And yet, when the worst is told, one may wonder whether there would not be some unfairness in judging Jefferson merely from these memoranda. There he noted information for which he foresaw some further use, interesting knowledge which could be utilized at Monticello or for the benefit of his fellow countrymen. How to plant and prune the vines and the olive trees; how to make cheese and oil; how to introduce the "St. Foin", new vegetables, new crops such as rice, new industries such as the silkworm and mulberry tree; how to build a house; all this required exactness and precision and could scarcely be trusted to memory. Pleasant impressions of travel, on the contrary, could always be evoked through the imagination and would lose very little of their charm and value with time. Furthermore to put down these impressions in black and white would have required a certain process of analysis entirely foreign to Puritan consciousness, and a Puritan Jefferson had remained in his speech and manners far more than he himself believed. There was in these purely æsthetic pleasures something really too personal to be indulged in, at least in writing. Once, however, he did away with all the restraint imposed upon him by education and the "habits of his country"; it is in the well-known letter written from Nîmes to Madame de Tessé. Parts of it at least, in all fairness to Jefferson, have to be quoted here as a contrast to the dryness and objectiveness of the notes on travel.... Here I am, Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarrée, like a lover at his mistress.... This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the Château de Laye-Epinaye in Beaujolais, a delicious morsel of sculpture, by M. A. Slodtz. This, you will say, was in rule, to fall in love with a female beauty; but with a house, it is out of all precedent. No, Madam, it is not without a precedent in my own history. While in Paris, I was violently smitten with the Hôtel de Salm, and used to go to the Tuileries almost daily to look at it. The loueuse des chaises--inattentive to my passion--never had the complaisance to place a chair there, so that sitting on the parapet, and twisting my neck around to see the object of my admiration, I generally left with a torti-colli.