TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, August 10,1815.

Dear Sir,

The simultaneous movements in our correspondence have been remarkable on several occasions.  It would seem as if the state of the air, or state of the times, or some other unknown cause, produced a sympathetic effect on our mutual recollections.  I had sat down to answer your letters of June the 19th, 20th, and 22nds with pen, ink, and paper, before me, when I received from our mail that of July the 30th.  You ask information on the subject of Camus.  All I recollect of him is, that he was one of the deputies sent to arrest Dumourier at the head of his army, who were, however, themselves arrested by Dumourier, and long detained as prisoners.  I presume, therefore, he was a Jacobin.  You will find his character in the most excellent revolutionary history of Toulongeon.  I believe also, he may be the same person who has given us a translation of Aristotle’s Natural History, from the Greek into French.  Of his report to the National Institute on the subject of the Bollandists, your letter gives me the first information.  I had supposed them defunct with the society of Jesuits, of which they were:  and that their works, although above ground, were, from their bulk and insignificance, as effectually entombed on their shelves, as if in the graves of their authors.  Fifty-two volumes in folio, of the acta sanctorum, in dog-Latin, would be a formidable enterprise to the most laborious German.  I expect, with you, they are the most enormous mass of lies, frauds, hypocrisy, and imposture, that ever was heaped together on this globe.  By what chemical process M. Camus supposed that an extract of truth could be obtained from such a farrago of falsehood, I must leave to the chemists and moralists of the age to divine.

On the subject of the history of the American Revolution you ask who shall write it?  Who can write it?  And who will ever be able to write it?  Nobody; except merely its external facts; all its councils, designs, and discussions having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having even made notes of them.  These, which are the life and soul of history, must for ever be unknown.  Botta, as you observe, has put his own speculations and reasonings into the mouths of persons whom he names, but who, you and I know, never made such speeches.  In this he has followed the example of the ancients, who made their great men deliver long speeches, all of them in the same style, and in that of the author himself.  The work is nevertheless a good one, more judicious, more chaste, more classical, and more true, than the party diatribe of Marshall.  Its greatest fault is in having taken too much from him.  I possessed the work, and often recurred to considerable portions of it, although I never read it through.  But a very judicious and well informed neighbor of mine went through it with great attention, and spoke very highly of it.