We have already seen that, with a corrupted court, a weak king, a selfish and ignorant queen, the only remedy he recommended at first was for the French not to reconquer their liberties by force and by a revolution, but gradually to buy them from the king. Yet he foresaw that the nobility would make a sort of alliance with the people, that is to say the _tiers état_, in order to get money from them, and he held the rather cynical view that "Courtiers had rather give up power than pleasures; they will barter, therefore, the usurped prerogatives of the King, for the money of the people. This is the agent by which modern nations will recover their rights."[204] This is written, not to Jay in a confidential letter, but to a French liberal of his acquaintance, and that practical piece of advice cannot be called philosophical. Altogether the results reached by the Assemblée des Notables were small and the king terribly slow to see the light. So for a long time Jefferson refused not only to encourage but even to admit that he was witnessing the beginnings of a true revolution. Writing to Rutledge in July, 1788, he declared "That the struggle in this country is, as yet, of doubtful issue. It is, in fact, between the monarchy and the parliaments. The nation is no otherwise concerned, but as both parties may be induced to let go some of its abuses, to court the public favor. The danger, is that the people deceived by a false cry of liberty, may be led to take sides with one party, and thus give the other a pretext for crushing them still more."[205] Writing to Cutting a few days later he was more optimistic. Most of the late innovations had been much for the better; a convocation of the States-General could not be avoided; "it will produce a national assembly meeting at certain epochs, possessing at first a negative on the laws, but which will grow into the right of original legislation. Much could be hoped from the States-General and it was also to be hoped that all this will be effected without convulsion."[206]
Such was his confident expectation. He foresaw "that within two or three years this country will be in the enjoyment of a tolerably free constitution, and that without its having cost them a drop of blood."[207]
