I cannot describe the pleasure that your letters gave us, especially the details regarding your health and all your personal concerns. It is a sweet thought for us and one on which we linger with satisfaction to know that at your age and after such a glorious career you have found once again in the bosom of your country all the pleasures to which your age is susceptible. You know how much we want these pleasures to be prolonged. Be certain that this hope we have for you is necessary to our own happiness. I say this to you in the name of the entire academy of Auteuil. And since its productions amused you for a spell, here are some new ones and I would be very pleased if you and your friends would give yet again your approval to them, as in the case of the indefinite particle “on.” They are again in your vein of pleasantry and I can claim that they have a bit of Swift in them, with somewhat less of his black misanthropy. Doctor Jonathan and Doctor Benjamin are, at least, the models I had before my eyes and perhaps nature has given me something of their phrasing in the art of telling the truth with humor or without seeming to tell it. The trouble is that we cannot laugh aloud at everything that is truly laughable. Indeed it is something quite serious, the dedication of your college in Lancaster county and the beautiful procession and religious ceremony in which Presbyterians, Anglicans, Lutherans, Catholics, Moravians, and everybody were brought together. This is tolerance in action. I translated the entire pamphlet that you sent me and had it inserted in our Mercure. I doubt that many of our readers grasped its subtleties, but they will not have been lost on everyone. You see that I continue to spread religious tolerance as much as I possibly can, without for all that abandoning commercial tolerance, and I fear that this latter is not making enough progress in your land. I will tell you on this matter that I do not view the duty imposed on foreign merchandise that you find necessary in your country because one cannot establish direct taxes, I do not view, I say, these duties as being contrary to freedom of trade when they are established as financial resources, but I do fear that they are viewed in your country, as they are still in all of Europe, as a grand political operation aimed at increasing national trade and national wealth to the detriment of foreign trade and foreign wealth, and this is an immense stupidity. I have reason to believe that you could fall into that same mistake as we do for I have just read a pamphlet that was printed in Philadelphia and whose title is “10 at the society for Political enquiries” in your home and in your presence; in it, the author recommends certain rights and prohibitions to retain navigation from port to port for united America, as if with all the advantages America has of this kind she could be afraid of foreign competition; as if she didn’t have enough other, much more advantageous uses for her capital and for her men; as if the constraints on her own trade and on that of foreign nations resulting from such legislation wouldn’t make her lose more than she would gain; as if she needed a merchant navy other than the one that will form naturally from the low price of raw materials for navigation and for fishing, etc. When you speak to me of the import duty in your ports that you are, you say, obliged to institute in order to provide for public expenditure and for the payment of your national debt and that you will eliminate as soon as you can do without it, and that you believe it will be possible to set up a land tax, although I do not approve of this measure, I at least believe it to be in good faith and perhaps temporarily necessary. You levy duty to get money. This much is clear. But the author of your pamphlet levies duties to protect America’s navigation and an advantageous trade balance. He already imitates those European governments who have tainted all the tyrannies that they have exercised on trade with these bad pretexts and I confess that it is with great pain that I would see you enter upon this false path.

You will have heard by public news about the great changes happening here. There is so much to say about them that a discussion of them cannot be the object of a single letter. The main events and the operations of M. de Calonne and those of the Assembly of notables and of the new administration, all of this can be found in big printed books, some copies of which will no doubt cross the Atlantic and find their way to you. If you are at all interested in these things, you will be able to learn about them in those books better than in any letter. What I can tell you and what may interest you is that our new minister or chief of finances, the Archbishop of Toulouse, is a very educated man, very enlightened, and very clever at managing business and men, and to whom all good principles are familiar and who has the firm will to put these good principles into practice. The most complete freedom of trade is counted among the maxims of his administration, and he will not institute any restrictions other than those he will be forced to apply by circumstances, circumstances that he will always endeavor to avoid and change as much as he possibly can. You perhaps are aware that I can testify to his way of thinking because I have been acquainted with him for almost forty years, and that this relationship continues to this day. These are the hopes for our country; but previous disorder and other causes that I shall not set out here can thwart or more or less delay the operations of this new ministry, and we are in a moment of crisis that could shatter all our hopes. But never mind; I still hope, as you know, for the future progress of humanity, and I have taken it upon myself to express this feeling by a little allegory that I am sending to you. Our Lady of Auteuil was very pleased with all the good news that you gave us of yourself and especially with the letter that you sent directly to her. Both she and the Abbé de la Roche are answering you. Her cats have slightly diminished in number thanks to the bulldog that your grandson left us. The problem is that we have no one to rid us of Boulet, the French name she gave him. He is always there to make us pay our sins. His mistress places him next to her on one of her 14 sofas, and he is the master of the house, and we his humble slaves obliged to open the door for him 40 or 50 times of an evening, but she got him from your grandson and this is the reason we patiently abide all the inconveniences with which he torments us. We are impatiently awaiting here news about your convention to bind the parties of your political state, without which you can have neither complete prosperity nor true tranquillity. I read a considerable work by M. Adams. If you will keep this a secret between us, I will tell you that I was not content with it. All that erudition about the old republics seems to me a waste of paper and ink. I do not believe that we can draw a single truly logical conclusion from it that can convince a statesman to take or not to take a single decision. It is in reason and not in facts—at times unique and at times badly articulated and badly understood—that one must seek the true principles of a good constitution and a good legislation. We were much happier here with the work of your excellent compatriot M. Jefferson, which I translated. It was very well received, and I find its principles very good and the facts very well assembled. If something is done in your country with which you are somewhat satisfied, especially if it is related to the matters of trade and your constitution, I would be very grateful if you could find an occasion to send it to me. I received, as was my duty, M. Payne. Perhaps he wrote you that I had his iron bridge returned to him, the one our farmers general had seized at port as contraband merchandise and subjected to duty; but it was found upon examination that the customs offices had not really prohibited or taxed bridges, which until now had only been constructed in the place they were to be used. The customs officials had not foreseen that one day a bridge would be built in Philadelphia or New York to be placed across the Seine in Paris. Well, now they know, and they won’t forget to put this item in the new Books-rates. They will soon have to put houses in, too, if you start getting used to making them for Europeans. There’s some nonsense for you. Let me return to more serious things. I can tell you that yesterday the parlement of Paris, in a rush for more than three weeks to register a stamp tax with a new land subsidy to cover by other means of finance the enormous deficit that M. de Calonne allowed in our affairs, decided and seems to hold to this resolution, that the parliament is not legally competent to accept and to ratify new taxes, that this right belongs only to the States-General of the kingdom, which the King is entreated to convoke without delay. There, as you can see, is a great change in the maxims of our sovereign courts which have, for at least several centuries, exercised and supported the right that they seem to renounce today. The most penetrating political minds can hardly foresee just how far such a request and an assembly of States-General, if it takes place, can go. Only the actual events will be able to shed light on this. What one wants to see in this deed, as well as in many others, is a great change that has been made in the ideas that nations had of governments and in the relationship between the governing and the governed parties. According to my principles on the perfectibility of the human race, one must still believe that everything is for the good, which we are always approaching, even if at times we seem to be moving away from it.

We do not have enough news here of your grandson. I would like to know how he is adjusting to Philadelphia and if he does us the honor of missing us a little. I mean our lifestyle, since he would be, in particular, an ingrate to forget us; since he owes some memory to people who were acquainted with his talents and his amiability and who did justice to them. I beg him to count me among those people and to accept my greetings. M. and Madame Marmontel and all my family have asked me to remember them to you and to express to you their satisfaction at the good news that you gave us of your health and your situation. I will never forget the happiness that I had in knowing you and in seeing you up close. I am writing to you from Auteuil seated in your armchair on which I had engraved Benjamin Franklin hic sedebat [sat here] and having next to me the little chiffonier that you bequeathed me when you left, with a drawer full of nails to satisfy the taste for nailing and hammering that you and I share. But believe me when I say I do not need all these aids to cherish your memory or to love you Dum memor ipse mei dum spiritus hos regret artus [As long as I remember myself, as long as the breath of life continues to animate the limbs] (Vergil, Aeneid, iv, 336).