Paris in the 1700's, after Ben Franklin

Thomas Jefferson was America's ambassador to France from 1785-1789. This is what Paris meant to him:

He wrote of this as the happiest time of his life but he never told why it was. Then when he was older:

Jefferson himself said that, as an old man, if he didn't live in Virginia, he would live in Paris. Here

Again he did not say why.

The 'why' has never been made clear because it was nobody else's business.

Thomas Jefferson landed in an upside world when he made it to Paris as Ambassador. He was the second man to represent the new country. The first American the Parisians became familiar with was Benjamin Franklin. He left a reputation that. Well one joke was that after putting 1800 notches in his bed it broke and crashed through the floor. The notches weren't cut that deep. It was the six women with him in the bed that broke it.

As the senior representative of the United States of America, as with any country's leader in France, the women were all over Thomas Jefferson. Then on top of that he had to follow Ben's act and that was far more than I was willing to deal with.

My wife had died a few years before I went to France (in 1782) and I was honoring a pledge we had made to each other. However, it was far more than just a pledge. I could not bring myself to be unfaithful. My faithful nature is part of my soul and it is guided by my heart. It's not an issue of mind. It's an issue of a morality. Remarkably my honor stays the same and it remains virtually identical in each and every lifetime. It gives an unreserved passion to my very being which is not just words on paper but runs throughout my very soul and this is what guides my lives throughout all eternity.

The women were all incredibly beautiful. Every single one of them actually was gorgeous since the aristocrats were literally breed for beauty. They were not at all stocky like most of the American women had to become in order to survive in the wilderness which was America.

When you visited the King of France for the first time you were invited to chose a courtesan. If you didn't chose one then the King asked his advisor to chose one for you and he would always chose the best spy! So you had to chose one and at least have her make tea and small talk with your visitors when they arrived. From the main hall in the palace, the King of France took you into a side room where up to a hundred of the most beautiful women in Europe had gathered. He would clap one time and the tops of their dresses would flip down exposing mountains of ripe flesh. For a frontiersman from America it just plain took your breath away. Then when you had just about recovered your ability to breath again the King would start telling you about each woman's merits. (More on this later.) Then when you were dizzy the King would clap his hands twice and all the women would turn 180 degrees, bend at the waist and flip their dresses up over their backs and were ready for your inspection. To me it looked like a hundred wheels of cheese, each one minus a slice, framed in curtains and floating in the air. These women were each considered one in a thousand in beauty alone. Hundreds of thousands had applied for each of the few hundred courtesan positions. They came from all over Europe and even Asia.

These women had specialties too. Some could cook better than any woman you had ever met. Some were excellent musicians. One count had a blind courtesan and he just raved about her continuously. It seems all her other senses were much more acute because of her blindness. She could not only play many instruments and sing well but her performance in bed satisfied the count beyond all his expectations. He never worried about her spying since he had the maid make certain no one came in the house in his absence and he counted all his mail to be sure the courtesan didn't smuggle any of it out. It seems to have been too good to be true. I guess it was because he caught her reading his mail one day and that was the end of it! Except she still got her pension and the money she got from spying. For a courtesan to become the mistress of an ambassador was a huge winfall. Mainly for a courtesan it was a juggling act. If they kept an ambassador happy for a few months they could end up with a chateau, a regal crest and a pension.

From that point on France was assured better treatment by that ambassador and hence his country. So King Louis made sure the women who helped France in this manner had their futures made.

Ben Franklin had a saying about how a country's women are like their horses. (Actually Ben had a saying about almost everything and half of them couldn't be repeated in mixed company.) That sayings was this:'The English women saddle up well and willingly go for a long ride. They are most fun for short gallops and are best if ridden only once or twice a week and gotten back home before the sun sets or there could be trouble. The French are more ready and willing. They have the best form of all but for endurance and a comfortable ride nothing beats an American'.

Paris was an upside down world. At the time Americans had this incredible reputation as being the most virile of lovers throughout Europe. Walking down a 100 foot hallway in France I'd see dozens of handkerchiefs falling to the floor out of the corner of my eye and get numerous pieces of paper with propositions like you could never believe. Many of the women of Paris had long before made up their minds that they wanted Thomas Jefferson in bed with them. So their minds flourished with incredible creativity in finding methods to make that happen.

I was introduced to the King and Parisian society at the biggest party of the year in Versailles I was in the huge antechamber that held about half the guests. It was an immense room where they served the food. It was decorated with far too much orange. It was supposed be gold for the 'Sun King' Louis XIV who built it but time had changed the gold to a faded orange and it looked really shabby. I kept thinking how little it would take to change everything in the antechamber to make it look like it belonged to a King. That would have been a small amount to pay compared to the immense amounts of money King Louis XVI pointlessly spent on everything else. I kept it to myself but I felt the king had lost his objectivity and all sense of proportion.

As I ate, a woman with barely disguised lust offered to pay me for harpsichord lessons. This was a common line for a proposition so I said 'Madam I do not even play the harpsichord.' (I said the word 'Madam' with a strong emphasis to remind her of her married status but I said it quietly in order not to embarrass her.) She replied 'Oh, very well, I'll just have to find someone to play while we are making love'. Then she yelled halfway across that huge room to her very nearsighted husband (who was busy in a conversation with two 15 year old courtesans who already had very scandalous reputations), 'Dear, I have located the most marvelous Harpsichord instructor. Is 50 Deniers a visit the appropriate amount to pay?' The husband approved with a nod of his head in front of everyone else in that huge room who knew that the representative of the United States was not going to give his pretty wife a single harpsichord lesson. Hundreds of people from Paris society heard it but that's all they heard and their minds filled in the rest. Actually the people were from all over the world.

My reputation was set.

After that I got ten times the offers I had gotten before then. The women decided after the Harpsichord incident that I was just another frontiersman like Ben Franklin. The women were not only a lot bolder after that but suddenly they were a lot younger too. (I can't recall yet why they were younger.) There were no more handkerchiefs. It was just direct outright propositions from the time of that harpsichord incident on.

I even found the cooks daughter and the scullery maid once in my bed when I pulled back the covers. They had been in that bed naked for hours waiting for me, However the prettiest one had long since fallen asleep.

Now I recall the reason that the women who propositioned me had gotten younger. But first let's regress a moment. There were years in which Thomas Jefferson had second doubts about having written the Declaration of Independence. Some of my thoughts were like everyone has about the things they have done in their life. 'If only I had not written those two lines.' others were a lot more serious like, 'Why didn't I leave out that one line. That one line by itself could get me hung if the British ever came back.'

If the English came back then the American people would distill the entire time that had gone by since 1776 and blame everything on Thomas Jefferson for having written that damn Declaration of Independence. So the Declaration was a huge weight around my neck. For seven years it hung there until about a year and a half after I had landed in that wonderfully upside France. The French aristocrats taught English in school to their daughters. They had one problem though. The French hated the British or should I say they despised the British while at the same time the British hated the French. (It was a class thing.) So the French schools looked far and wide for any literature that was in English but was not British and there were only about two things that fit the bill. One was the Farmers Almanac and that was far too risque for girls to read and the other was the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence had four things going for it. First, it was not British and for the French that was always good. Second, it was anti British which was extremely good. Third, it was proper English. (Since Thomas directed the declaration towards the aristocratic English he didn't want to give them any excuses for dismissing it due to poor grammar.) Ben's Almanac was atrocious in it's use of the American vernacular with it's largess of slang. The forth reason was that something happened about 1780-1784 and the Catholic Church in France actually approved of the Declaration of Independence, which surprised everyone. With that stamp of approval the French put it right up there along with the words of the Cardinals. This made it acceptable reading for even the youngest of schoolgirls.

The Declaration of Independence is very unique. I had focused on the issue of writing the document for over three years before I penned it and I could not arrive at a logical reason for a revolution. All logic said to stay as part of England and work it out in the courts over a period of time. So the great logician, Thomas Jefferson, threw logic completely out and became as Shakespeare.

Then without a bit of logic wrote an entirely emotion based document that any court of law in the world would have shredded into a thousand pieces. But the French girls loved it because it was just how they thought. Pure emotion. About 1783 the Declaration of Independence became known among French schoolgirls as the 'great liberator' of women and it became a kind of fad for at least twenty years. 

The situation among pubescent girls is this. Worldwide most schoolgirls have their first orgasm and thus become women in the privacy of their bedrooms late at night and often while studying. In the schools of France this often corresponded to when they were learning the English language. It was during a phase of their life when many years of being told by the Monsieur and their parents to 'not touch yourself there' was pitted against the rising tide of overpowering female hormones that it would inevitably lose out too.

Guess what document hastened the arrival of their desired freedom? Guess what man late at night in the dim candle light gave them the license, in plain English, to pursue their urges and their God given right to life, liberty and the happy pursuit of orgasms? And many did pursue them with the emotional words of freedom contained in the Declaration of Independence in their minds.

Most girls were betrothed and they got married within a few years after reaching that age but occasionally something happened to the man that they were bethrothed to. This left these young ladies in one of the most horrible dilemmas that a person could imagine.They had to go into a convent for the rest of their life since the King demanded it and said it was an absolute 'necessity', or that is what he called it.* Over half these women would go insane in the convents. They were essentially sentenced to solitary confinement living in a little cubical where they had to remain perpetually in silence until they died.

Many of these unmarried women committed suicide to avoid this horrible future without any future. It was incredibly serious and no one took it lightly except the king. The only valid alternative to being locked in a convent for the rest of their life was to become a 'cow' and have a child 'of great breeding' for France and their family. So to Thomas Jefferson's house came many young ladies who pleaded their case for him to become the father of their child so it would have the proper breeding that I could provide.

At first I doubted their sincerity because of the many tricks that the courtesans had played on me and other ambassadors. So the first few times it happened I thought they were traps of some kind and I sent several of these young ladies away to a slow end in a convent. I did send a letter to ask for advice on the matter to the American ambassador in Spain but the reply was slow in coming. As I recall the third young lady I sent away committed suicide by throwing herself in the Seine without any clothes, in January and with 20 pounds of iron strapped to her in order to make sure she would not have to go to a convent. That changed me completely and shocked me to no end. Freedom might mean one thing on parchment but what good is it to a girl being eaten by the fish at the bottom of the River Seine? The next woman was escorted by the young brother of the girl that had committed suicide and that removed all my remaining reluctance.

My maid would allow these women in and they would wait up to a dozen at a time in the ante room. After a while it became organized and we would have discussion groups nearly every night so that these young ladies could get to know me better both before and after they had made their decision. Then after an hour all except four of these young ladies would leave. Those that stayed would wait in the ante room except for one who would meet me in my study.

It would often go something like this. They would be standing ten feet away from me. As they would start to talk they would walk slowly towards me. As they did this they would reach behind their neck, undo a tie and as their dress slid to floor they would walk out of it totally naked. Then as they pressed themselves up against me they would say, in absolutely genuine desperation, something like this: I am an 18 year old virgin. The man I was to marry is a homosexual/went into the army and got killed/caught syphilis/got the milkmaid pregnant and married her/etc. If I don't get pregnant with your baby then I am going to have to live in a convent for the rest of my life/commit suicide. My father is willing to pay you 5,000 francs.** Please Mr. Jefferson, I know the Declaration of Independence in 12 language however I can't seem to read it completely without having a petit mal (orgasm) by the time I am two thirds of the way through it.' 

Their incredible smell, since they timed their visits for when they were ovulating, would penetrate to my very being. I would still be trying to deal with the first part about "I am 18 years old and a virgin" in my mind except my focus had been completely smashed to bits by everything else that had occurred in the ten seconds that had elapsed since those words had been spoken. I tried to say 'no' the first few times.

Without action 'Liberty' is only a word and I had given them their desire for freedoms when they read the Declaration of Independence. With the resulting action that I provided these young ladies it all turned out to be very wonderful.***No money ever passed hands. Even the snipping operation two weeks before they visited was a donation. It was a simple operation and often four young ladies were operated on simultaneously. It was done for free as training at a local medical college. It was always done there since it had to be documented in official records that these ladies were virgins. There was no leeway given on this point about them being virgins as it was to prevent any possibility of me and then the next young ladies from catching syphilis.

It's true that the Revolution in France soon abolished the system that made necessary this adventurous behavior however the only aristocrats that were allowed to live were women with small children. I left over ~220 offspring when I left France and that saved the lives of their 220 mothers who hated the despotic class system worse than any peasant ever could and so deserved the life they earned.

Ben Franklin said that I powered the French Revolution. There is an effect called tantric empowerment which was known about in the west at the time and I understood it inately. So did Ben. Empowered by the anger of over 350 young women (there were about 350 women but ~250 that actually gave birth) who hated the king, an enslaved population for the first time in 500 years awoke to action and destroyed the government that had always oppressed them.

*The King did have a valid reason for condeming unmarried women to the convents.

The unmarried women who had children maintained some ethics but those that had no children seemed to dump all theirs and do the most atroscious things imaginable. The flim 'Dangerous Liaisons' was real. Many wealthy motherless women considered the ruining of virgins a kind of sport.

These spinsters would hold contests to see who could corrupt the most maidens in a two year period of time. These women would actually hire the best lotharios they could find in order to win. So the king did have a very good reason for condemning those women without children to convents.

**I was offered lots of money to act as stud service. I figured I could have paid off the entire national debt in less than six months. I sent Ben Franklin a letter asking him for his advice and said that I would feel like I was essentially a prostitute. Ben's terse reply was how much did you get offers for? When I sent the reply what I received back from Ben was "Take the money. You can't be a prostitute if they offer that kind of money. That is ten times what a whore ever makes. Most of them don't make that much in their entire life."

However, I never could take money in exchange for granting anyone their freedom.

*** Often these women came to visit me in Monticello and then later in Washington, even at the Presidents mansion just so that my children could meet me and vice versa. There was no stigma attached to having children out of wedlock in France but Virginia was an another matter completely. Charlottesville gossip went sky high when the women with those look alike children started to show up. During my Vice Presidency my visitors were listed for awhile (in perhaps the newspapers). Then towards the end of it that list got seriously long but that made the best pr for getting me elected as president.

That was just the start though. There was a French custom that women who raised children alone would take their child to meet their father when he or she was reaching maturity. That took place about 1802 when about 15 mothers and children a week came to visit. That was right in the middle of my first term as President. These women lived outside of France since they had been aristocrats and after the French Revolution were considered outlaws by France. When a lot of them were showing up I also had to deal with the French for what became known as the Louisianna Purchase. I met with hundreds of Frenchmen to get that property for $14 million. They would end up in the waiting room at the 'White House' staring at five children that looked like me and their five French ex-aristocrat outlaw mothers.

My reputation soared in France as one result of this. I was surprised again about this benifit. The French had tuned down four European offers for that territory including one which was 'on the table' for $20 Million from Prussia. The Dutch made a preemptory offer for $60 Million. And everyone became rich when the Dutch were in charge. That is why I sent our best negotiator, James Madison, to finalize the secret talks that had gone through DuPont and others. By the way our main question was: 'Wouldn't you like a New Orleans administered by the United States?' This sounded like the perfect solution to an impulsive Napoleon these diplomats might need to run away from.

The French did not care about the mothers as they no longer officially existed but my half French children were very important in getting the French to even consider an offer for that territory. These women or should I say my children literally got us all of Lousiana. I write about how they did it here.

Thomas Jefferson stood at a height of almost six and a half feet. Only one in a hundred French men were taller than six feet.Thomas Jefferson's other remarkable feature was his prominent 'nose'. The French seem to favor tall men with prominent noses for their politicians, in fact four of their past presidents appear to have had the genetics of Thomas Jefferson. When Ambassador Jefferson left France he left gifts in the form of hundreds of motivated and intelligent children. These children were the real reason he later said he would live in Paris if he did not live in Virginia. France was a wonderfully upside world for Thomas Jefferson.

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2003-8 John Pinil