Always disposed and ready to embrace every plausible appearance of probability of preserving or restoring tranquillity, I nominate William Vans Murray, our minister resident at The Hague, to be minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the French Republic.

If the Senate shall advise and consent to his appointment, effectual care shall be taken in his instructions that he shall not go to France without direct and unequivocal assurances from the French Government, signified by their minister of foreign relations, that he shall be received in character, shall enjoy the privileges attached to his character by the law of nations, and that a minister of equal rank, title, and powers shall be appointed to treat with him, to discuss and conclude all controversies between the two Republics by a new treaty.

JOHN ADAMS.

[Translation.]

PARIS, the 7th Vendemiaire 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 Vendemiaire, 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.