He characterized the carrying of "that diabolical castle," the Bastile, as "among the most extraordinary things I have met with." The day it took place he wrote in his journal, with an irony very modern in its flavor: "Yesterday it was the fashion at Versailles not to believe that there were any disturbances at Paris. I presume that this day's transactions will induce a conviction that all is not perfectly quiet."
He used the Bastile as a text when, shortly afterwards, he read a brief lesson to a certain eminent painter. The latter belonged to that class of artists with pen or pencil (only too plentiful in America at the present day) who always insist on devoting their energies to depicting subjects worn threadbare by thousands of predecessors, instead of working in the new, broad fields, filled with picturesque material, opened to them by their own country and its history. "The painter shows us a piece he is now about for the king, taken from the Æneid: Venus restraining the arm which is raised in the temple of the Vestals to shed the blood of Helen. I tell him he had better paint the storm of the Bastile."
In March, 1790, Morris went to London, in obedience to a letter received from Washington appointing him private agent to the British government, and enclosing him the proper credentials.
Certain of the conditions of the treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States, although entered into seven years before, were still unfulfilled. It had been stipulated that the British should give up the fortified frontier posts within our territory, and should pay for the negroes they had taken away from the Southern States during the war. They had done neither, and Morris was charged to find out what the intentions of the government were in the matter. He was also to find out whether there was a disposition to enter into a commercial treaty with the United States; and finally, he was to sound them as to their sending a minister to America.
On our part we had also failed to fulfil a portion of our treaty obligations, not having complied with the article which provided for the payment of debts due before the war to British merchants. Both sides had been to blame; each, of course, blamed only the other. But now, when we were ready to perform our part, the British refused to perform theirs.