In July 1784, Thomas Jefferson, recently appointed to represent the American Congress in Paris, sailed from Boston with his daughter Martha, bound for France. Jefferson was eventually installed in a house on the Champs-Elysées, where he set about enjoying the special attractions of Paris. He went to galleries and concerts and entertained widely; he made note of the urban engineering and the beauty of Parisian architecture; and he browsed assiduously in local bookstores. Jefferson also made trips around the country and across western Europe, all the while taking notes on what he saw: the soil, crops, livestock, buildings, wine,
and local politics and customs.
        Fortunately, Jefferson, who was to become
the third president of the United States in 1801, recorded his impressions in his voluminous correspondence and journals. He wrote to Abigail and John Adams, James Madison, George Washington, and also to a number of women friends and his children, so a variety of styles and levels of intimacy adds to the fascination of these accounts.
        This volume has been selected from Jeffer-
son's letters by Douglas L. Wilson and Lucia Stanton, scholars of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, who have provided a Preface and Notes. In the opinion of the editors, the five years that Jefferson spent in France were arguably the most memorable of his life. "By the time he returned to America in 1789," they write, "Paris--with its music, its architecture, its savants and salons, its leanings and enlightenments, not to mention its elegant social life and distinctive sexual mores--had worked its enchantments on this rigidly self-controlled Virginia gentleman, and had stimulated him to say and do and write remarkable things."

"I am constantly roving about, to see what I have never seen before and shall never see again. 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 satiated 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."
-Thomas Jefferson to the Marquis de Lafayette, Nice, April 11, 1787

"We have now need of something to make us laugh, for the topics of the times are sad and eventful. The gay and thoughtless Paris is now become a furnace of Politics. All the world is run Politically mad. Men, women, children talk nothing else; and you know they talk much, loud and warm."
-Jefferson to Anne Willing Bingham,
Paris, May 11, 1788

Jefferson's writings, papers, and notes from the third president's extensive European journeys around the time of the French Revolution.