"Here I am, Madame, gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarree, like a lover at his mistress. The stocking weavers and silk spinners around it consider me a hyprochondriac Englishman, about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Laye Epinaye in the Beaujolais, a delicious morsel of sculpture by Michale Angelo Slodtz. This, you will say was in rule, to fall in love with a fine woman: but, with a house! It is out of all precedent! No, madam, it is not withour a precedent in my own history. While at Paris, I was volently smitten with the Hotel de Salm, and used to go to the Tuileries almost daily to look at it. The loueuse des chaises, inattentive to my passion, never had the complaisance to place a chiar there, so that, sitting on the parapet, and twisting my neck round to see the object of my admiration, I generally left with a torticollis. From Lyons to Nismes I have been nourished with the remains of Roman Grandeur." TJ to Madame Tesse, March 20, 1787, DLC Papers, 11, 226-228
"There never was a Palladio here [in Washington] even in private hands till I brought one: . . . I send you my portable edition, which I value because it is portable. It contains only the 1st book on the orders which is the essential part." Thomas Jefferson to James Oldham, December 24, 1804, UVA,
"With Mr. Jefferson I conversed at length on the subject of architecture--Palladio he said `was the Bible'--you should get it and stick close to it. . . . "false architecture, too much the rage at present." Thomas Jefferson quoted by, Colonel Isaac A. Coles to General John Hartwell Cocke, February 23, 1816, UVA, Cocke Papers, No. 640, Box 21
"The Capitol in the city of Richmond . . . is the model of the Temples of Erectheus at Athens or Balbec, and of the Maison quarree of Nismes. All of which are nearly of the same form and proportions, and are considered as the most perfect examples of cubic architecture, as the Pantheon of Rome is of the spherical." Jefferson, "An Account of the Capitol in Virginia," in Fiske Kimball, The Capitol of Virginia , ed. Jon Kukla with Martha C. Vick and Sarah Shields Driggs (Richmond, 1989), 13.
"I applied to M. Clerissualt, who had published drawings of the Antiquities of Nismes, to have me a model of the building made in stucco, only changing the order from Corinthian to Ionic, on account of the difficulty of the Corinthian capitals. I yielded, with reluctance, to the taste of Clerissualt, in his preference of the modern capitals of Scamozzi to the more noble capital of antiquity." TJ Autobiography ca. 1823, in Lipscomb and Bergh, Writings of ..... vol 1:68
simple & sublime, more cannot be said, they are . . . copied from. . . the most perfect model of antiect architecture remaining on earth; one which has received the approbation of near 2000 years." TJ to Dr. James Currie, Jan. 28, 1786, DLC, Chambers, p. 13
"I shall live in the hope that the day will come when an opportunity will be given you of finishing the middle building in a style worthy of the two wings, and worthy of the first temple dedicated to the sovereignty of the people, embellishing with Athenian taste the course of a nation looking far beyond the range of Athenian destinies." TJ to Latrobe... Monticello, July 12, ME, XIII pp.178-179.
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