The Nation: Gallic Grumbles

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The inhabitants never walk if they can ride. Their conversation is boring. The food in their inns—mainly smoked or salted bear fat, corn bread and weak coffee—is "very mediocre." Worse, travelers must often sleep on the floor, surrounded by couples engaged in various sexual acts.

So complained Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans and a future King of France (1830-48), after a four-month swing through the U.S. in 1797. Four years earlier, the young aristocrat, whose father was guillotined by revolutionists, had begun a 21-year exile, spent mostly in Europe. Then 23 years old, the duke filled two notebooks as he explored the exotic New World, writing of "very pretty" and "coquettish" Cherokee women, "gross, lazy and inhospitable" whites in Tennessee, and George Washington's "most exquisite politeness" during a dinner at Mount Vernon. The journal has just been published in France as a gesture toward the U.S. Bicentennial.

Louis Philippe made few judgments about the American political and social systems. But he was appalled by Washington's rather shabby treatment of his 300 slaves and, like the far more perceptive Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville a generation later, predicted that slavery would "sooner or later be fatal to the southern states." The young duke also recorded the sentiments of a certain Captain Chapman in Kentucky: "Our Government could be no worse than it is now." The plaint sounds remarkably up to date.