heir hovels, as I
have done; look into their kettles; eat their bread; loll on their beds on
pretense of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft. You
will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of the investigation, and a
sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to
the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their
kettle of vegetables."

These excursions among the French peasantry, who, as Jefferson well knew,
were ruinously taxed in order to support an extravagant court and an idle
and insolent nobility, made him a fierce Republican. "There is not a
crowned head in Europe," he wrote to General Washington, in 1788, "whose
talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the
people of America."

But for the French race Jefferson had an affinity. He was glad to live
with people among whom, as he said, "a man might pass a life without
encountering a single rudeness." He liked their polished manners and gay
disposition, their aptitude for science, for philosophy, and for art; even
their wines and cookery suited his taste, and his preference in this
respect was so well known that Patrick Henry once humorously stigmatized
him as "a man who had abjured his native victuals."

Jefferson's stay in Paris corresponded exactly with the "glorious" period
of the French Revolution. He was present at the Assembly of the Notables
in 1787, and he witnessed the destruction of the Bastille in 1789.

"The change in this country," he wrote in March, 1789, "is such as you can
form no idea of. The frivolities of conversation have given way entirely
to politics. Men, women, and children talk nothing else ... and mode has
acted a wonderful part in the present instance. All the handsome young
women, for example, are for the _tiers etat_, and this is an army more
powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the king."

The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France
the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the
government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of
liberty, a feeling of fraternity, a passion for equality moved the
intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers
looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path
upon which France was entering. "Our proceedings," wrote Jefferson to
Madison in 1789, "have been viewed as a model for th