After serving as U.S Minister to France (1784—89), Thomas Jefferson returned to his home in Virginia and essentially tore down Monticello and started over to base it on the Hôtel de Salm in Paris.
In a letter (20-Mar-1787) Jefferson wrote: While at Paris, I was violently smitten with the hotel de Salm, and used to go to the Thuileries almost daily to look at it.
The First Congress faced a unique challenge, and those congressmen and senators who gathered in New York in the spring of 1789 were awed by what lay ahead of them. Not only would members of the Congress have to pass some promised amendments to the new Constitution, but they would have to fill out the bare framework of a government that the Philadelphia Convention had created, including the organization of the executive and judicial departments. Some therefore saw the First Congress as something in the nature of a second constitutional convention.