When Jefferson left Philadelphia for what he sincerely believed would be definite retirement from the field of politics, he felt weary, tired, and already old. He had transacted all the business of his office with a minimum of clerical assistance, attending himself to all the details not only of foreign but also of domestic affairs, sometimes translating documents which he did not trust Freneau with, preparing reports for the President, digging in his manuals of international law, Wolfe, Puffendorff, Vatel, and Grotius. The actual labor was enormous, the variety of subjects amazing; many times during the course of a day he had to shift from one subject to another. Under fire all the time, harassed by the Federalist papers, consulted by the leaders of the party which was beginning to form, he had not broken down under the strain, but was in urgent need of complete rest and agricultural quietude. He had packed books and furniture in advance and sent everything to Monticello; his letter to Genet written, he set out for Virginia without even waiting for the justification that would result from the order to publish his correspondence with the French minister. At that time a vague idea that he could turn a new leaf and start a new life may fugitively have crossed his mind. He had respectfully but profoundly admired Madame de Corny when he was in Paris. News from her had come through Mrs. Church; Mr. de Corny had died; Madame de Corny left a widow in very limited circumstances had retired to Rouen.[308] It seems that he entertained the hope that she might decide to move to America and in that case he would have liked to see her at Monticello: "Madame de Cosway is in a convent ... that she would have rather sought the mountain-top. How happy should I be that it were _mine_, that you, she, and Madame de Corny would seek." But he had seen too many of these brilliant French women in Philadelphia to believe that a Parisian could ever become accustomed to the simplicity of Monticello and to its lack of entertainments, and he made the suggestion very timidly: "I know of no country where the remains of a fortune could place her so much at her ease as this, and where public esteem is so much attached to worth, regardless of wealth; our manners & the state of society here are so different from those to which her habits have been formed, that she would lose more perhaps in that scale." After all, he had not changed so much since he had declared his flame to Belinda, almost in the same terms, twenty years earlier. This was the typical Jeffersonian way of presenting his own wishes, of letting the others decide after he had stated the pros and cons; clearly he was not made to win personal triumphs, either in love or in politics.