Monticello to Montmartre

Among the giants of the Revolution perhaps Franklin and Jefferson were the most notably successful in being at once citizens of the United States and citizens of the world. One may at least speculate that this came about because both were also citizens, so to speak, of Paris. For to say "Paris" in the late 18th century was virtually synonymous with saying "the world." Jefferson lived in Paris from 1784 to 1789, and it is this magnificent city, the Paris of the ancien regime, which Rice faithfully recreates.

Though his life-long preference was for the slower-paced, quasi-rural life of Monticello, and although the expatriate's nostalgia occasionally surfaces in Jefferson's letters to friends back home, seldom has an exile been more nearly content. So pervasive was the influence of the Paris of Louis XVI on the brilliant gentleman farmer from Virginia that, as the historian Henry Adams concluded, "with all his extraordinary versatility of character and opinion," Jefferson "seemed during his entire life to breathe with perfect satisfaction nowhere except in the liberal, literary, and scientific air of Paris in 1789."

Rice, assistant librarian emeritus of rare books and special collections at Princeton, started work on Thomas Jefferson's Paris some 30 years ago when assembling documents for the Jefferson Papers. His book evokes in word and picture the city of Paris at the end of the anregime and on the brink, as it turned out, of the French Revolution. The Palais Royal, Rue Saint-Honoré, Place Louis XV, the Tuileries, the Louvre: all are recreated as they appeared in drawings, engravings, paintings, and documents of the late 18th century. The text draws copiously on Jefferson's contemporary correspondence, account books, and other writings and thus becomes as much an account of Jefferson's tenure as minister as a history of the city of Paris. But so perfectly matched were the city and the man that in the end it is fair to say, I think, that Rice's emphasis is on neither. His book is about Jefferson in Paris and the Paris that remained a part of Jefferson until his final day.

Perhaps that Paris is irretrievably gone. Perhaps. But it all lives for a moment in the mind's eye through the images and text of this book. For, as a commentator declares, perhaps Howard Rice "knows more about the Paris of that period than did Jefferson or the Parisians themselves."

THOMAS JEFFERSON'S PARISBy Howard C. Rice '26Princeton, 1976. 156 ppHardcover, $18.50; paper $8.75