Welcome to your country, that you have enlightened and made free. Enjoy glory and rest, something that is more substantial than glory and that you have done so much to deserve. May your days be long and free from pain; may your friends enjoy the sweetness and charm of your company for a long time, and may those whom the seas have separated from you be happy at the thought that the end of your career will be, as our good La Fontaine said, the eve of a beautiful day. You know how much these wishes, that I repeat daily, are true and sincere. I cannot express to you the pleasure, the rapture that the news, brought to me by a friend of M. Jefferson, of your arrival in Philadelphia gave me. I sent this news immediately to our friends in Auteuil.

I left them five or six days ago, after having spent three weeks near Our Lady, during which the Abbé de Laroche had left on a trip to Normandy. I am going back there soon, and we will speak of you and of our joy in hearing that you felt better during the crossing than you had on terra firma. No doubt you learned that in all the public papers they were saying that you had been captured by an Algerian corsair. I never believed a word of it; but perhaps in England there were people who, for the beauty of paradox, would have been quite pleased to see the founder of freedom in America made a slave in the land of Barbary. That would have made a good subject for tragedy in twenty or thirty years; you would have had a very good role. And don’t you have some small regret at having missed such a wonderful opportunity to be a tragic character? Still, you must do without this glory.

We heard that you were very well received, and that you got all the cheers of the people. These are very good and very just feelings; but, for the good of your country, they must be durable, they must spread, and all the enlightened and virtuous citizens must support them, so that your wise counsel and your great visions for the happiness and liberty of America may influence the measures that remain to be taken, and consolidate the edifice whose foundation you have laid with a few other good patriots. This is my wish from the bottom of my heart, not as your friend, not for your glory, but as a cosmopolitan who desires that there be on the face of the earth a country where the government is truly concerned with the happiness of men; where property, liberty, security, tolerance are natural goods, if I may say so, as natural as those offered by the soil and the climate; where European governments, when they will want to correct their mistakes, may seek models. The Greek colonies were obliged to relight their sacred fire at the spirtual center of their home country. For the States of Europe it will be the reverse, and they will go to America to seek the sacred fire that will revive in them all the principles of national happiness that they have allowed to be extinguished. Above all, may there be established in America the most complete and the most unlimited freedom of trade: I view it as being just as important to the happiness of those united in society as political freedom. This latter touches man only rarely and at a small number of points; but the freedom to cultivate, to fabricate, to sell, to buy, to eat, to drink, and to clothe oneself according to one’s fantasy, is a freedom of every day, of every moment; and I will never view as free a nation wherein all the pleasures of life are enslaved, for after all it is for these very pleasures that men came together in society.

After having ascended to these great aims, it is necessary to come back down to earth and to speak to you a little about your friends. Our Lady of Auteuil is doing very well, although she still drinks too much coffee, against the prescriptions of Doctor Cabanis, and she filches my share of cream, against all justice. The bull-dog that your grandson brought us back from England has become insufferable and even nasty; he bit the Abbé de Laroche again and lets us perceive a ferocity that is truly worrisome. We have not yet convinced his mistress to send him to fight the bulls or to drown him; but we are working on it. We have other domestic enemies that are less ferocious but very harmful; a great number of cats, who have multiplied in her woodshed and in her farmyard by the care she takes to feed them quite generously; for, as you explained so well in your essay On Peopling Countries, populations adjust according to the available means of subsistence, today there are eighteen of them, soon they will be thirty, eating everything they catch, doing nothing but holding their hands in their furry dresses and warming themselves in the sun, and allowing the house to become infested with mice. Someone offered to trap the cats and drown them; a subtle sophist, one of those people who know how to make everything problematic and who, as Aristophanes said of Socrates, know how to turn the worst cause into the best, became the cats’ defender, and composed an Appeal for them that could serve as a counterpart to the Poem of Thanks you wrote for the flies in your apartment, following the extermination of the spiders that Our Lady ordered. We are sending this Appeal to you, and asking that you help us respond to the cats. We could also offer them a kinder fate, and one that would benefit your America. I recall having heard that you have a great many squirrels in the countryside and a great many rats in the city, both of which cause great damage, and that as yet it has not been possible to impose on the countryfolk or the city folk a tax that would allow you to be rid of these two kinds of enemies. For that purpose our cats would be of great help. We would send you a shipment from Auteuil; and, over time, we would have enough of them to fill up a small boat. In truth, nothing would be more suitable. These cats would only be going back to their true country: friends of liberty, they are completely out of place under European governments. They could also serve as good models for you; since, first of all, as your charming apologia has it, they would be able to turn against the eagle who is carrying them off and, by sticking their claws in his belly, would force him to come back to earth to get rid of them. It must also be said in their favor that we have never seen them fight over their food dish, which is brought to them regularly twice a day. Each of them takes his morsel off to a corner and eats it peacefully. And after having escaped from the jaws of the bull-dog, as you Americans escaped from the jaws of John-Bull, they do not place themselves in any danger with intestinal discord: we can learn from them.

Well, there’s a lot of nonsense for you, my dear and respectable friend. I allowed it because I know you appreciate it and that you yourself are inclined to talk nonsense and, what is worse, to write it. But if you are afraid of losing the respect of your compatriots by letting your taste for it show, you need only lock yourself in to read my words, and not say a thing to congress about my plan to send you cats from Europe. There remains one obstacle to this, however, at present: our commerce treaty with you is no further along than at the time of the peace treaty, and while awaiting the signing of this treaty, I don’t know if import duty would be charged on my shipment of cats upon its arrival in Philadelphia; and then, if my vessel could only take on flour in your country, it would not be allowed to call at our islands to load sugar, nor to bring me back good rum, which I love and which would be taxed on arrival in France the “small” duty of 75 percent of its value. All of which frustrates my trade in cats, so I must come up with some other kind of speculation.

Here I end my letter from Auteuil. The Lady will write to you and answer your little missive. The Abbé de Laroche and M. de Cabanis will also write to you, etc.