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155 After a year in Paris Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in his native Virginia , “Behold me at length on the vaunted scene of Europe!” “But you are perhaps curious to know,” he continued,” how this new scene has struck a savage of the mountains of America.” This letter of September 30, 1785, to Charles Bellini, which Jefferson listed in his epistolary journal as “My view of Europe,” epitomized Jefferson’s ambivalent response to the Europe he was experiencing for the first time. He began answering the question he posed with a negative reply. The “new scene” was inferior to the United States politically and socially; invoking the words of the French philosophe Voltaire, Jefferson concluded that “every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil.” The masses could not claim “that degree of happiness which is enjoyed in America by every class of people.” He even criticized the European family structure and asserted that it did not afford the stability of that found in America. Yet he suddenly changed tone: the savage had to admit to his awe of the “vaunted scene.” Jefferson could not conceal his excitement in finally experiencing the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of Europe. As a young man he had expressed a fleeting interest in taking the grand tour of Europe. Years later he refused an initial appointment to the French court because of his wife’s declining health,expressing his regrets to Benjamin Franklin about not being able to join him at a “polite court” among “the literati of the first order.” But when he wrote to Bellini he had taken Franklin’s place as American minister plenipotentiary at Versailles and could participate in the acclaimed salons and society of Paris. His letter reveals that he was not disappointed. Jefferson freely admitted that in science the literati of Europe led America by half a dozen years. Then there was the availability of books. Even “Behold me at length on the vaunted scene of Europe” Thomas Jefferson and the Creation of an American Image Abroad gaye wilson s Gaye Wilson 156 the polite manners and the “pleasures of the table” were commendable and something to be emulated in the United States.He concluded his summary by enthusing, “Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture , sculpture, painting, music, I should want words.” This letter was not the first instance in which Jefferson described himself as a “savage” and then claimed a preference for the woods and wilds of America to the brilliance of Europe.Throughout his five years of diplomatic service he would tout the new nation’s “honest simplicity” as something “worthy of being cherished,” yet after four months at his post he admitted to James Monroe that “we are the lowest and most obscure of the whole diplomatic tribe” at Versailles. Despite his republican professions, Jefferson ’s diplomatic success depended on his being able to function effectively at a monarchical court. The need for diplomatic leverage, combined with Jefferson’s personal drive for inclusion in the scientific and cultural circles of Europe, required adherence to a long-established decorum and a rigorous attention to appearance. Jefferson might pose facetiously as a “savage” in epistolary exchanges, but his clothing, accessories, and deportment, the elements of personal self-fashioning, would have to meet European expectations if he were to realize his own ambitions and those he held for his country. When Jefferson arrived in Paris on August 6, 1784, to join his fellow diplomats John Adams and Benjamin Franklin in negotiating commercial treaties for the United States,he entered a world that placed extraordinary emphasis upon social and physical appearance.The German sociologist Norbert Elias in his influential study of ancien régime France, The Court Society, explains that rank was asserted through social display: “A duke who does not live as a duke has to live, who can no longer properly fulfill the social duties of a duke, is hardly a duke any longer.” Social demands on the French nobility were also felt by the diplomatic corps. Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all expressed concern over the costs associated with attendance on the French court during their tenure. Even Franklin, who famously created his own rustic,less formal style,could not completely escape the sartorial demands of court.“As the Article of clothes for ourselves here is necessarily much...

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