and a half.  The only gauze fit to wear is English, at a crown a yard; so that really a guinea goes no further than a copper with us.  For this house, garden, stables, etc., we give two hundred guineas a year.  Wood is two guineas and a half per cord; coal, six livres the basket of about two bushels; this article of firing we calculate at one hundred guineas a year.  The difference between coming upon this negotiation to France, and remaining at the Hague, where the house was already furnished at the expense of a thousand pounds sterling, will increase the expense here to six or seven hundred guineas; at a time, too, when Congress has cut off five hundred guineas from what they have heretofore given.  For our coachman and horses alone (Mr. Adams purchased a coach in England) we give fifteen guineas a month.  It is the policy of this country to oblige you to a certain number of servants, and one will not touch what belongs to the business of another, though he or she has time enough to perform the whole.  In the first place, there is a coachman who does not an individual thing but attend to the carriages and horses; then the gardener, who has business enough; then comes the cook; then the maitre d’hotel,—­his business is to purchase articles in the family, and oversee that nobody cheats but himself; a valet de chambre,—­John serves in this capacity; a femme de chambre,—­Esther serves for this, and is worth a dozen others; a coiffeuse,—­for this place I have a French girl about nineteen, whom I have been upon the point of turning-away, because madam will not brush a chamber:  “it is not de fashion, it is not her business.”  I would not have kept her a day longer, but found, upon inquiry, that I could not better myself, and hair-dressing here is very expensive unless you keep such a madam in the house.  She sews tolerably well, so I make her as useful as I can.  She is more particularly devoted to mademoiselle.  Esther diverted me yesterday evening by telling me that she heard her go muttering by her chamber door, after she had been assisting Abby in dressing.  “Ah, mon Dieu, ’tis provoking”—­(she talks a little English).—­“Why, what is the matter, Pauline:  what is provoking?”—­“Why, Mademoiselle look so pretty, I so mauvais.”  There is another indispensable servant, who is called a frotteur:  his business is to rub the floors.

We have a servant who acts as maitre d’hotel, whom I like at present, and who is so very gracious as to act as footman too, to save the expense of another servant, upon condition that we give him a gentleman’s suit of clothes in lieu of a livery.  Thus, with seven servants and hiring a charwoman upon occasion of company, we may possibly make out to keep house; with less, we should be hooted at as ridiculous, and could not entertain any company.  To tell this in our own country would be considered as extravagance; but would they send a person here in a public character to be a public jest?  At lodgings in Paris last year, during Mr. Adams’s negotiation for a peace, it was as expensive to him as it is now at housekeeping, without half the accommodations.