A Sort of Whirlwind
The Art of Seduction - Part IV. The Sum of Loneliness
Immediately after the Events described in The Price of Loneliness, where Gouverneur Morris returned “Home at twelve, the Object of my own Contempt and Aversion” Beatrix Cary Davenport does something unusual.
Instead of placing the next Letter at the End of the Chapter — where his Correspondence sits throughout the Rest of the Diaries — she inserts it directly after his Admittance of Shame.
The Effect is deliberate for what initially reads like Drunken Recklessness begins to look more like psychological Vertigo.
I. The Whirlwind
Paris 18 April 1789
Doctor John Jones
PhiladelphiaMy dear Doctor
I am pretty well convinced that I am not fit for a Traveller and yet I thought otherwise when I left America. But what will you say to a Man who has passed thro Rouen without looking at the great Bell, and who has been above two months in Paris without ascending to the Top of Notre Dame. Who has not been inside of any Church whatever except one which is Building. Who has been but three Times at Versailles and on neither of those Times has seen the King or Queen or had the Wish to see them, and who if he should continue here twenty Years would continue in Ignorance of the Length of the Louvre, the Breadth of the Pont Neuf, the Depth of the Seine and a thousand other Lengths, as every Body knows,
Should you ask me what I have seen I might reply in the Words of Nat Hyde of stammering Memory It is hard to say.
A Man in Paris lives in a Sort of Whirlwind which turns him round so fast that he can see Nothing. And as all Men and Things are in the same vertiginous Situation you can neither fix yourself nor your Object for regular Examination.
Hence the People of this Metropolis are under Necessity of pronouncing their definitive Judgement from the first Glance, and being thus habituated to shoot flying they have what the Sportsmen call a quick Sight. Ex pede Herculem. They know a Wit by his Snuff Box, a Man of Taste by his Bow, and a Statesman by the Cut of his Coat. It is true that like other Sportsmen they sometimes miss, but then like other Sportsmen too they have a thousand Excuses besides the Want of Skill. The Fault you know may be in the Dog or the Bird or the Powder or the Flint or even the Gun, without mentioning the Gunner.
We are at present in a fine Situation for what the Bucks and Bloods would term a Frolic or high Fun. The Ministers have disgusted this City by the Manner of convoking them to elect their Representatives for the States General, and at the same Time Bread is getting dearer, so that when the People assemble on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next, what with Hunger and Discontent the least Spark would set every Thing in a Flame.
The State Phisicians have by Way of Antidote brought between fifteen and twenty Thousand regular Troops within and about the City so that at any Rate the bons Bourgeois may not have all the Fun to themselves. This Measure will rather tend to produce than to prevent a Riot. For some of the young Nobility have brought themselves to an active Faith in the natural Equality of Mankind, and spurn at every Thing which looks like Restraint.
There are some Anecdotes of this Sort the most whimsical and ridiculous imaginable,
but I have neither the Time nor Inclination to communicate them.1
The Letter’s Placement and abrupt ending along with its complete Lack of Transitions give it the Quality of an overflow of Thought, closer to a Diary Entry than to something intended for Delivery.
But what matters just as much is who Morris chooses to write to immediately after the “Folly” — not a Friend, not someone within the Society, nor someone close to him:
His Doctor in Philadelphia.
The Man who famously wasn’t there, when he lost his Leg.
And suddenly the Letter begins reading less like ordinary Correspondence than the intellectual Aftermath of someone forced to confront the physical Reality of an Experience he had previously kept almost entirely theoretical.
It would explain the frantic Movement of the Letter itself: Morris circles Architecture, Society, Politics, Fashion, Crowds and finally himself, as though trying to think his way back toward Stability before arriving at the one Possibility he does not quite dare name directly.
So the Letter unfolds almost like an Examination conducted in real Time — but the closer Gouverneur attempts to assess the Whirlwind around him, the more the Storm turns inward.
1. The Traveler
“I am pretty well convinced that I am not fit for a Traveller
and yet I thought otherwise when I left America.”
Surface Alienation + Displacement + Foreignness + Loss of Orientation
= Morris’ Attempt to explain his Disorientation as a Failure of Travel.
But Tourism is only the Surface. Underneath, Morris has already begun indicting himself: The Journey Gouverneur feels unfit for leads less across Geography than into his own moral Conscience.
2. Every Body
“But what will you say to a Man […] who if he should continue here twenty Years would continue in Ignorance of the Length of the Louvre, the Breadth of the Pont Neuf, the Depth of the Seine and a thousand other Lengths, as every Body knows”
Dimensions + Measurements + Observation + Knowledge + Judgment.
= The Language of the Enlightenment
Read plainly, the Passage almost sounds like Morris mocking himself in Advance:
“What are you even doing if after two months — which is twenty Years in Paris-Time — you still don’t know what “every Body knows”?”
Whether intentional or actually revealing, the Phrase shifts the entire Passage away from Architecture toward Anatomy and from Observation toward Experience — toward what every Body except his own already seems to know firsthand.
And immediately after condemning his own Ignorance, Morris attempts to shift the Problem outward:
“you can neither fix yourself nor your Object for regular Examination.”
So, in Paris, he argues, superficial Fluency becomes a kind of social Survival Skill:
“Hence the People of this Metropolis are under Necessity of pronouncing their definitive Judgement from the first Glance”
Paris assumes Experience before Experience has actually occurred.
And suddenly the “Folly” itself begins reading differently.
Even though Morris openly admits in his Diary that “Mr. Richards and Mr. Dariell” drank with him before the Episode2, the Letter reveals something more important than simple social Pressure:
Morris was acutely aware that he was constantly being read as already initiated into a World he still experienced from observational Distance.
The Excuse is elegant because it almost works.
But then Morris finds himself in the Eye of the Storm.
3. The Gunner in the Whirlwind
Paris causes a Whirlwind + Everyone misjudges within it + Sportsmen miss all their Shots = It is the Bird, the Powder, the Flint, the Gun—
“without mentioning the Gunner.”
There it is.
The perfect Analogy.
The Access was there. The Opportunity was there. The Money was there. Previous Obstacles were removed — every external Condition supposedly necessary for Pleasure had technically been fulfilled.
And yet the Experience itself failed.
So his Search for the Reason why could only fail too, because the Act itself was never the central Problem: It was that Morris already knew, long before entering it, that it was not what he truly wanted.
The Letter sounds far less like the Reflections of an experienced Libertine than of a Man intellectually circling an Experience he cannot reconcile with himself afterward. It is the closest Thing in Morris’ surviving Writings to an Admission of profound Unfamiliarity with not only transactional Intimacy but with embodied Experience in General.
The Core-Problem was always Himself.
4. The Storm Wall
And immediately after arriving at “the Gunner,” Morris is pulled back into the Storm.
Hunger + Bread Scarcity + Troop Deployment = A City accelerating toward Explosion
The Shift is striking because it does not read merely as Self-Regulation through familiar political Terrain. Morris absorbs personal Failure into the larger Instability around him. “Yes, I failed — but look at the World around me.”
And to some Extent, he is not wrong.
April 1789 genuinely was combustible. Paris itself had begun behaving exactly like the Whirlwind Morris describes: overstimulated, accelerated, emotionally volatile and visibly approaching Catastrophe.
He knew that Situation from another Revolution and another War.
One he had played no minor Part in shaping and fighting himself.
The personal and political Crises in the Letter become impossible to separate.
“What the Bucks and Bloods would term a Frolic or high Fun”
sounds almost hysterically misplaced against heavy political Instability and approaching Violence, and could easily be mistaken for detached Cynicism.
But reading Morris as merely cynical often requires stripping the Passages from their emotional and historical Context.
Morris is not observing the Whirlwind from a safe Distance.
He writes from inside of it.
Whether he ever allowed that Self-Examination to leave his Desk remains unclear.
II. The Doctor
Just as Gouverneur Morris’ own Letter trails off unfinished, the Pages preceding Dr. John Jones’ surviving Responses from 1790 and 1791 are unfortunately missing as well. Whether Jones is replying directly to the “Whirlwind” Letter therefore remains impossible to verify.
But the surviving Correspondence suggests something equally revealing: while Morris spent the opening Years of the Revolution moving through Parisian Salons, political Upheaval and increasingly unstable emotional Terrain, Dr. Jones continued writing to him from an entirely different World.
Physician, Revolutionary Surgeon, longtime Philadelphia Acquaintance and occasional Housemate to Gouverneur, Dr. John Jones belonged to an older American World of Boarding-Houses, late-Night Conversation and fragile republican Stability — a World Morris himself increasingly seems to be swept away from.
1. The Old World
[…] if ever I had any talents for correspondence with ladies, those Days my Dear Doctor, are Alass! no more — even the good natured obliging creatures who used to visit the green room where you lived with me opposite the shambles, have now forsaken me, ungrateful Jades! They ought at least to remember my past services , but even the muses like other Jades swift says, treat a man the worse for every year added to his life.3
What survives in Jones’ Memory is domestic and social: shared Rooms, casual Visits, Women familiar enough to remain present Decades later.
The Image feels strangely intimate in its Casualness. And unlike Morris’ Paris, Jones’ World remains emotionally local. Grounded. Small enough to revisit mentally without becoming disoriented by it.
recollect this my dear Doctor! & write verses while you remain on the top of Parnassus. or to your friend the Old Doctor, all his views of happiness in this world are confined within a narrow compass — the fire side — an easy chair, a few good books & two or three old friends who are good enough to to visit him, constitute his summum bonum.
And in his second surviving Letter to Gouverneur, written roughly half a Year later, Jones returns to the same emotional Geography:
[…] our other friends in general are well, not excepting Mrs. Clarke & Miss Dally with whom the old Doctor has lived so long, he cou’d hardly live without them4
While Gouverneur attempts to navigate the Whirlwinds of Parisian Society — indeed writing his Verses to anyone willing to receive them — Jones grieves his own Drift beyond female Attention.
2. Matrimania
I had it once in contemplation to address a few lines to Mrs. Penn on the subject of her good old friend Mr. Hill, who for some time past has had the Matrimainia in his head to a great degree, & has been so severely treated by Mrs. M—s & Mrs. P—l under the specious pretence of friendship & regard for his character, that I have been allarmed at times lest he should deviate from the precise delicate line of moral purity which has ever constituted the distinguishing part of his character with the sex — temptations of a naughty nature have been thrown in his way. If he had not possessed a delicacy of gallantry superior to the [Albic] [illegible] Newt, I think he would have been a gone man — but you know my Dear Doctor when a coward is compelled to face his enemy he becomes the most desperate combatant, viz was the dread of this which made me wish5 hear Mrs. Penns opinion & I shou‘d really have written to request it, but my courage fail‘d me
The Topic itself already says enough: Women. Marriage. Temptation. Reputation. In short: Gossip. The Language of intimate male Friendship in the 1790s.
Jones does not write to Mrs. Penn directly despite clearly wanting her Opinion on the Matter. Instead he relays the entire Story to Gouverneur — thousands of Miles away in Paris — as though Morris were the more natural Recipient for this kind of social and emotional Conversation.
That alone implies a Friendship accustomed to speaking about Women, Courtship and romantic Confusion.
But what makes the Passage truly striking is the underlying Assumption beneath the Humor:
This is not a Letter written from one Libertine to another.
Jones writes to Morris as a Man expected to understand the same moral Code:
Restraint, Reputation and Delicacy before Women.
3. Morris the hopeless Romantic
In the second Letter Jones places his Finger directly onto the central Pattern of Morris’ Life:
Once more my Dear Doctor, what are you doing? how many years will you suffer to pass away in projecting schemes of happiness which may never happen, while you neglect those within your grasp
The Sentence feels almost absurdly modern in its Accuracy.
Jones has diagnosed something profound in Gouverneur:
the Habit of living slightly ahead of Reality itself.
He knew Morris as someone perpetually projecting Meaning onto the Future while struggling to inhabit the Present.
And suddenly the “Whirlwind” Letter reads differently once again.
Morris’ Failure in Paris begins to look less like Libertine Excess than its Opposite:
a deeply intellectual, emotionally idealizing Man discovering too late that embodied Experience cannot survive indefinitely as Theory.
And that may ultimately be the most devastating Detail in the entire Correspondence. Even the People closest to Gouverneur Morris seem to recognize the same Thing:
Morris was never truly equipped for the detached Mechanics of Libertinism at all.
So, if Jones, ever received the “Whirlwind” Confession at all, he would likely have read it as another Example of Morris being fundamentally unsuited to the Life he had thrown himself into, rather than as a singular emotional Crisis.
“Bad at Tourism. Bad at Paris.
Possibly even bad at Shooting.”
III. The Sum of Loneliness
In both surviving Letters, the old Doctor keeps trying to pull Morris back toward Reality. Jones urges him to abandon his legal practices and return to the one Thing he genuinely believes suits Morris’ Character:
employ the talents which heaven has so bountifully bestowed upon you in promoting order & good government so essential to the political happiness. of a constitution you had no inconsiderable share in framing — leave law trafficing speculations to those who are fit for nothing better — the character of an Upright Statesman & able Legislator will become you infinitly more —
Half a Year later, the Advice becomes even more personal:
“Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.”2 Says the old Latin proverb, & I shoud be very sorry my Dear Doctor that you was an exception to the general rule, yet when I reflect on the time which has elapsed since I wrote you a pretty long friendly epistle without receiving the least reply, I can not help feeling a little suspicion of some estrange in my old friend, who did not use to be sparing of his words or afraid of shedding a little ink whatever may be the cause of your silence, whether the pursuit of fame or wealth, both which I begin to regard as vain acquisitions, I am determined to ask you once more how you do? I have not heard that you are grown rich yet, & if you was, [archy] Mr . [Call & George Emlen] wou‘d dispute the prize with you. but indeed my Dear Doctor I believe you mistook your talents when you applied them to the science of accumulating wealth, which was never the genius of your family, who have in general understood the art of spending money much better than that of geting it, & I sincerely wish you may be convinced of this truth before you have spent too much of your own.
Jones sees Morris pursuing the wrong kind of Mastery entirely.
Speculation, financial Schemes, continental Status-Performance and Accumulation all pull Morris away from the one Thing that actually suited his Temperament:
Political Judgment.
Even Jones’ Criticism of Morris’ financial Habits suddenly acquires a different Weight in this Context. Parisian Excess is often reduced to Vanity or Libertinism. Jones suggests a more unstable Pattern: a Family Temperament predisposed toward Spending rather than Accumulation = toward Movement rather than Stability.
And suddenly the “Rashness” Morris fears in Himself no longer appears isolated.
It becomes cumulative:
Emotional + Financial + Political + Physical.
= The Sum of Loneliness.
Davenport, Beatrix Cary. A Diary of the French Revolution by Gouverneur Morris 1752-1816 Minister to France during the Terror. George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1939. p. 44-45.
Editorial Note: The Manuscript Page ends here and resumes on the next, so the Old Doctor’s “to” must have fallen between the Parchment Slides.