Not foreign to this despondency was the bad news that came from America. His youngest daughter Lucy died in the fall of 1784 and he was not satisfied until he had his remaining daughter near him in Paris, and Mary, familiarly called Polly, had joined her sister in the best convent of the French capital.
Between social duties and pleasures, dinners at the house of Lafayette, meetings of the Committees of Commerce, interviews with Vergennes, preparation of long letters to be sent home to keep his Government informed of the situation in Europe, correction of the proofs of the "Notes on Virginia", interviews with former French volunteers clamoring for their back pay, visits to shops and factories, Jefferson was a very busy man indeed. But exacting as his occupations were, he found time to escape from Paris on three different occasions to see something of France and Europe. In 1786 he journeyed to England, traveled in France and Italy in the spring of the following year, and visited Holland and the Rhine shortly before leaving for home. The diaries he kept during these trips are both revealing and disappointing. They demonstrate how little of European culture had penetrated his American mind, how carefully he preserved himself from the contamination of European manners and ways of thinking. In some respects it must be confessed that Jefferson remained very narrow and provincial, and almost a Philistine in his outlook.
The most damning document is the outline he made for Rutledge and Shippen on June 3, 1788, though in some respects it shows good judgment, as when Jefferson recommends "not to judge of the manners of the people from the people you will naturally see the most of: tavern keepers, valets de place, and postillions."—"These are the hackneyed rascals of every country. Of course they must never be considered when we calculate the national character." He manifested the same good sense in recommending always to ask for the vin du pays when traveling. But the worst comes in his enumeration of the "Objects of Attention for an American." It has to be read to be believed and should be transcribed here almost in full:
1. Agriculture. Everything belonging to this art, and whatever has a near relation to it.... 2. Mechanical arts, so far as they respect things necessary in America, and inconvenient to be transported thither ready-made, such as forges, stone quarries, boat bridges, etc. 3. Lighter mechanical arts, and manufactures. Some of these will be worth a superficial view; but circumstances rendering it impossible that America should become a manufacturing country during the time of any man now living, it would be a waste of attention to examine these minutely. 4. Gardens peculiarly worth the attention of an American, because it is the country of all others where the noblest gardens may be made without expense.... 5. Architecture worth a great attention. As we double our numbers every twenty years, we must double our houses.... It is, then, among the most important arts; it is desirable to introduce taste into an art which shows so much. 6. Painting, Statuary. Too expensive for the state of wealth among us. It would be useless, therefore, and preposterous, for us to make ourselves connoisseurs in those arts. They are worth seeing, but not studying. 7. Politics of each country, well worth studying so far as respects internal affairs. Examine their influence on the happiness of the people. Take every possible occasion for entering into the houses of the laborers, and especially at the moment of their repast; see what they eat, how they are clothed, whether they are obliged to work too hard.... 8. Courts. To be seen as you would see the tower of London or menagerie of Versailles with their lions, tigers, hyenas, and other beasts of prey, standing in the same relation to their fellows.... Their manners, could you ape them, would not make you beloved in your own country, nor would they improve it could you introduce them there to the exclusion of that honest simplicity now prevailing in America, and worthy of being cherished.
The man who wrote these lines was certainly not denationalized; the emancipated Virginian had unconsciously retained a puritanical distrust of purely æsthetic enjoyments. He seems to have taken a sort of wicked pleasure in denying himself the disinterested joys of the artist and philosopher and his travels in Europe were no "sentimental journey." It cannot even be maintained that the views expressed in the letter to Shippen were a paradox and that he felt free to enjoy the pleasures from which he strove to protect his fellow countrymen. Most revealing in this respect is the following passage from a letter written to Lafayette, when he was traveling along the Riviera:
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 satisfied 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.[111]
He seems to have been dominated by the same utilitarian preoccupations during his English journey. There he noted carefully all the peculiarities of English gardens, visiting all the show places with Whateley's book on gardening in his pocket: "My inquiries," he himself said, "were directed chiefly to such practical things as might enable me to estimate the expense of making and maintaining a garden in that style." This is why the only thing worth noticing at Kew was an Archimedes screw for raising water, of which he made a sketch. His conclusions were summed up in a letter to John Page after he came back to Paris. England had totally disappointed him. The "pleasure gardens", to be sure, went far beyond his ideas, but the city of London, though handsomer than Paris, was not so handsome as Philadelphia: "Their architecture is in the most wretched style I ever saw, not meaning to except America, where it is bad, not even Virginia, where it is worse than in any other part of America which I have seen." On the other hand, the mechanical arts were carried to a wonderful perfection, but he took no joy in visiting manufactures and shops, since the view reminded him that the frivolity of his fellow countrymen made them import many articles from London and thus pay tribute to a foreign nation.[112]
When he left Paris for the South of France he was in no more amiable mood. It was his first real contact with the French countryside and he was shocked beyond words at the sight of the first villages he passed through from Sens to Vermanton. He could not understand why the French peasants insisted on living close together in villages instead of building their houses on the grounds they cultivated. He racked his brains for an explanation and could find no better one than to suppose that they were "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." The people were illy clothed; the sight of women and children carrying heavy burdens and laboring with the hoe made the Virginian slave-owner conclude that "in a civilized country, men never expose their wives and children to labor above their force and sex, as long as their own labor can protect them from it." But he nowhere expressed any emotional distress nor heartfelt sympathy for these poor wretches and concluded that if there were no beggars it was probably an effect of the police.[113]
On the other hand, he noted every detail of the fabrication of Burgundy wine, enumerated the different vintages, the cost of casks, bottles, methods of transportation and marketing, the price of "vin ordinaire", of oil, butter, cattle, the cultivation of olive trees and fig trees and capers. Monuments are described with a mathematical eye, many small points noted, columns described, ornaments studied, but the only personal impression elicited by Arles is that "The principal monument here, is an amphitheatre, the external portico of which is tolerably complete."