He had caught something of the general fever, and he drew a vivid picture of Paris with crowds surrounding the "Parliament House", stopping carriages in the queen's livery, indulging in _bons mots_, caricatures, "collecting in mobs, and yet the King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper. The Queen cries, but sins on", and the only practical result one can see is that "all tongues in Paris and in France have been let loose."[201] The same note is given six weeks later in a letter to John Jay. "The King goes for nothing. He hunts one half of the day, is drunk the other, and signs whatever he is bid."[202] Even the reforms, the most important from the point of view of the French, seem to him insignificant, and when the edict on the Protestants appears, it is cruelly analyzed by the American minister: It is an acknowledgement that Protestants can beget children, and that they can die, and be offensive unless buried. It does not give them permission to think, to speak, or to worship.... What are we to think of the condition of the human mind in a country, where such a wretched thing as this throws the State into convulsions, and how must we bless our own situation in a country, the most illiterate peasant of which is a Solon, compared with the authors of this law.[203] When he wrote his "Autobiography", Jefferson used very extensively not only the notes he had taken when in Paris but the press copies of his correspondence, and on the whole gave an accurate picture of the events that immediately preceded the French Revolution--those he had witnessed before his departure from Paris, in October, 1789. But, true as the picture may be, it is not progressive, and here we aim not to trace again the main episodes of the French Revolution, but the development of Jefferson's mind, his reaction towards the events. Most of all we must seek to find out from contemporary evidence whether the old accusation launched by Gouverneur Morris, seized upon eagerly by Jefferson's enemies, and since repeated again and again, is in any way justified.