journal, legislative bill, political manifesto, state paper, table talk—Jefferson had neither the capacity nor the desire to write the kind of imaginative prose at which Sterne excelled.
Another memorable passage from Tristram Shandy highlights the differences between the way Sterne and Jefferson approached the task of writing. In one of the novel’s most famous passages, Tristram Shandy observes, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.”33 Though Jefferson appreciated Sterne’s digressions as a reader, as a writer he largely abjured the digression as a literary device. The Declaration of Independence is a masterpiece of concision. In “Notes of a Tour of English Gardens,” Jefferson concentrated so intently on his subject that he made no reference to his visit to Shakespeare’s birthplace. “Notes of a Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley” begins without a clear focus, but once it finds one—the wines of Germany—it scarcely deviates from it.
Throughout this trip, Jefferson hoped to find a really good bookseller, but so far such hopes had been thwarted. In Amsterdam, he visited Van Damme’s bookshop and requested several titles, mostly classical texts in small-format editions, including some more than two centuries old. Van Damme filled few of Jefferson’s requests. Perhaps the biggest indication of his disappointment with the Amsterdam booksellers comes in a letter he wrote John Trumbull shortly before he left the city, asking him to locate a bookseller in London from whom he could purchase what books he wanted: “Will you consult with some Amateur in classical reading to know who is the bookseller for classical authors in London, the most curious and copious, of whom one may get the particular editions they would wish, and send me his address?” Jefferson spoke too soon. When he reached Strasbourg, he visited Armand Koenig’s establishment in the Rue des Grandes-Arcades, which proved to be just the kind of bookshop he wanted. “The best shop of classical books I ever saw,” he said after purchasing multiple volumes from Koenig.34
Trumbull subsequently recommended a London bookseller named Thomas Payne. While evidence indicates that Jefferson continued to rely on Koenig for editions of classical works, he did write Payne after returning from Holland to request many important works of English literature and several books about Anglo-Saxon. Few surviving documents better illustrate Jefferson’s attitude toward book buying than his instructions to Payne:
When I name a particular edition of a book, send me that edition and no other.
When I do not name the edition, never send a folio or quarto if there exists an 8vo. or smaller edition. I like books of a handy size.
Where a book costs much higher than the common price of books of that size do not send it, tho I write for it, till you shall have advised me of the price.
I disclaim all pompous editions and all typographical luxury; but I like a fine white paper, neat type, and neat binding, gilt and lettered in the modern stile. But while I remain in Europe it will be better to send my books in boards, as I have found that scarcely any method of packing preserves them from rubbing in a land transportation.35
Though Jefferson spent much time in Strasbourg lingering in Armand Koenig’s shop, he visited the city’s other attractions, too. He climbed the 662 steps to the top of the steeple of the Strasbourg Cathedral, an effort he recommended in “Hints.” This steeple he called “the highest in the world, and the handsomest. Go to the very top of it; but let it be the last operation of the day, as you will need a long rest after it.”36
Elevated heights usually sent Jefferson into a state of contemplation. From the top of the steeple, Strasbourg lay at his feet, a sea of triangular rooftops and gable windows intermittently punctuated by picturesque towers and lesser steeples. The plains of Alsace spread out before him. He could see well beyond the city limits and, in his mind’s eye, even further. Northeastward he saw the route he had taken from Amsterdam. To the northwest was Paris, a city he had come to love, where he was now returning. To the distant west across the ocean was Monticello, to which both his head and his heart were longing to return.
CHAPTER 26
Last Days in Paris
Returning to Paris from the Rhine Valley, Jefferson made up his mind: he would go back to Virginia—not permanently, just for a few months, time enough to bring his daughters home and straighten out his personal and financial affairs. When he had left Monticello in October 1783 to serve as delegate to the Continental Congress, he had planned to be away for only five months. It had now been five years since he had seen home. The third week of November 1788 he wrote Congress to ask for a leave of absence. He argued persuasively that he could make the trip without detriment to his responsibilities as American minister to France. His ministerial duties, he assured Congress, had reached a pause. His most pressing commitments had been fulfilled or would be in a matter of weeks. Most important, he had reached a new consular convention, which he was arranging to have printed. In addition, he had finished composing Observations on the Whale-Fishery, which would also be published soon.
The harsh winter weather reinforced his decision to return home. For most Parisians, the winter of 1788–89 was the coldest in memory. Large bonfires, Jefferson wrote, were kept “at all the cross-streets, around which the people gathered in crowds to avoid perishing with cold.” As the bitter weather slowly abated in March, he informed Madame de Bréhan: “We have had such a winter Madam, as makes me shiver yet whenever I think of it. All communications almost were cut off. Dinners and suppers were suppressed, and the money laid out in feeding and warming the poor, whose labours were suspended by the rigour of the season. Loaded carriages past [i.e., crossed] the Seine on the ice, and it was covered with thousands of people from morning to night, skaiting and sliding. Such sights were never seen before, and they continued two months.”1 The skaters and sliders obviously enjoyed themselves that winter, but many Parisians suffered. The severe cold may have exacerbated the city’s social unrest and facilitated the onset of the French Revolution.
Several months would pass before Jefferson heard from Congress and learned that it had approved his request, but he anticipated its approval and prepared for his departure. Unsure when he would experience such fine shopping opportunities as he had been enjoying over the past five years, he stepped up his purchases, acquiring numerous items unavailable in Virginia. His most extravagant purchase was a custom-made crane-neck chariot, which he ordered from England. Upon his return, he intended to make his way through Virginia in style. He acquired numerous paintings to hang at Monticello. He also obtained several useful scientific instruments. And he kept buying more books, lots and lots more books.
His artistic, literary, and scientific interests occasionally coincided. That winter he wrote John Trumbull, asking him to commission a painting. He wanted a single canvas depicting Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, who, he said, were “the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception.” These three “laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.” He gave Trumbull detailed instructions regarding how the painting should be composed. The portrait of each man should appear in a small oval and, for
symmetry’s sake, all three should be contained within a larger oval.2
The story of Jefferson’s last year in Paris can be told partly through the books he purchased. That winter Van Damme, the Amsterdam bookseller, sent him a catalogue of a forthcoming sale and urged him to submit his orders prior to the public auction. Jefferson took Van Damme’s advice and sent him a list of requests. Though he already owned a Latin edition of Annales et Historiae de Rebus Belgicis, Hugo Grotius’s history of the Wars of Independence in the Netherlands, he requested the sixteenth-century polyglot edition Van Damme was advertising. The size of this edition made it especially appealing to Jefferson, given his penchant for small-format volumes. He had always enjoyed little books, which facilitated another great pleasure—reading in bed—but now, with the nagging pain in his right wrist, he found small books essential for bedtime reading.
He also hoped to augment his collection of European Americana. He asked Van Damme for Voyage d’un François Exile pour la Religion, a book of travels containing firsthand descriptions of Virginia and Maryland, which has been called “one of the most picturesque and lively descriptions of life in an English colony at the end of the seventeenth century.”3 He also requested Voyage de la Louisiane, the travels of the Jesuit missionary Antoine François Laval. Interwoven in Laval’s exciting narrative of his missionary work is a considerable amount of useful scientific data.
Reading Van Damme’s sale catalogue, Jefferson recognized the gem of the collection, at least as far as Americana went: Thomas Hariot’s Admiranda Narratio, a sixteenth-century description of Virginia that formed part of a much larger work, Theodor de Bry’s collection of voyages. Jefferson would acquire not only the part by Hariot, but also several other parts of de Bry’s work. Gleefully, he recalled the purchase of the work many years later. Describing it to John Adams, he wrote, “This is a work of great curiosity, extremely rare, so as never to be bought in Europe, but on the breaking up, and selling some antient library. On one of these occasions a bookseller procured me a copy, which, unless you have one, is probably the only one in America.”4
News of Jefferson’s growing reputation in America also reached him that winter. He learned from Joseph Willard, the president of Harvard College, that the school had granted him an honorary doctorate of laws. Jefferson was now receiving the same kind of recognition Franklin had received before him. Unlike Dr. Franklin, he never went by the title that this or any of his other honorary degrees conferred upon him. Much as he eschewed the title of Colonel Jefferson when he was the leader of the Albemarle militia, he now eschewed the title of Dr. Jefferson.
Expressing his thanks, he gave Willard a report on the state of letters in Europe, naming and describing the most remarkable French publications that had appeared in the past year or two. Mentioning the Posthumous Works of Frederic II, King of Prussia, he explained that the sixteen-volume Berlin edition had been severely “gutted” and that the Paris edition was even “more mangled.” These comments reinforce his disgust with any and all forms of censorship. Other books Jefferson mentioned to Willard include L’Etat des Etoiles Fixes au Second Siecle, a Greek edition of the seventh book of Ptolemy with an accompanying French translation; Joseph-Louis Lagrange’s Mechanique Analitique, a work seeking, in Jefferson’s words, “to reduce all the principles of Mechanics to the single one of the Equilibrium, and to give a simple formula applicable to them all’; and another important work of European Americana, Francesco Saverio Clavigero’s History of Mexico, which “merits more respect than any other work on the same subject.”5 In addition, he told Willard about the latest scientific developments in Europe, especially in the field of chemistry.
Jefferson’s information-packed letter to Willard goes well beyond the note of thanks the honorary degree necessitated. Knowing that his presence in Europe exposed him to news long before it reached America, Jefferson sought to keep Willard and others informed of the latest advancements in science and literature. He wanted to minimize lag time and foster American intellectual development, as his closing remarks suggest: “It is for such institutions as that over which you preside so worthily, Sir, to do justice to our country, its productions, and its genius. It is the work to which the young men, whom you are forming, should lay their hands. We have spent the prime of our lives in procuring them the precious blessing of liberty. Let them spend theirs in shewing that it is the great parent of science and of virtue; and that a nation will be great in both always in proportion as it is free.”6
Thus, this letter of thanks evolved into a celebration of American freedom. Jefferson recognized that freedom was the one thing that made everything else possible. As the parent of science and virtue, freedom gave people the ability to think and act in ways they could not before becoming free. The unfettered mind has the potential for limitless development. More than an abstract expression on the value of freedom, Jefferson’s words convey the personal pride he felt for contributing to the advancement of freedom and embody his hope that such freedom could span the globe.
The biggest news from the Republic of Letters that year concerned the death of Maffeo Pinelli, the great Venetian collector. Pinelli’s death resulted in the sale of his extraordinary library and created a fantastic opportunity for collectors from Rome to London. Pinelli had assembled an unparalleled collection of classical and Italian books: printed volumes dating from the earliest days of printing and manuscript volumes antedating the invention of printing. Before the sale, bibliographer Jacopo Morelli prepared a detailed catalogue, which was published at Venice in six octavo volumes. Pinelli’s heirs sold the entire collection to London book dealer James Edwards and his associates. Intending to resell the library piecemeal, Edwards arranged to have the books shipped to London. According to legend, one of the ships transporting the books from Venice to London was besieged by pirates, but the story is apocryphal: the Pinelli library reached London intact and unscathed.7
Once the books arrived, Edwards had them recatalogued for sale. Copies of Bibliotheca Pinelliana, a beefy quarto of more than five hundred pages listing nearly 13,000 items, made their way into the hands of interested collectors throughout Europe, Jefferson included. The sale was scheduled to start in March and would continue into May.
To purchase the books he wanted from the Pinelli sale, Jefferson enlisted the help of Lucy Ludwell Paradise, whom he had met three years earlier at a London dinner party that she and her husband, John Paradise, had hosted. From the time they met, Jefferson took a liking to the Paradises. Lucy was from an old Virginia family but had lived in England since girlhood. John was born at Salonika in Macedonia and educated at the University of Padua before settling in London, where he and Lucy were wed. Seldom has there been a more mismatched couple. Lucy, possessing the haughtiness and beauty of the stereotypical Southern belle, had an urge for social affairs and a fiery temper that frequently plunged her into difficulties. John was a quiet, scholarly type who preferred the company of books and intellectual conversation with a few close friends.
With John’s interest in the sciences and his skill as a linguist—he could speak Arabic, French, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Turkish—Jefferson found in him a like-minded soul. Given Paradise’s linguistic expertise, especially in both modern and classical Greek, Jefferson asked him about how Greek was pronounced in ancient times. The books Jefferson acquired in 1789 reflect Paradise’s influence; they include one work devoted to a discussion of how to pronounce ancient Greek.
Despite his scholarly accomplishments, Paradise was totally inept when it came to practical affairs, and he and his wife often found their finances on the brink of ruin. They sought help from Jefferson, who went well beyond the call of duty in his exertions on their behalf. In an early move to sort out their personal and financial difficulties, he arranged to have Lucy leave Paris and return to London as John remained on the Continent.
Before she left, Jefferson gave her a list of titles he wanted from the Pinelli library and a set of instructions detailing how she sho
uld execute his bids. Lucy Paradise had become quite fond of Jefferson and, realizing how indebted she and her husband were to him, was happy to act as his agent.
She undertook the responsibility with great seriousness and found someone to execute Jefferson’s commission. Contacting James Robson, she could scarcely have found anyone better: Robson was one of Edwards’s associates. She and Jefferson engaged in a lively correspondence through the spring of 1789 as she informed him how the sale was going. He kept adding to his list of requested books and answering her queries about the prices books were fetching. Jefferson’s marked-up copy of Bibliotheca Pinelliana does not survive, nor does a copy of the list he originally gave her. But their surviving correspondence indicates the kinds of books he wanted from the Pinelli collection.
Several titles he put on his initial list of desiderata are clear from their correspondence: Epistolae Veterum Graecorum, a collection of letters by such Greek authors as Democritus, Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Hippocrates edited by Eilhard Lubin and published with the text in Greek and Latin on facing pages; a polyglot edition of De Amoribus Anthiae et Abrocomae by Xenophon of Ephesus, with the text in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French in parallel columns; and Geographiae Veteris Scriptores Graeci Minores, John Hudson’s collection of Greek geographies, which also included works by thirteenth-century Arabic geographers printed in Arabic and Latin.
Amidst all this classical erudition, Jefferson requested another important piece of Americana. Listed in the Pinelli catalogue under the general heading “Biblia Linguis Exoticis” is a quarto printed in 1663 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, titled “Biblia Indica.”8 This short title represents Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God Naneeswe Nukkone Testament Kah Wonk Wusku Testament, that is, John Eliot’s translation of the Bible into the Massachusett language. The presence of Eliot’s Indian Bible in Pinelli’s library shows that this book had already become a precious collectible among European bibliophiles.
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