Petra Quilitz's List: forgotten stories

• Americans drink no wine but stuff themselves with stupefying amounts of food.
• He writes about dancing on the deck of Le Havre, the ship that carried him here, and crawling out on the bowsprit to watch the foam break.
• He writes one letter to his father while perched in a sycamore tree overlooking the Hudson River. In another to his brother, he asks for two dozen yellow kid gloves, because he’s been going to so many balls that he runs through a pair every two or three days.
• Tocqueville and his friend and traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, were here to study the American prison system for the French government, and on their return they dutifully filed a lengthy report
• the idea that American individualism is isolating as well as liberating.
• Oddly, when Mr. Brown began to collect the letters, he discovered that the originals had vanished. They exist now only in handwritten copies, some from the 19th century and some made later at Professor Pierson’s request. “It’s just a mystery,” Mr. Brown said. “Someone is probably sitting on them somewhere, and they’re worth a fortune.”
• Once he got here, Tocqueville was dazzled by the country’s sheer expansiveness, Mr. Brown said, and found in all that physical space a sense of inner space and freedom.

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