“_Saturday, June 29th_ [1782].--We went together to the Spanish Ambassador’s, who received us with great civility and politeness. He spoke with Mr. Jay on the subject of the treaty they were to make together.… On our going out, he took pains himself to open the folding-doors for us, which is a high compliment here, and told us he would return our visit (_rendre son devoir_), and then fix a day with us for dining with him.”[593] Adams, in his Diary,[594] describes a Sunday dinner at his house, then a new building in “the finest situation in Paris,” being part of the incomparable palace, with its columnar front, still admired as it looks on the Place de la Concorde. Jay also describes a dinner with the Count, who was living “in great splendor,” with an “assortment of wines perhaps the finest in Europe,” and was “the ablest Spaniard he had ever known”; showing by his conversation “that his court is in earnest,” and appearing “frank and candid, as well as sagacious.”[595] These hospitalities have a peculiar interest, when it is known, as it now is, that Count Aranda regarded the acknowledgment of our independence with “grief and dread.” But these sentiments were disguised from our ministers. After signing the Treaty of Paris, by which Spain recognized our independence, Aranda addressed a Memoir secretly to King Charles the Third, in which his opinions on this event are set forth. This prophetic document slumbered for a long time in the confidential archives of the Spanish crown. Coxe, in his “Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon,” which are founded on a rare collection of original documents, makes no allusion to it. It was first brought to light in a French translation of Coxe’s work by Don Andres Muriel, published at Paris in 1827.[596] An abstract of the Memoir appears in one of the historical dissertations of the Mexican authority, Alaman, who said of it that it has “a just celebrity, because results have made it pass for a prophecy.”[597] I give the material portions, translated from the French of Muriel. “_Memoir communicated secretly to the King by his Excellency the Count Aranda, on the Independence of the English Colonies, after having signed the Treaty of Paris of 1783._