The next day I had a fresh conference with M. Dubourg, who brought me a number of memorials from officers and engineers offering their services in America; some of whom, I believe, deserve the utmost encouragement; but more of this hereafter. While I was casting in my mind, how best to improve the present favorable crisis for supplying the Colonies, Monsieur Beaumarchais made proposals for procuring whatever should be wanted, but in such a manner as was understood by M. Dubourg to amount to a monopoly, which indeed was not his only objection, for Monsieur Beaumarchais, though confessedly a man of abilities, had always been a man of pleasure and never of business; but as he was recommended by Count Vergennes, M. Dubourg could not avoid noticing him, but immediately expostulated with the Count in a letter, which brought on embarrassments no way favorable, and I saw that M. Dubourg was so far from sounding the views of his superior in this manoeuvre, that he was, with the best intentions in the world, in danger of counteracting his own wishes, the extent of which were, to obtain the supplies of merchants and manufacturers on the credit of the Colonies, in which the strictest punctuality and most scrupulous exactness would be necessary, and which under the present difficulties of remittance, I feared would not be lived up to. As I had learned, that in the late reform of the French army, they had shifted their arms for those of a lighter kind, the heavy ones, most of which were the same as new, to the amount of seventy or eighty thousands, lay useless in magazines, with other military stores, in some such proportion, I apprehended it no way impossible to come at a supply from hence, through the agency of some merchant, without the ministry being concerned in the matter. In such case the merchant would be accountable to the ministry, and the Colonies to the merchant, by which means a greater time of payment might be given, and more allowance in case of our being disappointed. With this in view I went to Versailles on Wednesday, the 17th, and waited on M. Gerard, first secretary of foreign affairs, and presented to him the enclosed memorial,[2] which led to a very particular conversation on the affairs of America, and which I turned finally on this subject, to which he would not then give me any immediate answer, but promised me one in a day or two. Returning to town, I found Messrs Dubourg and Beaumarchais had a misunderstanding, the latter giving out that he could effect every thing we wished for, and the former, from the known circumstances of M. Beaumarchais, and his known carelessness in money matters, suspecting he could procure nothing, and the more so as he promised so largely. They parted much displeased with each other, and Mons. Beaumarchais went directly to Versailles. On M. Dubourg's coming and informing me what had passed, I immediately wrote to M. Gerard the enclosed letter,[3] and in return was desired to come with M. Dubourg