Though I may and should be certain that your excellency is regularly informed of my dispatches to the honorable Department of Foreign Affairs, I 399 nevertheless found it necessary to take the liberty to address myself directly to you to solicit, sir, your particular attention to an article in that of the 14th to 23rd of this month, and to the enclosures which touch upon the honor done to Professor Luzac and to me, by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachussetts; and consequently, to the very natural desire that we have to know to whom we are obliged to have been recommended for this favor, in order that we may express our proper gratitude.1

Here, thanks be to God, is real civil liberty, true majesty, the people’s, highly commended and established by two powerful nations, capable of setting the bar, one for the new world, the other for the old, more than ever worthy friends one of the other, together making up a population of almost 30 million humans. A citizen king more firmly powerful than all of his peers: all of the other thrones, Gothic ones, founded upon ancient opinions and prejudices, undermined by the abolition of hereditary nobility and hierarchy in France, their politics deterred by the decree renouncing all spirit of conquest; quaking, trembling, not knowing what decision to make in order to contain the millions subjected to their dictatorships. A new order of things is born. And I, a septuagenarian, shall yet see a little part of all this: little Diogenes, alone and crouched within the vast barrel of the Hôtel des États-Unis, undesirous of anything from the Alexanders of the world, so long as they do not block my sun with their shadow.

Would you be pleased, sir, for the remainder of this life, to honor me with your good graces, to accept the extension of my respects for Mrs. Adams, the tribute of my wishes for your steady prosperity and for that of your children, and to be persuaded of the sincere respect with which I am now and always, sir, your excellency’s most humble and most obedient servant