Washing is another expensive article:  the servants are all allowed theirs, besides their wages; our own costs us a guinea a week.  I have become steward and bookkeeper, determined to know with accuracy what our expenses are, to prevail with Mr. Adams to return to America if he finds himself straitened, as I think he must be.  Mr. Jay went home because he could not support his family here with the whole salary; what then can be done, curtailed as it now is, with the additional expense?  Mr. Adams is determined to keep as little company as he possibly can; but some entertainments we must make, and it is no unusual thing for them to amount to fifty or sixty guineas at a time.  More is to be performed by way of negotiation, many times, at one of these entertainments, than at twenty serious conversations; but the policy of our country has been, and still is, to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.  We stand in sufficient need of economy, and in the curtailment of other salaries I suppose they thought it absolutely necessary to cut off their foreign ministers.  But, my own interest apart, the system is bad; for that nation which degrades their own ministers by obliging them to live in narrow circumstances, cannot expect to be held in high estimation themselves.  We spend no evenings abroad, make no suppers, attend very few public entertainments,—­or spectacles, as they are called,—­and avoid every expense that is not held indispensable.  Yet I cannot but think it hard that a gentleman who has devoted so great a part of his life to the service of the public, who has been the means, in a great measure, of procuring such extensive territories to his country, who saved their fisheries, and who is still laboring to procure them further advantages, should find it necessary so cautiously to calculate his pence, for fear of overrunning them.  I will add one more expense.  There is now a court mourning, and every foreign minister, with his family, must go into mourning for a Prince of eight years old, whose father is an ally to the King of France.  This mourning is ordered by the Court, and is to be worn eleven days only.  Poor Mr. Jefferson had to his away for a tailor to get a whole black-silk suit made up in two days; and at the end of eleven days, should another death happen, he will be obliged to have a new suit of mourning, of cloth, because that is the season when silk must be left off.  We may groan and scold, but these are expenses which cannot be avoided; for fashion is the deity every one worships in this country, and from the highest to the lowest, you must submit.  Even poor John and Esther had no comfort among the servants, being constantly the subjects of ridicule, until we were obliged to direct them to have their hair dressed.  Esther had several crying fits upon the occasion, that she should be forced to be so much of a fool; but there was no way to keep them from being trampled upon but this, and now that they are a la mode de Paris, they are much respected.  To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse.