[Translation.]
PARIS, _the 7th Vendémiaire of the 7th Year
of the French Republic, One and Indivisible_.
_The Minister of Exterior Relations to Citizen Pichon, Secretary of
Legation of the French Republic near the Batavian Republic_:
I have received successively, Citizen, your letters of the 22d and 27th
Fructidor [8th and 13th September]. They afford me more and more reason
to be pleased with the measure you have adopted, to detail to me your
conversations with Mr. Murray. These conversations, at first merely
friendly, have acquired consistency by the sanction I have given to them
by my letter of the 11th Fructidor. I do not regret that you have
trusted to Mr. Murray's honor a copy of my letter. It was intended for
you only, and contains nothing but what is conformable to the intentions
of Government. I am thoroughly convinced that should explanations take
place with confidence between the two Cabinets, irritation would cease,
a crowd of misunderstandings would disappear, and the ties of friendship
would be the more strongly united as each party would discover the hand
which sought to disunite them. But I will not conceal from you that your
letters of the 2d and 3d Vendémiaire, just received, surprised me much.
What Mr. Murray is still dubious of has been very explicitly declared,
even before the President's message to Congress of the 3d Messidor [21st
June] last was known in France. I had written it to Mr. Gerry, namely,
on the 24th Messidor and 4th Thermidor; I did repeat it to him before he
sat out. A whole paragraph of my letter to you of the 11th Fructidor, of
which Mr. Murray has a copy, is devoted to develop still more the fixed
determination of the French Government. According to these bases, you
were right to assert that whatever plenipotentiary the Government of
the United States might send to France to put an end to the existing
differences between the two countries would be undoubtedly received
with the respect due to the representative of a free, independent, and
powerful nation.
I can not persuade myself, Citizen, that the American Government need
any further declarations from us to induce them, in order to renew
the negotiations, to adopt such measures as would be suggested to
them by their desire to bring the differences to a peaceable end. If
misunderstandings on both sides have prevented former explanations from
reaching that end, it is presumable that, those misunderstandings being
done away, nothing henceforth will bring obstacles to the reciprocal
dispositions. The President's instructions to his envoys at Paris, which
I have only known by the copy given you by Mr. Murray, and received by
me the 21st Messidor [9th July], announce, if they contain the whole of
the American Government's intentions, dispositions which could only
have added to those which the Directory has always entertained; and,
notwithstanding the posterior acts of that Government, notwithstanding
the irritating and almost hostile measures they have adopted, the
Directory has manifested its perseverance in the sentiments which are
deposited both in my correspondence with Mr. Gerry and in my letter to
you of the 11th Fructidor, and which I have hereinbefore repeated in the
most explicit manner. Carry, therefore, Citizen, to Mr. Murray those
positive expressions in order to convince him of our sincerity, and
prevail upon him to transmit them to his Government.
I presume, Citizen, that this letter will find you at The Hague; if not,
I ask it may be sent back to you at Paris.
Salute and fraternity,