In almost every assemblage of individuals, whether for social or other purposes, this favourite theme excluded all others; and the pretensions of France were supported and controverted with equal earnestness.

The opposing parties, mutually exasperated by unceasing altercations, cherished reciprocal suspicions of each other, and each charged its adversary with being under a foreign influence.[44] Those who favoured the measures adopted by America were accused as the enemies of liberty, the enemies of France, and the tools of Britain.

In turn, they charged their opponents with disseminating principles subversive of all order in society; and with supporting a foreign government against their own.
[Footnote 44: See note No.XIV.at the end of the volume.] Whatever might be the real opinion of the French government on the validity of its charges against the United States, those charges were too vehemently urged, and too powerfully espoused in America, to be abandoned at Paris.

If at any time they were in part relinquished, they were soon resumed.
For a time, Mr.Fauchet forbore to press the points on which his predecessor had insisted; but his complaints of particular cases which grew out of the war, and out of the rules which had been established by the executive were unremitting.

The respectful language in which these complaints were at first urged, soon yielded to the style of reproach; and in his correspondence with the secretary of state, towards its close, he adopted the sentiments, without absolutely discarding the manner of Mr.Genet.
Mr.Adet, the successor of Mr.Fauchet, arrived at Philadelphia, while the senate was deliberating on the treaty of amity with Great Britain.
In the observations he made on that instrument, when submitted to his consideration by order of the President, he complained particularly of the abandonment of the principle that free ships should make free goods; and urged the injustice, while French cruisers were restrained by treaty from taking English goods out of American bottoms, that English cruisers should be liberated from the same restraint.