In obedience to this request Jones went privately to Versailles, where he spent some time in consultation with the commissioners and the French ministry discussing the exchange of prisoners, and proposed several plans of attack by which his services could be utilized. These plans well indicate the fertility of imagination, the resourceful genius, and the daring hardihood of the man. One of them was for making another descent upon Whitehaven, another was to attack the Bank of Ayr and destroy or ransom that town; another was to burn the shipping on the Clyde. Expeditions on the coast of Ireland were suggested. London might be distressed, he thought, by cutting off the supplies of coal from Newcastle; but the most feasible projects were the capture or destruction of the West Indian or Baltic fleets of merchantmen or the Hudson Bay ships. The Minister of Marine, M. de Sartine, lent an attentive ear to all of the plans which were proposed, and Jones returned to Brest with high hopes that he should be soon employed in an expedition to carry out one or the other of these plans with adequate means to do it well. It is quite likely that the minister was as earnest and honest in his intentions as the king in his desire to make use of Jones, but the formal declaration of war rendered it possible to prosecute the enterprises which had been suggested by Jones, if it were thought expedient to attempt them, under the French flag and with French officers. As France had only intended to use him under the cover of the American flag to harass England before war was declared, and as that could now be done openly under her own flag, they did not see the same necessity for his services as before. The matter of finding employment for him was further complicated by the fact that since a state of actual war existed the ministry was besieged with applications from numbers of French officers for command, and the ships which had been proposed for Jones were naturally appropriated to the French themselves. Even if a command could have been found for the American, there would have been a natural disinclination, so great as to be nearly prohibitive of success, on the part of the French officers to serving under a foreigner. Time brought him nothing but disappointment, and the high hopes he had cherished gradually waned. Always a persistent and voluminous letter writer, in his desperation he overwhelmed everybody with correspondence. Inaction was killing to him. Not to be employed was like death itself to a man of his intensely energetic temperament. His pride would not permit him to return to the United States and seek a command when he had specifically announced, in a letter to Congress by the returning Ranger, that the King of France asked that he might make use of his services, and therefore no command in America need be reserved for him; and yet he now found himself a hanger on the outskirts of a court and a ministry which had no further use for him.