thinking perhaps he had strayed from his own true republican self a bit more than was seemly—and than Abigail would wish—he assured her that all such “bagatelles” meant nothing to him. “I cannot help suspecting that the more elegance, the less virtue in all times and countries.” In later years much would be written and said of John Adams’s dislike of France, his puritanical disapproval of the French and their ways. But while, to be sure, there was much he disapproved of, and even disliked, much that he found shocking, such as the forwardness of the women, so also did most Americans of the day.
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