When a fight broke out between two street gangs wearing the black and tricolor cockades, the cavalry was called in. It had become dangerous to set foot outside the door at night, Jefferson wrote. “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he told his daughter Martha. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.” One French emigré would remember people acting as though a French army might land at any moment. “Everybody was suspicious of everybody else; everywhere one saw murderous glances.”
