To Madame de Brehan.
Paris, March 14th, 1789.
Dear Madam—I had the honor of writing to you on the 15th of February, soon after which I had that of receiving your favor of December the 29th. I have a thousand questions to ask you about your journey to the Indian treaty, how you like their persons, their manners, their costumes, cuisine, etc. But this I must defer until I can do it personally in New York, where I hope to see you for a moment in the summer, and to take your commands for France. I have little to communicate to you from this place. It is deserted; every body being gone into the country to choose or be chosen deputies to the States General. I hope to see that great meeting before my departure. It is to be on the 27th of next month. A great political revolution will take place in your country, and that without bloodshed. A king, with two hundred thousand men at his orders, is disarmed by the force of public opinion and the want of money. Among the economies becoming necessary, perhaps one may be the Opera. They say it has cost the public treasury a hundred thousand crowns in the last year. A new theatre is established since your departure—that of the Opera Buffons, where Italian operas are given, and good music. Paris is every day enlarging and beautifying. I do not count among its beauties, however, the wall with which they have inclosed us. They have made some amends for this by making fine Boulevards within and without the walls. These are in considerable forwardness, and will afford beautiful rides around the city of between fifteen and twenty miles in circuit. We have had such a winter, Madame, 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 labors were suspended by the rigors of the season. Loaded carriages passed the Seine on the ice, and it was covered with thousands of people from morning to night, skating and sliding. Such sights were never seen before, and they continued two months. We have nothing new and excellent in your charming art of painting. In fact, I do not feel an interest in any pencil but that of David. But I must not hazard details on a subject wherein I am so ignorant and you are such a connoisseur. Adieu, my dear Madam; permit me always the honor of esteeming and being esteemed by you, and of tendering you the homage of that respectful attachment, with which I am and shall ever be, dear Madam, your most obedient, humble servant,
TH. JEFFERSON.
Jefferson's devotion to the study of Natural History is well known, and the accuracy of his knowledge in it is most strikingly illustrated in the following anecdote, which we quote from his biography by Randall:
An amusing anecdote is preserved of the subject of his correspondence with the celebrated Buffon. The story used to be so well told by Daniel Webster—who probably heard it from the lips of the New Hampshire party to it—that we will give it in his words, as we find it recorded by an intelligent writer, and one evidently very familiar with Mr. Webster, in an article in Harper's Magazine, entitled "Social Hours of Daniel Webster:"
"Mr. Webster, in the course of his remarks, narrated a story of Jefferson's overcoming Buffon on a question of Natural History. It was a dispute in relation to the moose—the moose-deer, as it is called in New Hampshire—and in one of the circles of beaux-esprits in Paris. Mr. Jefferson contended for certain characteristics in the formation of the animal which Buffon stoutly denied. Whereupon Mr. Jefferson, without giving any one notice of his intention, wrote from Paris to General John Sullivan, then residing in Durham, New Hampshire, to procure and send him the whole frame of a moose. The General was no little astonished at a request he deemed so extraordinary; but, well acquainted with Mr. Jefferson, he knew he must have sufficient motive for it; so he made a hunting-party of his neighbors, and took the field. They captured a moose of unusual proportions, stripped it to the bone, and sent the skeleton to Mr. Jefferson, at a cost of fifty pounds sterling. On its arrival Mr. Jefferson invited Buffon and some other savants to a supper at his house, and exhibited his dear-bought specimen. Buffon immediately acknowledged his error, and expressed his great admiration for Mr. Jefferson's energetic determination to establish the truth. 'I should have consulted you, Monsieur,' he said, with usual French civility, 'before publishing my book on Natural History, and then I should have been sure of my facts.'"
This has the advantage of most such anecdotes of eminent men, of being accurate nearly to the letter, as far as it goes. The box of President Sullivan (he was President of New Hampshire), containing the bones, horns, and skin of a moose, and horns of the caribou elk, deer, spiked horned buck, etc., reached Mr. Jefferson on the 2d of October. They were the next day forwarded to Buffon—who, however, proved to be out of town. On his return, he took advantage of a supper at Jefferson's, to make the handsome admissions mentioned by Mr. Webster.[38]
In a letter written early in the summer of the year 1788 to the Rev. Mr. Madison, of William and Mary College, we find Jefferson again right and Buffon wrong on a scientific subject. The student of chemistry will smile at Buffon's opinion, while he can not but admire Jefferson's wonderful foresight in predicting the discoveries to be made in that science, even though he should have erred in his opinion of Lavoisier's chemical nomenclature. We quote the following from the above-mentioned letter:
To Rev. Mr. Madison.
Speaking one day with Monsieur de Buffon on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on a footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. It is yet, indeed, a mere embryon. Its principles are contested; experiments seem contradictory, their subjects are so minute as to escape our senses; and their results too fallacious to satisfy the mind. It is probably an age too soon to propose the establishment of a system. The attempts, therefore, of Lavoisier to reform the chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms, and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures may have served no other end than to have retarded the progress of the science, by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us. Accordingly, it is not likely to be admitted generally.
The letter of which we now give the conclusion shows how closely and how minutely Jefferson watched and studied the improvements and progress made in the arts and sciences during his stay in Europe. This letter—to be found in both editions of his correspondence—was written in the spring of the year 1789, and addressed to Doctor Willard, professor in the University of Harvard, which University had just conferred on Jefferson a diploma as Doctor of Laws. After mentioning and criticising all the late publications bearing on the different branches of science and letters, he makes the following eloquent conclusion: