The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson spent five years in Paris, from 1784 to 1789, serving as the representative of a struggling new nation. In this entertaining, scholarly chronicle of those years, we're treated to an account of how the nights spent among the Paris intellectuals influenced Jefferson's thought, and we get a vivid taste of the social whirl in that great European city. William Howard Adams, a leading Jefferson scholar for 25 years, quotes extensively from Jefferson's letters and other writings, and does a commendable job of describing the scenes in which Jefferson would have found himself.