[Extract]

Monsieur le Comte de Vergennes:

Friday at 8 o'clock I shall be at Your Excellency's.

If I were not certain that I agree with your views in desiring that you lift as many as you are able of the obstacles which are holding up my business, I would not have the indiscretion to point [it] out, since it seems that I need only submit myself. But I know that you are as vexed as I am about what is being written about me: this idea consoles me and makes me take these mortal displeasures of an uncompensated task with patience, were there not the advantage of pleasing you. For I am still very far from achieving, with the feeble help I have received, the purpose that I set out to achieve, to bring together by all means possible the A ——— [Americans] with ourselves, to tie them by the inducements of an advantageous trade, to have them find in France all of the agreeableness that they renounced from the English on separating themselves from them. Truly this great purpose inflames me! But how far away it is! My Heavens, how far what I am doing is from what needs to be done for that. The Spanish ambassador might weU say here: "The Lord is a Bourbon, etc . . . ."

Do not consider, Monsieur le Comte, my impatience, my vexations, as signs of insubordination; they are nothing other than zeal, and do me the favor of remarking that if I must go to Santo Domingo, it will be of very little use to transport the artillery at Dunkerque to Brest, while the ship that is awaiting it is hove to at Le Havre.² Isn't it just as much in France in this Port as it would be in Brest; and isn't this a waste of time and money to leave me with a ship tied up when it is expressly loaded, not knowing what to do next, unless before you leave Fontainebleau you would be so kind as to have M. St. Germain issue an order to deliver to me in Havre and Nantes two thousand quintals of powder, with which I shall depart in the safekeeping of God and your tiny fleet. All of the magazines are filled to overflowing, and the Minister of War is still rather far from having taken from the stewards the quantity of powder coming to him. As much at Marseille and here I am somewhat consoled; because at least I am not altogether useless, and because my ships will have on board the necessaries to pay for their fitting-out. . . .

Why, then, is not a little more confidence accorded me? Is there any one more sincere than I? Have I not acquired the reputation of a man of good sense, who extends himself to the first interesting objective that I seek to establish? Believe me, Monsieur le Comte, my heart is wrung on seeing how everything goes, or rather how it does not go.