Marie Kimball

For nearly a hundred years the great body of official and personal papers left by Thomas Jefferson has formed an almost bottomless mine of material for the historian dealing with political as well as with social questions. Although there have been four editions of his writings, they have emphasized mainly the public papers, and the wealth of the private letters has not yet been exhausted.

The revival of interest in our early history which the last dozen years have witnessed, has brought about certain curious phenomena. None is more so than the tendency for picking up odd bits of information about various characters or events, appending them to documents usually already well studied and published, and printing the result with a loud hurrah.

Secure in his widowerhood and faithful to the memory of Martha Wayles, not two years dead, Thomas Jefferson had set sail for France in the summer of 1784 as Minister Plenipotentiary to the court of Louis XVI. It may have been that this crossing of the sea was something of a flight from memories, for Jefferson's love for his young wife and his mourning for her are traditional.