Jefferson was then forty-one years old. He knew life and men and had no illusions; he had experienced happiness and sorrow; he had had moments of exaltation, of hot patriotic fever; he had occupied the front of the stage in several circumstances never to be forgotten; he had aroused enmities and made devoted and faithful friends, among them Monroe, Madison, and Short whom he was taking along with him. But neither his disappointments nor his sorrows had made him a misanthrope. Not an orator, he liked to talk, and he could not live without society. The tall spare man in black was no longer able to feel his heart moved by the early emotions of his youth. Next to Washington, who remained in America, and to Doctor Franklin, a debonair patriarch, he was the most famous national figure of America. None was better qualified by his former life and studies to represent America and to speak for his country. Whatever sectionalism he may have had in him had disappeared in these last two years of Congress, when he had striven so strenuously to make the Union an actual fact and to consolidate the loose Federal fabric, for only there could men "See the affairs of the Confederacy from a high ground; they learn the importance of the Union & befriend federal measures when they return. Those who never come here, see our affairs insulated, pursue a system of jealousy and self interest, and distract the Union as much as they can." Of Europe he knew little, except what he had been able to absorb from books. It was a country of great artistic productivity, of enviable social life. Towards England he was not particularly attracted; towards France he felt much more favorably inclined. He had met many Frenchmen; some of them already had become his close friends, two particularly, the Chevalier de Chastellux and especially the youthful, impulsive, and charming Lafayette, who in a parting note had asked him to consider his house as his and to take the little motherless girl to Madame de Lafayette. He knew he would not be without friends, without society, that he would have an unique chance to meet the best minds of Europe. This practical American, so little given to the "_joie de vivre_" and without _abandon_, wanted primarily to increase his knowledge, to gather facts, to make comparisons. He had retained the taste for society, the good breeding, the polite manners, the artistic tendencies of the Virginian, but in him the American was already fully grown. He felt also that he had a certain mission and intended to fulfill it: it was to convey to the European statesmen whose wiles he distrusted the impression that the United States existed as a country, that they did not form a loose and temporary confederation of States, but a nation to be reckoned with and respected. His country was no longer his native Virginia alone: he was thinking nationally and not sectionally. For the French Jefferson was already a great American figure; he was going to